Karl Bunch, author of Conjori: Two Minds, One Channel
Karl Bunch has been writing code since 1981, when he started his first software company as a high school student in Los Angeles. Over the next twenty-five years, he founded and led companies across accounting and operations software, computational linguistics, and interactive entertainment, building, selling, shutting down, and learning from each one.
In 1997, he began working in natural language processing and machine learning, years before most of the industry recognized their potential. That work included founding a computational linguistics company whose technology was licensed by Fortune 500 clients.
He spent over a decade in digital advertising, where he learned how data and human behavior map to the real decisions people make. He built machine learning-powered real-time bidding systems and became the primary inventor on a granted patent for a system that protected proprietary and user data during automated media buying while capturing experienced traders' intuition and scaling it through machine learning.
In 2010, he brought that perspective into the corporate world, holding technology and product leadership roles across digital media, music, advertising technology, cloud infrastructure, and data governance. He has spent the last eight years at Amazon in roles spanning advertising platforms, satellite networking, and enterprise privacy architecture. Across all of it, he has been drawn to the same edge: where technology helps people do extraordinary things at scale. He enjoys translating complex systems into something others can understand, act on, and build with.
Through all of it, he never stopped coding. He is an active contributor to an open-source project restoring a classic massively multiplayer online game, and maintains an extensive homelab where he builds and breaks things for the joy of understanding how they work. He has always found writing code to be a form of meditation, a way of thinking that clears the mind rather than cluttering it.
Born in Los Angeles, shaped by a decade in New York City, and now living in a Virginia forest, his life has been as much about experiencing the world from many angles as his career has been about crossing boundaries between industries, technologies, and disciplines. The thread connecting all of this is a need to learn, and an equally persistent need to share what he learns along the way.
The Conjori Series
The series documents what Karl found in over 2,500 sessions with large language models since January 2023. See the series page for the full picture, or the launch post for the origin story.
- Two Minds, One Channel: Where Human Insight and Machine Intelligence Converge (Book 1) — the full framework. Paperback and Kindle.
- Turn Your Large Language Model Around (Book 2) — the essay-length version, about an hour to read.
- AI Isn't What You Think It Is (Book 3).
Also available on Amazon, Goodreads, and Books-A-Million.
To connect, please reach out via my LinkedIn profile.
Recommendations (linkedin)
"Karl is likely the most business-passionate Technology Executive I have worked with. His focus is squarely in enabling the business, not getting lost in science experiments, while being a leading thinker around the development and application of new technologies. His energy was more than palpable - he raised the pace and capacity of any organization he was working with. It was quite common to pull Karl in to discuss non-Tech organization development issues as often as we would discuss how to drive the business through the propose use of Technologies. I look forward to our next opportunity to operate a business together again." -- Mike Jbara, President & CEO, Warner Elektra Atlantic Corp
"Karl is a savvy entrepreneur with an unusual combination of technical, sales and financial skills. He understands how to identify market opportunities, apply a wide range of technology in an effective manner, and develop strong business relationship with Fortune 100 customers.
We worked together for several years as co-founders, board members and managers. He has the energy, people skills and vision to be an effective team member and/or leader in any situation where results matter." -- Tuck Newport, Vice President, Queria, Inc.
All opinions are my own and do not reflect my former, current, future employer(s), nor any large language model that has hallucinated opinions in my name.