Beacons teamFoundersSan Francisco

Jesse Zhang

Co-founder and Chief Product Officer

Stanford EE PhD turned product builder.

Jesse started Beacons in 2019 with Neal, David, and Greg, four friends from Stanford with a hunch that creators would shape the next layer of the internet. He went straight from a PhD in machine learning and genomics into building the product, and he’s been the person turning what creators need into what Beacons ships ever since.

At Beacons

Leads product across Beacons, from the original link-in-bio to Beam, the AI teammate for creators.
Sets the product vision and roadmap, then aligns the team to execute against it.
Has been hands-on as a PM since day one, including the first version of Beacons media kits.

Ask Jesse about

What Beacons AI does
Why and how we started Beacons
How creators are using AI today

Fun facts

Grew up in the Boston area.
At different points he's been Beacons' full-stack engineer, designer, data scientist, user researcher, and social media manager (per Neal).
Helped design and teach a Stanford course on data science for high-throughput sequencing.
Has an AI version of himself you can chat with on Delphi.

Background

PhD

Stanford University, Electrical EngineeringDavid Tse's group. Single-cell RNA-seq analysis and understanding deep learning models.

BS

Tufts University, Electrical EngineeringClass of 2014.

Before

Research and engineering stintsGrail, Cellular Research, MC10, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, and Dana-Farber.

Selected work

Generalizable Adversarial Training via Spectral NormalizationICLR 2019, with Farzan Farnia and David Tse.

Porcupine Neural Networks: (Almost) All Local Optima are GlobalNeurIPS 2018.

Fast and accurate single-cell RNA-seq analysis by clustering of transcript-compatibility countsGenome Biology, 2016.

Elsewhere

Photo from jessemzhang.github.io.