Karl Muth

Background

About Karl Muth

My career has focused in a single area with many facets: understanding markets for contractually-defined risk. This has taken many forms, from my PhD work on decision-making among commodities producers (in the agricultural insurance space), to work at Thiel and Microsoft Ventures looking at innovations in financial services and insurance, to creating Arturo.ai (one of the first AI underwriting systems startups), to designing, building, and scaling insurance and risk-market-adjacent products to - most recently - ensuring that a private-equity-backed E&S insurer's underwriting function reaps the full benefit of the available information, technology, and best practices. Ten milestones: ⁍ Created commercially-viable framework for zero-human-intervention parametric insurance underwriting; invented 3-factor ALT-LAT-TYP model in agricultural insurance context (2010-11) ⁍ Proposed architecture for Fortune 250 insurer's restructuring; represented that firm for two years on Board of Directors of key underwriting technology entity spun off during that period ⁍ Directly advised insurance and financial services portfolio company CEOs/CFOs in the earliest days of Thiel Fellows program (early cohorts) and earliest days of Microsoft Ventures (now M12) during its first US-based Microsoft accelerator ⁍ Rule 702 expert witness in front-page criminal securities fraud matter following civil judgment against defendant(s) re violations of 17a ('33 Act), 10b ('34 Act), and 10b-5 (ibid.) ⁍ Led negotiations among adverse creditors under FDIC supervision in wake of comprehensive bank failure of then-NASDAQ-listed enterprise (>$1.8B in encumbered assets) ⁍ Invented variety of search and recommendation optimization methods, culminating in patented recommendation technologies used by major streaming video and audio content providers ⁍ Cited by Secretary (Countryman) and Commissioner (Aguilar) of SEC on 953b and other issues; cited directly in SEC rulemaking documents, including being cited by name in over a dozen SEC Final Rules ⁍ Youngest person ever appointed to teach across five disciplines at Northwestern: Economics, Law (Pritzker School of Law), Organizational Behavior, Public Policy, and Statistics (at age 32) ⁍ Most published legal scholar (pubs. per year) at Northwestern, including publishing several research articles on key securities questions (953b, 10b5-1, LIBOR, etc.) ⁍ First person to teach blockchain contract/obligation design and programming at top-tier law school (Northwestern, 2016); designer of a Solidity law school curriculum around ERC-20 smart contract design