Damon Kost
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About me

The basics:
My Name: Damon Kost
My Email:
New York, NY
I live and work in New York.
I have a wife, a new daughter and a dog; all of whom are exceptionally charming.

Professional position: I have always seen my roll as straddling business understanding, entrepreneurial and managerial goals with the an underlying technical proficiency and knowledge of the state of the art. With the advent of llms, this method pays additional fividen6

Interests (in no particular order):
Data-Technology-Business-related
I believe “No-Code” software will fundamentally change “knowledge work” and the economy.
I’m interest in Crowdsourced and open-sourced projects and business models.
Though I’m not sure how near Singularity actually is, applied AI/ML and its implications is both fun and important to think about.
I have too many lists and productivity tools.
I enjoy watching low-brow reality TV with my family.
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University At Albany
Cavalry Portfolio Services
For fun
Eltman Law
RNN
Winsor Consult
Allied Extract
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University At Albany
Cavalry Portfolio Services
For fun
Eltman Law
RNN
Winsor Consult
Allied Extract
Multi-Year
TodayFit

My Work

Company Overview
Position
Project Examples
Project Overview
Project Detail
Tools
@Winsor Consult
2018-Current
Winsor is a consulting firm specializing in disaster recovery for State and local Governments. The primary client that I am assigned to is the Governor’s Office of Storm Recovery.
Data/Business Analyst, Project Controls
Property Value Analysis for buyout program
After Hurricane Sandy, one of several initiatives instituted by the Governor's Office of Storm Recovery (GOSR), was a Property Buyout and Acquisition. The program used grant funding to acquire properties at risk of repeated flooding where structures were damaged or destroyed and redevelop or repurpose them to create a coastal buffer to mitigate future risks posed by climate change.

To address concerns from government officials and auditors related to the valuations made by appraisers, Using both aggregate and I devised and built tools to analyze the amounts paid vs. historical sales & valuations adjusted by date and location and bounded by zip code. This interactive dashboard enabled the user to identify outliers and made assumptions explicit given incomplete information about the properties assessed.
Rapidminer
PowerBI
Excel
Hardship Program Workflow and Reporting
The Hardship program was developed to assist hurricane sandy victims who had received grant money to assist in rebuilding or elevating their homes, who were further victimized by fraudulent contractors or who’s work was substandard in completing their construction.


