San Francisco Bay Area
Hesam
Motlagh
Scientist · Founder · Stanford Professor
My work moves between science, artificial intelligence, and building companies.
Entrepreneurial Work
From a scientific background to building an AI company.
Drift.ai
I co-founded Drift.ai. This is the story of the problem we set out to solve, the company we built, and what I learned along the way.
Company history and sources
I co-founded Drift.ai to bring artificial intelligence into financial workflows.
In March 2026, S&P Global announced its acquisition of Drift AI and plans to integrate the technology into the Capital IQ Pro Excel Plug-In. The product automates work such as financial modeling and analysis.
Stanford Professorship
Stanford Medicine · Structural Biology
I’m an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Structural Biology at Stanford Medicine.
Courses & lecture materials
A home for the courses I teach, with lecture materials, notes, and resources organized by course.
Course materials will be added here.
Khosla Ventures
Former Chief of Staff
I previously served as Chief of Staff to Vinod Khosla at Khosla Ventures.
Biophysics Work
Understanding proteins through the many states they can occupy - and how those states shape their function.
Nature · 2014
The ensemble nature of allostery
A starting point for exploring my work on protein dynamics and allosteric regulation.
Research overview and publication details
Proteins move among different conformations. Allosteric regulation can be understood through changes in the populations of those states - a connection between molecular motion and biological function.
Hesam N. Motlagh, James O. Wrabl, Jing Li & Vincent J. Hilser