Gong Szeto

+

Profile

Gong Szeto
Director of Product Design at Strand Life Sciences
Design | Santa Fe, New Mexico Area, US

Experience

  • Mar 2013 - Present
    Director of Product Design / Strand Life Sciences
  • Jul 2010 - Present
    Fellow, Center for the Advancement of Public Action / Bennington College
  • 2010 - Present
    Principal / Gong Szeto Design Office
    GSDO designs interfaces to data-intensive software applications for the financial and geopolitical risk, and life science intelligence sectors.
  • Oct 2009 - Present
    Strategic Consultant / Santa Fe Innovation Partners
    Providing strategic advisory role in formation of new public-private innovation incubation and economic development institution for the State of New Mexico.
  • Apr 2010 - Present
    Co-founder and CEO / Doxa 2, Inc.
    Doxa 2, Inc. is a new tech startup company co-founded with Janina Pawlowski, former Chairman and CEO of E-LOAN, that is dedicated to leveling the playing field for average citizens in the complex, and at times hostile, world of modern American politics. Doxa 2's first offering will be launched in May 2010 for the State of California.
  • Jan 2005 - Present
    Director of Product Design / OptionsHouse/PEAK6 Investments, LP
    Director of Design for all PEAK6 business units in all strategic branding, marketing engineering, and advanced web applications design and development. Deepest endeavour is for OptionsHouse, a new equity options online brokerage based in Chicago. Founded by proprietary trading firm and hedge fund PEAK6 Investments LP, the OptionsHouse options trading platform is a next-generation platform utilizing the latest in web technologies to create a streamlined trading experience. OptionsHouse received 4.5 stars and #1 ranking in usability in 2008 and 2009.
  • Apr 2004 - Present
    Owner / Tranquility Base, LLP
    Tranquility Base, LLP is an Austin, TX partnership formed to develop ecologically sustainable and affordable live/work real estate developments in transitional neighborhoods.
  • May 2003 - Present
    President / Szeto Brothers Ventures, Inc.
    Prospecting commercial and residential real estate deals in medium to large cities. Responsible for all financial analysis, zoning analysis, design and specifications for new developments. In partnership with Nam Szeto.
  • 1999 - Present
    National Board Member / AIGA
  • Aug 1998 - Present
    Chief Creative Officer/Senior Vice President / Rare Medium, Inc.
    Internet services company, 1200 employees. Clients included The New York Times, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Sony Corporation, XM Radio, Microsoft. Led the Design Strategy Practice and co-created the usability and user experience audit in-house capabilities. Business development, client interfacing, strategic plans, and in-house cross-office design practice conferences. Consulted to the many incubation companies as part of the Apollo Management/Rare Medium Group investment portfolio.
  • Jun 1999 - Present
    Board Member / Van Alen Institute for Public Architecture
  • Jan 1995 - Present
    Partner / i/o 360 digital design, inc.
    Early design and user experience firm during the dotcom boom in Silicon Alley, 35 employees, $4MM revenue. Designed early web applications for Nikkei, Fujitsu, Sony Corporation, Dow Jones, Reuters, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, The New York Times, Shiseido. Won numerous awards including Top 40 Innovators in the US and Europe in I.D. Magazine in 1996. Sold to Rare Medium Group in 1998.
  • Jan 1994 - Present
    Junior Architect / Leers Weinzapfel Associates
  • May 1991 - Present
    Junior Architect / Moore Andersson Architects

Education

  • 2001 - 2001
    Harvard Business School
    Business
  • 2000 - 2001
    New York University - Leonard N. Stern School of Business
    Finance, Economics, IP Law
  • 1985 - 1991
    The University of Texas at Austin
    B.Arch in Art, Architecture

Additional Information

Websites:
Company Website
linkedin
+
+
+

Videos

vimeo

"Comfort the afflicted. Afflict the comfortable." -Finley Peter Dunne


I am a designer, entrepreneur, strategic consultant, blogger, and (soon-to-be) educator. I think a lot about the confluence of politics and economics as they relate to alleviating or exacerbating human suffering. I explore the open question of innovation and public policy, think a lot about how ideas propagate throughout modern society, study the art and science of debate and deliberation, study the history of dissent and moral sentiments in various political regimes, visualize and map the complex machinery and information flows of political and capital markets, and consult on unlocking value and increasing efficiencies in public and private contexts through smart design and social technologies.

I spent a chunk of my career in finance at an equity options proprietary trading firm and hedge fund designing and deploying high-performance stock and equity derivatives trading systems and risk management tools for sophisticated retail and institutional investors, ones that rely on real-time price quotes for over 9,000 stock symbols and 180,000 option symbols, that execute millions of transactions per day on the nation's financial exchanges.

I blog about American politics and the history of American dilemmas and dissent at rhetoricsandheretics.com, the product of an elaborate feed and alert engine (an information-firehose, if you will) that I devised recently to test my own cognitive limits in terms of how many American "problems" I am able to parse and cohere on a weekly basis into something grokkable for a general audience. It's a nerdy, oddball hobby, I know.

I co-founded pandoxa.com with Janina Pawlowski to develop new online tools and technologies for the American polity. I also do strategic public/private sector macro-innovation consulting at Santa Fe Innovation Park, an economic development think tank for the State of New Mexico.

I serve on the boards of the Open Forum Foundation and the Preservation of Land for Agricultural Needs Trust (PLANT!). I also serve on the Advisory Board of investigative journalism startup WarIsBusiness.com. I was recently appointed a Fellow at the Center for the Advancement of Public Action at Bennington College.

I was a finalist in the 2009 Buckminster Fuller Prize for YourOwnDemocracy.org an online public sentiment system that merges my interests in politics and finance. I was also named a Top 40 Innovator in the U.S. and Europe by I.D. Magazine in 1996. 

More info about me and my doings at gongszeto.com and some presentations at slideshare and vimeo.

I am a first-generation naturalized Chinese-American, I am a staunch Independent voter with friends from all over the political spectrum, I married a Quebecois Canadian, I absolutely love co-parenting a feisty and brilliant little girl adopted from Hubei Province, China, and we have three mix-breed dogs and a warmblood horse. I reside in Santa Fe, NM, a place much older than the United States of America itself. You can reach me at gszeto360 [at] mac [dot] com. Thanks for visiting.

gs.

.

(Photo by Willow Lin Schwartz Szeto, 3)

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz