Growing up I went to a school called Waldorf where I didn't use a computer or watch TV. Right before I went to high school I got a laptop and I became obsessed.
2002: Went to an amazing high school on scholarship. Was surrounded by people who had 100000x more wealth than me, was very strange to go their houses. Fascinated by what their parents did for work to get them into that type of position.
2005: Kicked out of high school because I spent more time building products that doing home work
2005: Hacked the school over summer, but helped them fix it, got back in and graduated.
2007: Was in the early beta of Hulu. I embedded every single Hulu video on my own website and launched it, taking Hulu out of beta overnight.
2007: Produced a live broadcast of someone playing Halo 3 for 72 hours straight, one of the first video game marathons every streamed. Used a small website called Ustream to live broadcast it and took the entire website down after hitting the front page of
@kevinrose's Digg.
2008: Met the founders of Ustream after breaking their website, and moved to Silicon Valley to join their team. This was a lucky break as nobody in Silicon Valley was hiring people who didn't have a college degree. Started as an intern doing literally whatever they needed, I didn't care, worked 24/7/365, then moved into business development, and finally into the position I wanted where I was leading product. Got so (so) lucky to be mentored in product by
@joshelman, founding team of
@linkedin and major impact at
@facebook @twitter, and many other platforms - this honestly changed my life trajectory in a way I can't ever really repay, even sometimes by him just telling me that I could do this. Ustream went on to be acquired for 9-figures years later by
@IBM (I worked there for almost 4 years). I was young (I joined when I was 19) I didn't really make any money from it, although people probably thought I did.
2011: Bought bitcoin. Lost it all when Mt Gox was hacked.
2012: Took a company through
@ycombinator. Was in the same batch as
@brian_armstrong when he was the only person who worked at
@coinbase. Got advice weekly from
@garrytan @sama and others. I built products I was proud of, but ultimately failed to create a business. Felt horrible to fail.
2012: Asked to give the commencement speech at the high school I had been kicked out of. Did the speech.
2014: Built the first crypto social network where you could send bitcoin to each other instead of liking posts, used by every major person in crypto at the time.
@BoostVC invested. Notably
@VitalikButerin used the platform to do a pre-launch AMA before the ethereum token sale. The idea was a bit too early and was unable to sustain itself. Again, felt horrible.
2016: Started
@OctaneAI, an AI chatbots company backed by
@BoostVC @generalcatalyst and more (it has evolved quite a lot since then). When I first had the idea for it I called
@BraytonKey and
@AdamDraper (who by the way
@joshelman introduced me to years earlier) and they wrote the first $250k investment check on the spot based on a drawing I had made on a napkin, even though my last company they invested in shut down. They have been with me ever since and I am immensely grateful for the level of trust, support, and dedication they bring.
2018: Focused
@OctaneAI on the
@Shopify ecosystem, went on to help drive $1bil in revenue for our customers. Actually started to figure things out with my cofounder
@benparr, and our team, and built a real business (we are still running it today, profitable and growing). Learned and still learning from
@tobi's vision and execution of the Shopify platform.
2020: Was one of the first people invited to be in
@OpenAI's private beta before LLMs could even write poetry correctly.
Spent every day after that coding with LLMs, exploring different RAG techniques, building experiments of all kinds.
April of 2023: I wrote maybe the most widely read article on autonomous agents (over 250k readers). As part of the article I talked to experts like
@shl @ericabrescia @tunguz @yoheinakajima @rrhoover @Jihoz_Axie @realSharonZhou @bentossell @MattHartman @jowyang @dunkhippo33 and many more.
November 2023: Attended
@OpenAI's first ever private dev day, was able to see
@gdb @DrJimFan and many others. Was one of the first with access to the ChatGPT app store. Launched multiple GPTs, one of which is still top ranked.
2024: Spent every single day coding with AI using
@cursor_ai @ChatGPTapp @perplexity_ai @v0 @Replit. I would sit down and speedrun building apps from zero to something every 30 minutes for hours every night.
December 2024: Noticed an emerging trend at the intersection of AI and crypto. Thought it would make for a great article, like my AI agents article. Needed something to build that was an actually useful AI agent that would truly benefit people so that I could talk about it in my article. Saw
@pmarca and
@emollick talk about the need to use AI to audit science papers and find errors. Used all of my knowledge to build a prototype in a day. Made a token and posted it on X.
Instant chaos.
Suddenly
@yesnoerror +
$YNE was born, with a community of over 10,000 people that gathered with a ferocity I have never experienced. Literally out of nowhere in a single day. What was intended as an experiment took on a life of its own.
I could either have backed away, or dove headfirst in. I chose the latter. There is something big here. And it is clear I'm not the only one who thinks so.
2 weeks later, here we are. We just put out our first whitepaper. We're building an AI agent to audit all of science. It's already audited thousands of papers. It's already found errors.
My timeline isn't perfect. I've failed a lot, and I've learned a lot, but still I am lucky to be put in positions to BUILD, and so grateful for it. Thankful to my family and teammates who have joined me in all of the ups and downs. If I'm in a position to give any advice, then my advice is to go build as well and dive in headfirst.
The timing is feeling very right for this concept, some of this is on purpose, and some of this is luck. This quote from
@naval has been my north star "Become the best at what you do. Refine what you do until this is true. Opportunity will seek you out. Luck becomes your destiny.".
I'm fascinated by the idea that a community is powering an AI product that the world gets the benefits of for free.
FASCINATED.
There is something so interesting in the underlying fundamentals of how
@yesnoerror works.
It may cost $30mil to simply power the AI to audit all of the research papers in the world, and no business would ever be created to do this so it would never happen, but a crypto market is actually making it happen.
I just can't stop thinking about it.
If you can't stop thinking about this concept either, DM me.
Diving into this is a risk. Diving into anything is a risk. But to move forward we need to take big risks, and that is exactly what we're doing.
What will happen in 2025?