Hilary Mason

Current role: building games out of stories

Hilary Mason is co-founder and chief executive of Hidden Door, a New York-based company founded in 2020 to build artificial intelligence for interactive storytelling. Its product lets audiences talk to characters, change how a story turns out, and return to worlds that remember their earlier choices. Those worlds are licensed from film and publishing partners, and the company says it does not train models on its partners' works.^[1]

Hidden Door has also built a studio tool called Atlas, in which partners can build, refine, publish and analyze worlds, plus an API and an MCP connection so creators can work from other AI tools. The team page pairs researchers with writers and game designers and lists Matt Brandwein as co-founder for product. It names investors including Makers Fund, Northzone, Betaworks, Brooklyn Bridge Ventures and Homebrew; it does not publish funding amounts.^[1]

Early career and the bitly years

Mason was born in New York City and earned a bachelor's degree in computer science from Grinnell College in 2000; she also attended Brown University. By the early 2010s she was best known as chief scientist at bitly, the link-shortening company, a role VentureBeat's 2014 reporting says she held for almost four years.^[3][5]

During that period she became one of the most visible public explainers of the data scientist job. Wikipedia records her inclusion in Fortune's 40 Under 40 "Ones to Watch" list in 2011, a TechFellows engineering leadership award in 2012, and Fast Company's list of the 100 most creative people in business in 2013.^[3]

Community builder in New York

Alongside the corporate work, Mason helped shape New York's technology community. In 2010 she co-founded hackNY, a nonprofit that connects student engineers with New York City startups. From 2012 she co-hosted DataGotham, a conference for the city's data community, with Drew Conway, Mike Dewar and John Myles White. Wikipedia adds that she served on Mayor Bloomberg's technology and innovation advisory council, announced in October 2011, and is a member of the Brooklyn hacker space NYC Resistor.^[2][3]

Fast Forward Labs

In 2014 Mason left bitly and founded Fast Forward Labs with Micha Gorelick, a former bitly data scientist. The company sold subscription research reports on technologies that had recently become feasible or cheaper but were not yet widely used in industry, and clients could then bring in the firm's staff to build with them. Mason described it to VentureBeat as a hack on the basic consultancy model. At launch it reported four customers within a few months and no outside venture funding. She had earlier worked part-time as a data scientist in residence at Accel Partners.^[5][4]

Cloudera and the move to general management

Cloudera announced the acquisition of Fast Forward Labs on September 7, 2017, and Mason joined the company as Vice President of Research. She later became general manager of Cloudera's machine learning business unit, as TechCrunch described when it introduced her as an industry chair for its 2023 Disrupt conference.^[2][3][4]

Books and public writing

Mason has co-authored two O'Reilly titles. Data Driven: Creating a Data Culture (2014) was written with DJ Patil, and Ethics and Data Science (2018) with Mike Loukides and DJ Patil. Her own site, which collects her projects and press, also lists conference talks and podcasts. For 2026 it records a GDC Festival of Gaming appearance on AI-native games in March and a podcast conversation on building the product first and adding AI afterwards in April.^[2]

Recent news

Her press page records the August 2025 launch of Hidden Door's social roleplaying platform, which drew coverage in Variety, The Verge, Forbes and Publishers Weekly, and an October 2025 GamesBeat piece on fan-fiction games built on the platform.^[2]

Why she matters

Mason is one of the few practitioners who has moved across the whole arc of applied data work: startup chief scientist, research-firm founder, big-company general manager and now a founder building consumer products on generative models. Her books and talks on data culture and ethics gave a generation of managers a vocabulary for treating data as a company-wide practice rather than a specialist function, and her current work tests whether language models can be licensed and used with the consent of the authors whose worlds they depend on.^[1][2][3]

On The Executive List

Hilary Mason is ranked No. 56 on The Executive List (October 2026) in the Chief Data Officers discipline. The ranking reflects The Executive Review's own editorial Trending Score; it is not an outside award, and placement on the list is never sold. View the October 2026 edition.