The same problem looks different to an engineer, a data scientist and a lawyer. I’ve trained as all three.
I’m Oliver Walker, and I’ve always cared more about why something happens than what happened. I founded RhoStone in London to turn complicated real-world systems into something people can understand, model and act on.
Engineering taught me to think in systems, and that an answer only counts once someone else can check the working. Building machine-learning models on large credit datasets taught me to find patterns and test assumptions. Strategy and M&A work for financial institutions and investors taught me to tie the analysis to a decision someone has to make.
The models were accurate. The trouble came afterwards: a score would reach a credit officer who couldn’t see why it had moved and had no rule for what to do next.
Then I qualified as a solicitor, and law gave me another lens. A contract is a structured description of a system: rights, obligations, conditions and consequences decide what each party can do and what happens when circumstances change. On commercial and licensing deals for technology and life-sciences businesses, I saw a contract term change what a business was worth while the valuation model still held a number someone had typed in by hand.
The longer I worked across these fields, the less separate they looked. The data, the model and the contract are records of the same reality, kept by different teams, and things go wrong in the gaps between them. RhoStone works in those gaps. I bring the pieces into one model, find what drives the outcome and what could happen next, and then agree with you whether the answer is advice or software.
RhoStone is new, and I’m starting with a lot of questions and plenty to build. Its own lab works mostly on getting software to read a clause and work out what it does to the numbers. I write up what I explore, what works and what doesn’t in the lab book.
Oliver Walker · Founder · LinkedIn ↗
How we work →Science, then finance, then law.
- Science & engineering
- Thinking in systems, and the experimental method RhoStone still works by.
- Strategy & M&A
- Strategy and M&A work for financial institutions and investors.
- Machine learning
- Pipelines and models on large credit and behavioural datasets, including insolvency risk scoring.
- Law
- Commercial, regulatory and licensing work for technology and life-sciences businesses, as a qualified solicitor.