Product Insights for Emerging Technology

20 years in emerging tech — ex-Head of Product at Palantir, now founder of two ventures.

At Common Sense, we’re building modern agentic AI systems for local government — 100x increases in productivity across critical workflows that simplify civil service and delight citizens.

At First Principles, we help emerging tech companies generate massive value, ship faster, align teams, and unlock product-market fit or hypergrowth — through fractional product leadership and expert product coaching.

Whether it serves 10,000 users or 10 million residents, the system has to work — and keep working.

Sound like I can help you? Get in touch:

adam@firstprinciples.la or adam@commonsensetech.ai

Adam Judelson

The U.S. hasn’t had a balanced budget in 25 years.

Every administration since Clinton has overspent – not because taxes are too low, but because government systems are too inefficient.

Obama tried to fix it with the U.S. Digital Service. They saved HealthCare.gov and proved world-class engineers can make government work. But USDS was too small and its remit too limited to tackle the structural waste driving deficits.

This year, Trump and Elon Musk rebranded it as the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The mandate: cut $1B a day. Agencies were slashed, programs shut down, costs trimmed. But broken software and processes stayed in place – and when systems are broken, the costs always come creeping back in.

Both efforts failed for different reasons:

– USDS lacked breadth, urgency, and proactivity
– DOGE lacked precision, patience, and long-term vision.

That’s the gap we’re filling with Common Sense.

We work outside government, so we can move fast. But we go deep into the plumbing – the legacy systems, the paperwork, the IT that wastes billions and frustrates citizens.

Urgent enough to matter.

Precise enough to actually work.

Building Common Sense (govtech) | Founder, First Principles | Product Insights for Emerging Tech | Ex-Palantir | 4x Venture-Backed Exec

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Stellation

I write code, make designs, architect data pipelines, build the core models, and create the product strategy and roadmap. I also manage the engineering and data science teams.

Co-Founder / CTO

South Park Commons

Spent a few months tinkering with AI and building side projects. Ran a squad and helped other founders explore ideas. Co-led the healthcare forum. Was an early member, boomeranged back.

Member

Amplitude

Principal product manager and product lead for the experimentation platform. Joined when it was newly launched, wrote strategy docs, shipped over 100 features, and shortly after I left it was named the only leader in the 2024 Forrester Wave™ for Feature Management and Experimentation, ahead of Optimizely, LaunchDarkly, and Statsig.

Product

Code for Democracy

Turned what started out as a meetup across NY, SF, DC, and Boston into a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and data platform for 250M+ public disclosure documents related to campaign finance, lobbying activities, and political advertising. Designed the product and technical architecture, built NLP pipelines, wrote over 50,000 lines of code pre-AI, recruited dozens of engineers and volunteers, closed partnerships, and funded the organization by taking people out to coffee and hustling for $25K checks.

Co-Founder

The World Bank Group

Led a team of data scientists in the Innovation Labs and across the FCI, T&C, and ICT global practices. I developed a new framework for leveraging network analysis and computational social science techniques to deploy capital and accelerate early-stage venture ecosystems that was applied across 8 countries to inform a $400M portfolio of projects.

Data Science

Applied Predictive Technologies

Worked on pilots and implemented our analytics products for 11 customers. Built data pipelines with 1TB+ of transaction-level data across retail, hospitality, grocery, QSR, and CPG clients. Made decks, presented insights, contributed to case studies, and co-chaired Penn recruiting. APT was acquired by Mastercard for $600M in 2015.

Consultant

Kathy has extensive experience building new products in the data and analytics space. She is currently the co-founder and CTO of Stellation, a healthcare startup building an AI-native provider data and management platform for health plans, provider groups, and risk-bearing entities.

Previously, she was a principal product manager at Amplitude, where she grew their experimentation platform from new product to Forrester Wave™ leader in 2 years. Kathy also co-founded Code for Democracy, where she designed, architected, and coded a search, visualization, and alerting platform for 250M+ public disclosure documents related to campaign finance, lobbying activities, and political advertising.

Kathy started her career in data science. She led a team of data scientists in the Innovation Labs of the World Bank and worked on civil rights litigation with the ACLU. She also helped Fortune 500 companies design and analyze data-driven initiatives at APT, an enterprise software startup that was acquired by Mastercard for $600M.

Kathy has a degree in economics from the University of Pennsylvania, where she graduated summa cum laude with distinction in 3 years, and she is an alum of South Park Commons.

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