About me

I derive a ridiculous amount of enjoyment from reading, wandering about in places I’m unfamiliar with, thinking about problems that seem strange or curious to me, eating, and having conversations with other people. I think of this site as another way to do more of that last thing.

If you need a profile for a talk, podcast, etc

Paul Meinshausen is an experienced data, product, and software executive. He has demonstrated success in recruiting and managing high performance data science, engineering, and product teams. He specializes in mapping nuanced and complex problems to analytical and statistical methods that can help solve them. His research background is in behavioral, cognitive, and organizational science.

Paul is also an entrepreneur, advisor, and investor. He co-founded Aampe, a B2B SaaS startup that provides a personalization layer for notifications and short-form messaging. He earlier co-founded PaySense, a mobile credit company in India backed by Nexus Venture Partners, Jungle Ventures, and Naspers and acquired by PayU in 2019 for $185M. Some of his early angel investments include UIlicious and Supabase. In addition to investing, Paul has advised several startups across India, London, and southeast Asia.

If you’re curious to know a little more

Wilbur Wright said that if he were giving a young person advice as to how to succeed in life, he would say “pick out a good father and mother, and begin life in Ohio”. There is so much meaning packed in that elegant reduction.

I grew up mostly in a small town outside of Ft. Knox, Kentucky. My father was a U.S. Army officer and while my family stopped moving regularly before I was born - I only experienced a military move once, when I was eight and we spent a year in Carlisle, PA while my father was at the U.S. Army War College - our community was militarily migratory. Many of the kids I was in youth sports or Boy Scouts with weren’t born in Kentucky or would move away soon after I met them. We had no roots there, unlike those in the town and surrounding areas who did. I learned early the distinction between being in a place and being of or from it.

Between my first couple of years of schooling in a Montessori school and going away to University, I studied at home. In the U.S. it’s called home schooling, though I remember always resisting thinking of it that way. The term felt overloaded before I knew what it meant for a word to be overloaded. Most of my curriculum consisted of reading books and I selected the majority of them. In other words, I read books I wanted to read and if’s helpful to call those books my curriculum then I’m ok to call them that. I’m intrigued at how close my childhood was to when the internet started to fill up with things you could read and discover and try for yourself. I imagine my early education might have been very different had it taken place 5 or 10 years later. 

Between the ages of 13 and 17 I found myself continuously reading early travel and anthropological writing (e.g. Alan Moorehead, Richard Francis Burton, Martha Gellhorn, Somerset Maugham, Rebecca West) and I realized the world was a big place and there were many ways that people lived. When I arrived at university, unduly fascinated by what it was like to sit at a desk in a classroom - its own kind of exotic experience - I chose Anthropology as a major. I wanted access to different ways of experiencing life, which at the time primarily meant other places in the world. Anthropology seemed a more direct route than any other available major (I was under the impression that a college major meant more than it does). A friendly and generous professor in the department made it possible for me to spend my freshman summer in Portugal, first on an archaeology dig in the Alentejo region and then in language and ethnography courses at the University of Lisbon. That summer was filled with the thrill of shaking ancient Portuguese dirt through a sieve on a sun-baked hill near a small town called Monforte or trawling the back streets of Bairro Alto in Lisbon on my way home from class at the University of Lisbon.

I went to the University of Louisville because they offered a full scholarship eligible for Eagle Scouts. My father had attended the United States Military Academy and my mother a private college in New York so university wasn’t an unfamiliar experience for my family. But as I finished what we called high school my parents left the decision of where to attend, or even whether to attend, to me. For various reasons I had grown up fearing financial debt and therefore had no interest or knowledge of how to take a loan, and didn’t know much about the college application process. U of L was the only university I applied to. It accepted and funded me and that’s where I went. I later realized my parents had exhibited a fairly unusual (for their background and “class”) kind of benign neglect or laissez faire in my education. I did not make optimal decisions with that freedom, of course, and I’m not ungrateful for the mistakes I made.

By my third year I had spent enough time in Louisville and demanded, of myself, that I go somewhere far away for much longer than a summer. The head of the honors scholars program had become a wonderful mentor and helped me apply for the David Boren National Security Education Program scholarship to study at Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey for my fourth and senior year. I had such an incredible time in Turkey (despite naively selecting Ankara rather than Istanbul as my base) that I couldn’t leave after one year and fortunately received a Fulbright Scholarship to stay a second year and finish an MA degree at METU. I met the person who would become my best friend and wife during our Fulbright orientation and we’ve managed to keep Turkey a part of our life since then.

At this point my professional bio starts to approximate my life sufficiently for a personal website so I’ll stop writing. But thanks for sticking around to read a bit about my life before my professional life began!