Read about the most brilliant, fascinating characters shaping the future of AI.
Joined October 2026
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> french kid making pixel-art games in high school
> write a deep learning framework in Rust for fun
> engineering degree at INSA Lyon
> last internship: European Space Agency, near Madrid
> make a black-hole-hunting pipeline 100x faster so it can scan 2 billion stars
> move to Munich to start an AI 3D design company
> join Entrepreneur First in Paris, build a time-travel debugger in Rust
> 2025: four products, three pivots
> 16 months and 5 pivots to reach $10k ARR
> pivot 6: Boat, cloud VMs for AI agents
> get into YC Fall 2026
> $200k to $1M ARR in one month
> mfw $1M ARR in 22 months
we just reached 1M ARR with boat.dev
it was our best case scenario for the entire YC batch, yet it took only 2/3rd of it to happen
slowly then all at once, we grew from 0 to 1M ARR in 22 months over 6 pivots:
0 -> $10k ARR in 16m, 5 pivots
$10k -> $100k ARR in 4m, 1 pivot
$100k -> $200k ARR in 1m
$200k -> $1M ARR in 1m
we already got way more in rev run rate btw, subscriptions are just a fraction of our total revenue
now road to $100M!
> 2006: starts math and CS at Waterloo
> 2008: no ticket for Bill Gates' campus talk. carries T-shirts, poses as a volunteer, gets the last seat
> 2010: builds software for robots to understand plain speech in a class project with Kaheer Suleman
> 2011: turns it into Maluuba at Velocity, before Siri launches
> 2015: $9M Series A. assistant tech on 50M+ phones and TVs with Samsung, LG, BlackBerry
> 2017: Microsoft buys Maluuba and its 50 person team. about $160M
> money lands Feb 1. he flies to New Zealand Feb 2
> next: 9 countries, Kilimanjaro, a shark cage
> 2025: cofounds Skyfall AI
> Jul 2026: tells Forbes he'll buy a business and let AI run it
> Aug 2026: hands AlphaSocial to an AI CEO named Steve
> Nov 2026: Steve runs 3 businesses. AlphaSocial MRR up 2.3x. $2M to buy 5 more
Introducing Steve: the World’s first AI CEO for fully Autonomous companies.
Powered by World Models, Recursive Self Learning, a Policy Engine and a team of specialist AI agents, it runs your business end-to-end 🔥.
Proof? Steve currently runs 3 businesses we acquired and they are all crushing it (numbers in thread 🧵)
We’re now launching the Steve Startups Program of $2M to acquire 5 additional startups for Steve to automate.
Join us in the Autonomous Enterprise revolution 🚀.
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1981: born in Pittsburgh
3rd grade: teaches himself BASIC from a library book on making computer games
1999: starts computer science at Harvard
2003: graduates. Later joins Amazon in Seattle
2006: one of about 10 to 12 engineers at Facebook
2006 to 2009: starts the Facebook developer platform
2009: co-founds Quora with Adam D'Angelo
2012: steps back from managing Quora
2015: co-founds Expo with James Ide. Neither has built a mobile app
2026: Expo raises $45M. 3M+ developers
9 Nov 2026: previews Exact, an app framework designed to be written by agents, not people
@ccheever
I want to share a preview of something I've been working on called Exact. It's a new Agent Native app framework written in Rust. It's extremely fast and tries to let you build exactly the experience you want with no compromises.
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LATENCY LOG: Benjy Boxer (@boxerbk)
Wharton: economics
World Bank: asset and liability management
AOL: corporate development
NewsCred: Director of Product Strategy
2016: co-founds Parsec with Chris Dickson. Low-latency remote desktop for gaming
COVID: Parsec pivots into enterprise remote desktop for creators
2021: Unity acquires Parsec for $320M
Unity: VP then SVP and GM of Unity Cloud. Parsec, SyncSketch, Furioos
a16z: works on early computer-use AI models
Jan 2025: co-founds Phaze with Dickson. Remote workstations for people and AI agents
Nov 4 2026: $8.75M seed led by Martin Casado at a16z
Phaze is now available on macOS. So many updates rolling out over the next few weeks - watch here for more.
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Jarred Sumner (@jarredsumner), test results
✓ grows up in the Bay Area. Spends basically all his time on a computer
✓ learns Ruby on Rails. Builds an app his teachers try out
✓ cold emails nearby companies. One takes him on as an intern. Drops out of high school
✓ becomes a Thiel Fellow
✓ builds a Pokémon Go map used by 4.9 million people
✓ front end engineer at Stripe
✓ spends about a year on a multiplayer voxel game in the browser. Waits on Next.js reloads
✓ ports esbuild's JSX and TypeScript transpiler from Go to Zig. Three weeks later it works
✓ Jul 5 2022: releases Bun v0.1.0. 20,000 GitHub stars in the first week. Raises a $7M seed
✓ Sep 2023: Bun v1.0. $19M Series A led by Khosla Ventures
✓ Dec 2 2025: Bun joins Anthropic. Claude Code ships as a Bun executable
✓ Nov 4 2026: posts "Dependencies are over". Bun starts rewriting and vendoring nearly all of its dependencies. Bun v1.5 will include an ahead of time compiler
What’s going to happen to open source?
A prediction:
Dependencies are over.
The same Brotli vulnerability impacted .NET, Node, Bun, Envoy and more. Dependencies are too big of a target.
When rewriting a dependency is one prompt away, why take the risk?
