Alec is cofounder and CEO of DelfinSia, an unstructured data mining firm in the oil and gas industry. Alec holds an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he focused on corporate innovation and digital transformation management as well as on design thinking at Stanford’s d.school. Alec earned a BS in chemical engineering and a BA in Asian studies from Rice University in 2009, after which he began his career at Shell in catalysis R&D and refinery technical service engineering based out of Houston. He helped clients around the world and was involved with several new reactor startups and refinery turnarounds inside and outside of Shell. Emphasis on ESSA (Eliminate, Simplify, Standardize, and Automate) landed him a position as Shell’s internal software product manager for a global technical tool built by Astron International, which is how he knows his cofounders at Delfin. Alec also spent a year and a half in Denver as Shell's primary development reservoir engineer for a $500 million dollar asset, where he took part in the evaluation of new technologies in hydraulic fracturing. Before starting Delfin, Alec consulted in digital transformation and internal entrepreneurship program development at Intel, General Motors, Inditex, Swarovski, AECOM, and the Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide Group. 

Alec is a big nerd, having contributed to research projects including liquid salt development at University of California Berkeley, urban migration studies in outer Mongolia, quantum computing research at Keio University in Japan, and electron orbital measurement at National University of Singapore. He earned a certificate in machine learning from Stanford and another in neural networks and deep learning from Stanford’s Andrew Ng and his Deeplearning.ai. Following a research trip to North Korea, he was once featured in an official DPRK tourism video.