A Q&A with Eugene Wang, Head of Product Engineering
Cornerstone AI is publishing a series of Q&As with team members to provide more information and context on their role at Cornerstone AI, as well as their professional background. This is the third post of the series. Visit our blog to see previous posts in the series.
Your background is in economics and finance, and then later, programming/web development - can you tell me a little about why you chose to go into those fields in the first place?
A lot of my college was oriented toward me going to work in business somewhere. I thought after college I would work in professional fields for a little bit before going on to grad school for an MBA or a JD. When I went to work at The Blackstone Group, I joined their hedge funds group in the legal and product structuring division. I worked with a lot of lawyers and did a lot of investment diligence and structuring of custom investment vehicles. I was exposed a lot to both the business side and the legal side. I enjoyed my time there and learned a lot, but ironically, I realized that the JD/MBA dichotomy wasn’t exactly for me.
After your time at Blackstone, you switched gears to programming and web development - was there anything in particular that compelled you to make this change?
When I was at Blackstone, I found myself drawn to problems internally that were kind of overlooked and were very manual. For example, one thing we had to do was produce client liquidity reports for investors. This was after the financial crisis, and a lot of investors were wondering how to get their money back when a lot of it was locked up in liquid assets. We had to comb through these dense legal documents, extract what the liquidity terms were, and create a client report. It was a very manual process, and one client report could take 10 hours or more. I created an Excel model that would extract the relevant term, structure the data, and then spit out a report. That enabled us to automate a lot of this process that was previously very manual. That was my first real exposure to coding at a professional level.
Once I realized that I wanted to move on from Blackstone, I looked at other career options. I found myself really drawn to programming—the thought process, skill set and overall craft appealed to me. I did a coding bootcamp called The Flatiron School and then found a job as an engineer in the new products division at The New York Times.
I worked for a few years as an engineer, but I think my non-developer background helped me connect and communicate with business stakeholders, product managers, designers, and other kinds of people that interact with engineers. That ultimately led me to product management.
On a day-to-day basis, what does your work look like? What drives you to continue the work each day?
Coming to Cornerstone, a lot of what I’ve tried to do is wear that product management hat to institute more processes and figure out what our roadmap looks like. As a team of talented technical people, how do we coordinate well on the things we need to do in order to advance the business and delight our customers? That’s where I see my role beyond the engineering work I’m doing.
A lot of my day-to-day work involves coding, but it also involves spec-ing out requirements, figuring out what customers need, and developing processes and documentation. Usually, I’ll have a handful of technical work I’m doing. Most of my specialization is on the front end, but I also enjoy working on our API, server infrastructure, and other back-end things.
What does the future hold for Cornerstone AI?
Our software is powerful, but it can come off as pretty complicated at first glance because you’re dealing with large datasets, AI, and machine learning. Striving to break down that complexity into a usable, scalable and accessible digital product for a broad base of life science users is where we’re headed. We started out doing more service-oriented work—our clients give us a data set, we clean it for them, and then we return it. But to be scalable, we need to move that more and more into the software. Eventually, I think it would be cool to become a low code / no code platform for life sciences companies to quickly clean their real-world data.
What are you most proud of in your professional and/or personal life?
Currently, I have a newborn baby. So, it seems cliché, but I’m proud of my child. Going on that journey of having kids has been a lot of great moments, a lot of joy, and a lot of challenges. I feel proud to be going through this and seeing how it goes.
In general, I’m proud of my diverse sets of interests and ability to dive in, explore something, and develop a passion for a new thing.
What are you passionate about outside of work?
Especially since COVID, community has become a big passion of mine. We’re fortunate that where we live in New York, we’ve got a lot of friends who live very close by, and so it’s easy to just pop by after work or grab a drink at our local pub. The importance of having a community of friends around in close geographic proximity has been something I’ve thought a lot more about in the past year or two.
Beyond that, I’ve always loved outdoor activities and sports, such as snowboarding, hiking and cycling. My latest obsession has been rock climbing - I try to go to an indoor climbing gym as often as I can and have found the mental and physical challenge of trying to scale a wall exhilarating.