Welcome to my little corner of the internet. I'm AI researcher/Roboticist, entrepreneur, and investor living in San Francisco. I like to build things, write code and help fellow founders.
I am interested in large scale AI models, new model capabilities and architectures, System 1 & System 2, and Reinforcement Learning.
I am also an investor and a Partner at a16z where I invest in AI companies (Cursor, Black Forest Labs, Waveforms AI, etc) and angel invested in a few more.
I cofounded Fellow AI, an AI and Robotics company based in the San Francisco Bay Area, to optimize supply chain in brick and mortar retail stores, warehouses and factories with autonomous robots, working with the largest retailers (built the LoweBot, Oshbot, and Cobot robots).
I spent some time in Japan doing AI and robotics research for the Fukushima nuclear accident and working on autonomous wheelchair robots for people with disabilities.
Before that, I worked at BMW in Munich on robotics and new vehicle design (some of my designs come in the MINI Cooper 2014 series).
I started programming in Assembler and C when I was ~12 years old when I learned about (and loved) the Microchip PIC microcontrollers and enjoyed building robots with them (and joined FIRST Robotics). I started working with SLAM (Lidar based), V-SLAM, and CNNs around the AlexNet era (~2012).
Other interests:
- I like to research and study what made great progress possible in labs with small teams, like ASML (a Philips side project in a shed), the original iPod team, the couple of people who worked on GPT-1, WeChat (a hackathon project inside Tencent), etc.
- Love solving puzzles
- I am a big fan of Japan, the fascinating world of Tokyo and Akihabara and Japanese Culture.
- Having lived in both San Francisco and Japan, I'm fascinated by the fictional city concept of San Fransokyo, which combines the best of both cities. This interest grew stronger during my time living at the Archive house, where I met some amazing friends.
- I spend some time with friends at a robotics hacker studio (MadSci) in Alamo Square to build side projects on weekends.
- For fun, I enjoy reading books, working on robotics projects, helping friends with their startup ideas, programming, tinkering with electronics and CAD, and play ping pong.