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> 2018: graduates from Ashesi University in Ghana
> builds RollE, a low-cost self-driving research car
> Mar 2019: keynotes a design biennale in France about it
> banking internship in London. Considers a finance career
> founding R&D engineer at Nokwary Technologies, voice banking in African languages
> 2022: first open speech datasets for Ghanaian languages
> goes to Brown for a PhD. His advisor accepts him in the pandemic without meeting him
> Boston Dynamics Robotics & AI Institute
> 2025: LIMP, ICRA best paper finalist at the TAMP workshop
> Oct 2026: PhD done. Y Combinator F26
> Nov 3 2026: launches Primordiant, robot scientists that run experiments. 37K views
@Benedict_Q
An intelligent machine needs three things: a brain, senses, and hands.
We gave AI a brain. We taught it to see. Now we're giving it hands.
Models can propose a thousand hypotheses, but breakthroughs come from testing them.
Today we're launching @primordiant : general-purpose robot scientists that run experiments at scale.
AI mastered bits. Now it's time for ATOMS.
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Adam Zinebi (@AdamZinebi1), Cyclon pitch deck
Slide 1: Moroccan. Studies electronics and miniaturized hardware at EPFL
Slide 2: Co-founds BeatsOn, an AI music generator. Third at START Lausanne
Slide 3: Sells music to artists in Morocco and Switzerland
Slide 4: Machine learning research intern at Oracle in Zurich
Slide 5: Visiting researcher at UC Berkeley in ML and robotics
Slide 6: Teams up with Thomas Kiefer, who worked on Android at Google
Slide 7: May 2026. Wins YC's Call My Agent hackathon against 90+ teams
Slide 8: Fall 2026. Joins Y Combinator
Slide 9: Product. Ask your phone to do it. It uses your apps, builds the ones you lack, works in the background
Slide 10: Ask. $199 refundable deposit. Pixel 8a prototype now, custom hardware Q2 2027
Slide 11: Nov 2 2026. Launch post: 955K views
An AI phone to replace your iPhone.
That’s what we’re building at Cyclon (YC F26).
If you can do it on your phone, you should be able to ask your phone to do it.
AI uses the apps you already have, builds the ones you’re missing, and handles tasks in the background.
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Igor Zalutski (@IgorZIJ), rejection arc
Studies computer science and maths in Minsk
Works at Fitbit in Minsk, then Palantir, helping grow its Singapore hub
2021: co-founds Digger to make deploying to AWS easier
Rejected: YC interviews them before they have a product and passes
Rejected: reapplies with about 10 paying customers. Doesn't get in
Launches on Product Hunt within 48 hours anyway
Pivots four times. Realizes they've built a worse Terraform Cloud
Goes open source "almost as a last resort out of desperation"
A GitHub Action built in a week gets a couple hundred people engaged on Reddit
ThePrimeagen reacts to his post on the Go rewrite. Stars triple in a week
Backs OpenTofu, the Linux Foundation's Terraform fork
2025: $3.6M seed led by Initialized
Oct 30: introduces "computer". 120x his median likes
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> study math and physics at Harvard, graduate summa cum laude
> think you'll be a physics professor for the rest of your life
> 2006: master's in physics at Stanford
> get two-thirds of the way through a particle physics PhD. quit
> join Tropos Networks, a company "no one had heard of," full of physics PhD dropouts
> 2009: join Twitter. asked to count its users. come in at 3 a.m. to run the SQL query
> that analytics work becomes Twitter's first ad product
> 2014: run all of product at Twitter
> 2016: head of product at Instagram. 400M to 1B users. launch Stories
> 2018: co-create Libra at Facebook
> 2021: president at Planet, the satellite company
> 2024: chief product officer at OpenAI
> 2025: sworn in as an Army Reserve lieutenant colonel
> start OpenAI for Science
> 2026: launch Warp Sciences, robot chemistry labs in America. $215M Series A at $865M
💥 Introducing Warp Sciences, a new company applying AI and robotics to help the world develop new medicines faster.
We’ve raised a $215M Series A led by @lightspeedvp to bring frontier AI out of the browser and into the lab, and build scientific capacity here in America.
I co-founded Warp with my long-time friend @dpatil, FAIR co-founder @manohar_paluri, and drug hunter Sol Reisberg. The early team is full of incredible people like @bkspears9, who helped achieve Q>1 fusion at LLNL.
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Humans of AI retweeted
We've raised a $70,000,000 Series B, led by @eqtventures, bringing our total funding to $110 million in just two years.
At @neviswealth we believe financial advice will always be human-led. But advisors spend far too much time on administrative work, held back by outdated and fragmented technology.
Nevis brings CRM, meeting intelligence, financial planning and custodial workflows into one AI platform. Our agents execute work end-to-end, enabling advisors to serve more clients, deliver more services and grow faster.
The past 12 months have been extraordinary:
- Revenue has grown more than 25x.
- We've partnered with 10+ leading RIAs, including Focus Financial Partners, IEQ Capital and United Capital.
- Assets on Nevis have grown from $50B to over $700B, adding $50B every month.
- Our AI agents have completed over 100,000 operational tasks.
Advisors using Nevis are already reclaiming up to 10 hours a week and taking 30% more prospect meetings.
Our ambition is to make every financial advisor a super advisor, equipped to serve more clients, deliver more personalized advice and build businesses at an entirely new scale.
This funding will allow us to grow our team, accelerate product development and build new products across the wealth management technology stack.
I'm also excited to welcome two new investors, @CharlesSchwab and Quantum Light. Schwab's strategic investment will deepen our partnership and unlock more AI-powered workflows for the 16,000+ independent RIAs they serve. QuantumLight is the venture capital firm founded by Revolut founder and CEO Nik Storonsky.
Every one of our existing investors, including @sequoia , @ICONIQCapital and @RibbitCapital, has also doubled down.
To our customers, investors and above all our team, thank you for your trust, ambition and relentless execution.
We're building the foundational AI platform for wealth management.
And we're just getting started.
Read more here: neviswealth.com/blog/nevis-r…
