About the builder.

First spam. Then phishing. Now slop.

I’m Manav Mishra, and I built Zero Slop. Every era of my work has the same shape: machines flood a channel with a new type of junk, and I build the intelligent learning systems that fight back.

The path runs through Intel, Microsoft, Google, HPE, Silver Peak, and MSCI. Along the way: the spam filter that guarded 500 million inboxes, the reputation service behind SmartScreen, Universal Analytics, a $925 million exit, and AI product for institutional finance. Today I build agentic AI full time, in Los Angeles.

Spanning four eras of machine learning.

1. 1996-2003
   Neural beginnings

   Trained a four-layer feedforward neural network to recognize faces, animals, and everyday objects as a 1996 undergraduate project, coding backpropagation from first principles on scarce compute. Built hidden Markov traffic predictors that scheduled light paths in optical WDM networks through Washington State University and Intel, running network control before ML in production was a phrase.

2. 2003-2012
   ML at internet scale

   Shipped Microsoft’s first machine-learning spam filtering and cut spam 99% for 500 million inboxes. Built SmartScreen, the first real-time reputation service for websites and downloads, blocking phishing, malware, and spyware across Internet Explorer, Windows, Office, and Xbox, and patented the feature engineering, secure hashing, and sender reputation behind it.

3. 2012-2020
   Data for the model era

   Launched Universal Analytics at Google and wired it to BigQuery, putting petabyte-scale behavioral data and attribution modeling in reach of ordinary analysts. Built the cloud platforms at HPE and Silver Peak that carried the workloads the deep learning wave would demand.

4. 2020-now
   The GenAI era

   Delivered machine-learned index and risk models and fine-tuned domain models at MSCI, then GenAI portfolio analytics, agentic infrastructure, and MCP offerings. Left to build full time: Zero Slop, an agentic pipeline with a private learning loop that turns kept edits into evidence.

Select work.

Insights.