Endeavours

Operating

Research memory for agentic science (South Park Commons → Tuva AI)

I use LLMs for many research tasks, from ideating to writing scripts to doing calculations. They're excellent at abstract reasoning, but struggle with context—I spend as much time reteaching the bot about project details as I would writing the script myself. Details change as the project develops, as hypotheses get invalidated, new data gets generated, and ideas branch. The deeper into a project I get, the more context there is to manage, making off-the-shelf tools unsuitable for many tasks.

Can we build an agentic LLM interface that solves this by intelligently routing the right context to the right tasks? How might programming context like code allow us to automate more of scientific problem-solving, freeing researchers to focus on asking better questions rather than technical implementation? Instead of trying to replace scientists, can we empower them to do more with less, especially given the current funding environment?

After ruminating on these questions for several months at South Park Commons, my friend Samsara and I founded Tuva AI to build the agentic collaborator I want for my own research, with the goal of accelerating scientific progress by turning every scientist into a PI managing their own team of LLM research agents. Our first product, Rao, remembers your project context and history, updating it as it develops and supplying just the right information to both our own bespoke scientific agents as well as third party agents scientists may already be using.

Networked identity (Sora ID → CLEAR)

Today, we predominantly verify our identities online using things we know (passwords, SSNs, magic codes, security questions) or things we have (devices, ID cards). But if a fraudster knows your secrets or spoofs your credentials, they have your identity, and if your identity is compromised at one place, it's compromised everywhere. This fundamental gap in Internet infrastructure leads to 3 million Americans getting their identities stolen every year and hundreds of billions of dollars stolen or laundered, much of which goes towards funding terrorists and rogue states.

Prompted by rising fraud during COVID and growing adoption of technologies like Apple's FaceID, I cofounded Sora with Stanford classmates to solve this problem by building biometric identity credentials for every user (with consent, of course!). Sora's platform verified user identities for fintechs and banks, then issued strong biometric credentials that could be reused at any other Sora customer. We raised $6M from investors including Greylock, Abstract, and General Catalyst, scaled the business to seven figures of revenue and hundreds of thousands of users, then sold the company to CLEAR (NYSE:YOU) in 2023. Now, Sora's technology powers CLEAR's identity network across sectors, serving over 40M Americans and household names such as LinkedIn, Home Depot, Avis, Uber, T-Mobile, and Docusign.

If you're even more interested in the Sora/CLEAR story and have half an hour to kill, here's a podcast on which I talk through the journey.

Investing

I am an active angel investor with a focus on early-stage startups. I especially enjoy advising young and/or first time founders, where I aim to be the steady voice I wish I had during my first rodeo. Beyond my own check, I've helped my portcos find and close candidates and customers, raise additional financing, and think through strategic decisions. A (non-exhaustive) list of investments includes:

Wispr, Slingshot, Tenzo, Rhizome, Yolodex, Sentience, Third Space Insurance, Scale Medicine, Crippling, Frec, Astro, Abacus, Scott, Anthropic, SpaceX, Fluidstack, Generalist, Zamana.

Advising

I am an advisor to Oncare AI, which uses AI to optimize operations for leading cancer centers. I also occasionally join advisory boards through StartX, which Sora was lucky to be part of in Winter '21.

On a more ad-hoc basis, I've guided several friends through their Seed raises, helping put rounds together with Abstract, Kleiner Perkins, Craft, and several other leading venture firms. Feel free to reach out if you're raising.