Troy Astorino

Entrepreneur

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

VDA Class of 2005

In 2013, I graduated from MIT with majors in Physics and Aerospace Engineering and a minor in Economics. Outside of academics, I played on the varsity tennis team. I interned at Lockheed Martin and SpaceX.

After college, I co-founded PicnicHealth. PicnicHealth creates training data for precision medicine. We take a unique approach to doing this — actually giving patients a useful service. PicnicHealth collects, organizes, and manages medical records for patients.

In 2014, PicnicHealth went through Y Combinator, the same startup program that gave birth to Dropbox, AirBnB, and Reddit. In 2015, PicnicHealth raised a $2M seed funding round, and in 2017, won the $1M grand prize at Google's Machine Learning Startup Competition. As of mid-2017, PicnicHealth has processed 500,000 medical records from 5,000 different health care facilities across the country. 

VanDamme Academy is where I learned to think. I learned how to identify and reason about principles that applied across all academic subjects. Building a startup, I constantly deal with uncertainty, incomplete information, and a shifting environment. The rigorous, first principles approach VanDamme taught me enables me to think clearly and confidently about what truly matters to my company and our customers.