About

I’m Hilary Mason. I build beautiful, human-centered, technical experiences.

Today I’m co-founder and CEO of Hidden Door. We welcome world-builders and day dreamers to join us! And are showing what good looks like in modern AI, designing our math, models, and product layers to work together to bring us closer together with the people we love.

In 2014 I founded Fast Forward Labs, an applied machine learning research company. Cloudera acquired it in 2017, and I was the General Manager of Machine Learning/AI for Cloudera through 2020. Before that, I was Chief Scientist at bitly, trying to understand what a whole internet’s worth of attention looked like, and I spent time as Data Scientist in Residence at Accel.

I like building communities as much as products. In 2010 I co-founded hackNY, a nonprofit that places student engineers at New York City startups for the summer. I co-hosted DataGotham, a conference for New York’s data community, starting in 2012, with Drew Conway, Mike Dewar, and John Myles White. And I’m a longtime member of NYC Resistor, a hacker collective in Brooklyn where people build things with lasers, solder, and questionable judgment.

With DJ Patil, I co-wrote Data Driven: Creating a Data Culture (O’Reilly) — a short, practical book about what it actually takes for an organization to use its data well, rather than just collect it.