* GenDocu - Jared Madden. Something gRPC related
* Steven Zhou - PhD student in organizational psychology at George Mason University
* Elliott Ash and Swagatam Sinha -- Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich)
If they're trying to build a startup and sell you that startup that's different, but you don't seem to be listing startups you seem to be listing researchers.
If you want to talk about tech sales people with no respect for boundaries desperately willing to do anything to sell you something you don't want and don't need - then yeah, lets rage against that. I've been in a role where I became a target for tech SDRs and it was absolutely miserable. My phone wound up in a sales database and I came very close to changing my phone number (a number I've had for almost 20 years). It stopped when I left that role - thankfully. The last year I was in it, in particular, once they got a hold of my phone number was miserable. Multiple sales calls a day, my work inbox snowed under, often 3+ outreaches followed by a phone call. One SDR emailed me 6 times, called me, I chewed him out on the phone and then he emailed me again. I blocked his email and then instituted a policy of silently marking any 3rd outreach as spam. I wish phones had a similar feature.
But I'll point out: these are graduate or PhD students, traversing language and etiquette boundaries, under pressure from their advisors to acquire the data they need to publish (or perish). I wish they wouldn't do it (and that their advisors would nudge them away from pointless surveys), but naming individual students isn't really calling out the bad actors here.
Given the volume of emails I get (and their disproportionate sources from a handful of the same universities) over 5+ years, I'm inclined to believe that there are a handful of advisors that push their students to do these surveys as "easy" research.