Tasked with building tools for case management and workflow, reporting to federal and state agencies, and audit preparation.
PowerBI
Access
Excel
Powerpoint
LWTB Project controls and Budgeting
Living with the Bay is a $125-million-dollar project funded by state and federal grants to harden and rebuild infrastructure on Staten Island and Long Island. It includes the construction weirs, dams, pump-stations and other initiatives to make flood-prone regions resistant to future storms and climate change.
Built and maintained reporting and tools to manage:
Budgeting
Projects
Contracts
Documents
...across multiple systems and databases.
PowerBI
Access
Excel
Powerpoint
Primavera Contract Manager
Allied Extract
2021-Current
In the days following the U.S. withdrawal of Afghanistan, a former collogue and intelligence veteran of the war in Afghanistan quickly put together a team with military, legal and other experience to assist in moving people out of Afghanistan.
In the weeks that followed we received hundreds of applications for assistance for groups containing thousands of people fleeing the Taliban.
To date Allied Extract has received requests to evacuate ~6,300 people from Afghanistan.
417 people have been extracted due to our work and a further 3,177 through coordination with other organizations and the State Department. We continue to look for ways to assist the remaining 1,500.
Director of Data & Technology
Case management/Field ops CRM
Case Management CRM and intake.
The effort was mainly divided into two parts:
Case Management- I was tasked with quickly building a system of refugee-intake to collect the immigration/citizenship status, location, documents and contact - all of which needed to be reviewed by a team of volunteers to verify it and offer guidance to the applicants based on quickly changing political/legal/threat assessments. If we were unable to assist physically, we would do our best to help by providing assistance with special visas and coordinating with the State Department and other NGOs to make referrals.
Operations- Using local contacts we were able to coordinate and pay for transportation and safe-houses for hundreds of Afghanis. Once the airports were shut down we coordinated with people in bordering states to cross by land.
Some the biggest challenges involved
Making forms in multiple dialects with logic dictating subsequent questions and providing resources based on:
Quickly evolving U.S. DOS policy
Location and availability of known internal and External assets.
Able to accommodate groups of people with separate documentation/immigrant status
...While being as simple-as-possible to use and iterate on based on historical inputs
Operations Dashboard
Analytics and Automation Case Mgmt and Data
A series of dashboards, linked resources and documentation, and automations to:
Clean and structure messy inputs
Hand-off applications to operations/case management/other organizations
Provide high-level metrics in automated reports to allocate resources and provide updates to the organization
Excel
Rapidminer
Google Data Studio
@For fun
1985-Present
Projects born of interest, boredom, fear.
Father, Husband, Son, Friend
Podcast Knowledge Engine
Built a tool to create custom subject-matter knowledge-bases and collections of podcast transcriptions.
Snipd is a podcast App that leverages Speech-to-Text and Natural language software that allows users to capture key moments and highlights to save and share the audio/text. Still exploring uses, but currently building out a tutorial/reference document for web-development tools and concepts based on content from niche podcasts.
PowerBI
Wordle Solver
Is it cheating? Who cares?
Is it cheating? Who cares?
Coda
Covid Tracker based on early published NYC git
In the early days of the pandemic as a resident of NYC, I built a interactive local Covid-19 dashboard, updated daily to share with friends and coworkers using the data published to github by the City.
In the early days of the pandemic as a resident of NYC, I built a interactive local Covid-19 dashboard, updated daily to share with friends and coworkers using the data published to github by the City.
PowerBI
Baby Patti - Input/Output
As a new parent during a global pandemic, what is a better way to harness existential-dread and uncertainty than by tracking the minutia of your infant’s digestive processes like a nuclear power-plant employee?

As a new parent during a global pandemic, what is a better way to harness existential-dread and uncertainty than by tracking the minutia of your infant’s digestive processes like a nuclear power-plant employee?
PowerBI
@Eltman Law
2012-2016
Eltman Law was a firm that served investment funds and original creditors to assist in servicing portfolios of distressed debt on a national level.
Developed strategies (long-tail etc etc)

Director- Special Enforcement
Vendor Management & Anlysis
Constructed processes and workflows to allocate cohorts of portfolios with civil judgments to different processes and data vendors based on historical performance, client requirements and ROI.
Created a multi-tiered, dynamically architecture “waterfall” designed to choose:
Type of legal remedy
Wage Garnishment
Bank Levy
“Special Enforcement” -other remedies found as a result of state-level research of unique legal processes/requirements
Receiverships
“shot-gun” levies
Estates
Fraudulent conveyances
Vendor(s) to send to as a function of
Maximum theoretical net-revenue thresholds based on
cost*historical/projected “hit” rates
detailed historical modeling of defendant characteristics
Historical vendor performance/fee structure
Client prioritization/scorecard needs

Access
Excel
Rapidminer
@RNN
2016-2018
RNN Group provides Data verification and investigation services primarily to creditors and attorneys.

Dev-Ops, Data Analyst
Business
Designed core products & processes to automate and optimize the flow of client assignments through internal, purchased and scraped data to internal call centers with maximum profitability and performance.

Provided reporting and analytics for both internal use and presented to VC firms
Using internal systems, databases and web-data while leveraging machine learning tools and prioritization matrices, I constructed the tools driving company-wide workflow to balance:
Investments in purchased data
FTE ROI on call-centers
Client expectations
Alteryx
Excel
Knime
Google Data Studio

Tools
Alteryx
Tableau
Excel- including Powerpivot and various other analysis tools
Access- proficient in query design and analysis
Rapidminer
Open Refine
PowerBI
Powerpoint/Word
Google Data Studio
Coda
Notion
Knime
Powerpoint
Primavera Contract Manager
Open AI API

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