Ross Sylvester

The Algorithm Foundation

I started at Adelphi Group, a global research consultancy, building the quantitative machinery for multi-country pharmaceutical studies. Conjoint analysis. Hierarchical Bayesian models. Patient pathway simulation. Discrete choice experiments across populations of tens of thousands.

The core insight from conjoint is simple and devastating: there is a 40–60% gap between what people say they value and what their behavior reveals they value. You discover this by forcing tradeoffs—not asking “What matters?” but watching what people actually choose when they can't have everything. Run enough of these experiments and you can mathematically decompose the utility function behind any decision.

Most people treat that as a research technique. I treat it as a worldview. Every deal, every market, every buying committee has a hidden utility function. The question is whether you can see it.

Operator

I've built companies from zero and operated inside companies at scale. As an undergraduate at the University of Delaware, I built a 20-person operation from nothing—not because it was a great business, but because I wanted to learn what breaks when systems hit reality.

After Adelphi, I became CEO of an enterprise platform that I scaled across Arizona State, Cornell, University of Virginia, and dozens of other institutions. Built the team. Sold the product. Navigated the most byzantine buying environments in enterprise sales—higher education procurement makes B2B software sales look simple.

The company was acquired by CampusLogic (backed by $72.5M from JMI Equity), where I became Director of Product managing the platform across 500+ institutions and 3 million end users. Then Ellucian—the dominant enterprise technology company in higher education, serving 2,700+ institutions worldwide—acquired CampusLogic. I continued as Director of Product at Ellucian.

What Two Acquisitions Taught Me

Two acquisitions. Both sides of the table. CEO of the acquired company. Director of Product inside the acquirer. I watched the same deal from every angle: the seller trying to identify who actually controlled the decision, the buyer navigating a committee of people with competing priorities, and the product trying to serve both.

The pattern was identical every time. The people making the decision were invisible to the people trying to reach them. Committees, governance structures, informal influence networks. The math I learned at Adelphi—decomposing who matters, what they value, how they interact—was the same math you needed to win an enterprise deal. Nobody was applying it.

Adrata

Adrata is what happens when you take the mathematical frameworks from quantitative research—conjoint analysis, Bayesian preference modeling, utility decomposition—and apply them to the enterprise revenue problem using AI.

I co-founded it with Daniel Mirolli, who spent years at Palantir Technologies building intelligence systems and holds a Masters in Finance from IE Business School. We saw the same gap: every CRM tracks what sellers do. No system shows you who actually controls the outcome.

We call it Buyer Group Intelligence—the layer between CRM and revenue that identifies every stakeholder, computes their decision-driver profile from behavioral signals, maps the power structure, and tells you the fastest path to a signed contract.

Our latest engine introduces predictive intelligence: who will enter the deal, who has veto power, and where the consensus will form or fracture. We compress buyer group identification from months to seconds. This is the system I've been building toward.

Current Research

The problems I spend my time on:

Writing

I publish research on the intersection of AI, buyer behavior, and revenue systems at Sky Lobby by Adrata.