Daniel Nadler is best known to the business press as a billionaire entrepreneur, founder of Kensho Technologies, sold to S&P Global for $550 million, and now of OpenEvidence, an AI platform for physicians valued at $12 billion. But before spreadsheets and valuations entered the picture, Nadler trained as a poet, and it is Lacunae, his debut body of works, that perhaps far more than his other achievements, offer greater insight into who he is.

Nadler was born in Toronto in 1983 to immigrant parents from Romania and Poland; his father was an engineer who used sound waves to detect microscopic cracks in bridges and submarines, a detail that reads almost like a metaphor for his son’s later lifelong passion of finding what’s missing and giving it shape.

A Harvard graduate, Nadler pursued an unusual combination of studies: mathematics and classics as an undergraduate, followed by a PhD on the pricing mechanics of credit derivatives, with a stint as a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve along the way. As if this academic roster was not already full, he was simultaneously studying poetry under Jorie Graham, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and mentor to generations of writers at Harvard. It was Graham’s tutelage that shaped Nadler’s specific style writing, with a focus on the space around words as much as the words themselves.

Nadler co-founded Kensho in 2013, whilst living a double life as a poet. As The New York Times noted in a profile timed to his book’s release, he spent his days running a financial technology company that had attracted major investment from Goldman Sachs and venture capitalists, while mornings and weekends were reserved for writing poetry. His devotion to his writing is almost monastic in the way that he shuts himself off entirely from the outside world to avoid distractions – no emails, phone, not even a look in the mirror.

In 2016, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published Nadler’s debut collection, Lacunae: 100 Imagined Ancient Love Poems. The premise of his poems is novel – rather than writing original love poetry in a contemporary style or his own voice, Nadler presents his poems as if they were translations reconstructions of archaic Indian or ancient Greek scripts. The poems are built from short, almost haiku-like declarative lines, focussing heavily on slightly distorted imagery – “forest masks”, “a dripping leaf”, “the earth was fruit”, and designed to suggest belonging to a larger anthology. The effect is less narrative, more mystery: Nadler gives little explanation to his poems, leaving the reader to gill in the gaps themselves. Indeed, reviews have described the poetry as “exercises in meditation”.

Lacunae has enjoyed popularity beyond poetry’s usual audiences. NPR named it one of its Best Books of 2016. The collection has also been discussed alongside major modern day poets, with a 2017 roundup in The New Criterion considered it beside new work from heavyweights John Ashbery, Alice Oswald, and Jorie Graham herself, Nadler’s former teacher. Boston Review ran an interview with Nadler conducted by poetry editor Timothy Donnelly, giving the collection a serious hearing in a publication known for its literary rigor rather than its interest in tech founders.

Individual poems have also appeared in journals and anthologies beyond the book itself, including Conjunctions and Colorado Review, signs that his standing as a poet is recognised within literary institutions rather than treated as a novelty attached to his business success. This recognition extends to his current role as a board member of the Academy of American Poets, alongside seats on the boards of MoMA and the Whitney Museum’s Digital Art Committee.

What makes Nadler’s poetry notable isn’t just its quality but its incongruity with his day job. He has spent his career building machines that search, summarise, and extract meaning from vast amounts of text from financial filings at Kensho to medical literature at OpenEvidence. Lacunae does the opposite: it takes the absence of text to imagine meaning into the space – where his companies are in the business of retrieval and verification, his poetry is in the business of invention.

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