He wrote his thesis on using AI to manage the input of different sensors for a vehicle, which helped get him a visiting scientist position at NASA's Jet Propulsion Labs. There, he contributed to the Pathfinder mission to land the Sojourner rover on Mars. Next, he and his partner, the British-Nigerian novelist Sarah Ladipo Manyika, moved to Silicon Valley, where he became a consultant for McKinsey and had a front-row seat to the dot-com bubble and subsequent crash. He wrote extensively on how tech breakthroughs impacted the real world, publishing a book in 2011 about how the massive amount of data generated by the internet would become critical to business.