Travers Nisbet

Building, tinkering, thinking. Based in San Francisco.

Day jobs

I'm building a company called Parallel: AI is becoming the web's second user, and we're building infrastructure for how it should interact.

I started my career at McKinsey in San Francisco: payments, growth strategy for marketplace tech, and research at the McKinsey Global Institute (including reports on the bio-revolution and on AI). Later I joined Chime, where I led strategy for our bank partnerships and ran our savings product, evaluating whether Chime should become a licensed bank.

Earlier still: interning at SeatGeek as a teenager, working at a no-code startup that didn't make it.

I'm also a Fellow at The Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, where I think and write about progress.

Side tinkerings

I've always had a habit of projects that bridge data, culture, and technology:

• Helped launch The Pudding, a visual, data-driven publication
• Produced documentary films
• Collaborated with researchers to analyze creativity across 62,000 paintings using image recognition
• Ran a semi-successful music blog in the pre-streaming era

More recently I've been working on The Paradox of Progress, a personal research project that may always be a work in progress. "The Leaning Tower of Progress" is an essay published in The Hedgehog Review; a newer piece on intuition, compression, and reason came out in late 2024. Other writing lives on my writing page.

A few things I believe

• Progress is about loss as much as gain, and that tension is worth sitting with
• The interesting stuff usually lives in the in-between; toggle between "explore" and "exploit" throughout life
• Reason and intuition work better together than apart
• Cultivate an "original life," not an optimized one, and ask yourself "great questions"
• Go slow to go fast

Reach me