The Grantees*
(*) The profile on each grantee, almost by definition, will be out of date in no time: Any description had some ephemeral merits at the time of the grant allocation. They serve as a quick blurb only.
Isaak Freeman
Isaak Freeman
He’s a standout even in the Bay, let alone starting from rural Austria, growing up in a country often provincial in its attitude towards immigrant communities. Checking with one of our friends, we received this lyrical pitch: "Anyone who’s met him knows his brilliance in technical domains (math, biology, neuroscience) and executive leadership (ran a $1M nonprofit, ran the most talent-dense hacker house in SF for two years). He finished his Berkeley undergrad in 1.5 years and has similar plans of speedrunning his current PhD at MIT. If I had to bet on one person to do unthinkable extraordinary work, without hesitation it would be him."
Ferdinand Dabitz
Ferdinand Dabitz
Top of his class in the most selective law program in Germany, a sure combo of 2 anti-signals in the world of tech, but Ferdinand left orbit by setting up Ivy, the global API for instant bank payments. We loved Ferdinand’s particular views on the world. And his approach on hiring is refreshingly different from ours: read applications > ask for referrals > take a decision - almost without chatting in person with the candidate. He loves polarising referrals, with people either loving or hating the candidate
Martin Michalko
Martin Michalko
Went through huge adversity, was homeless and launched Biogenesis, creating a clinical trial ecosystem. Martin stands out as someone with unparalleled ambition and integrity. When one of Martin's employees was in the hospital, his room mate mentioned how Martin was consistently up until 2am reading research papers, driving his family between the airport/hospital, and making sure funding was available to cover hospital bills. This same commitment pours into his company.
Sigil Wen
Sigil Wen
Personal scrambling is a great source of entrepreneurship: When Sigil got himself an O1 visa, he started obsessing over getting 20.000 people an O1: he’s the no1 search result in Youtube on ‘o1 Visa’. We were struck by Sigil’s open-mindedness and fresh thinking: loved how he challenged my own approach. Prior to his o1 Visa focus, Sigil tried his hand at a venture aimed at crowdsourced talent.
Koki Mashita and Mason Lee
Koki Mashita and Mason Lee
Both Koki and Mason are seriously intense. Our conversations touched so many different dimensions we hardly got into the crazy ambitious project of attacking hurricanes… Akin to other grantees at this age, the truly daring mission will be met by a few bloody noses as reality has this habit of not willingly conforming to one’s dreams… and hurricanes strike us as the fiercest of realities.
Hector Gomez
Hector Gomez
Hector started in rural Amazonian Peru, in the middle of nowhere, with no real mentors or peers. He taught himself English using YouTube. Impressive how he managed to forge his own path, surrounded by people doing very different things, and learning things by himself, he puts a different perspective on what it means to not be born in the Valley and with no other option than to go auto-didact.
Mateo Escalante
Mateo Escalante
An Argentinian surfacing in Berlin: Mateo is building and shipping leg protheses Ukraine under very difficult circumstances. Started on the technical side of things and taking on more and more aspects of the business, hard to resist analogies with the typical navy SEAL lingo we find in the startup world: we wonder if other founders have been so close to the tragedy and learnings of the real battlefield. Mateo is smart and ambitious: it’s such an easy and relevant signal if people ask you more relevant questions than anybody else.
Sunir Manandhar
Sunir Manandhar
Sunir made a leap with his parents from Nepal to the US: Surely smart, ambitious, and he's already well connected at age 19. A friend of an earlier grantee. Feels like one of the most likely to build things of the group: parallel to so many in the Valley it’s a thin line between gearing up to be eternal hacker or to be on a path towards being a company builder: we bet on the latter.
Rahul Chandelkar
Rahul Chandelkar
The youngest grantee at age 16, interviewing from a shack with corrugated roof on a farm in the boondoggles of India. Special guy, very unprivileged background: His parents are farmers, they live in a poor area. He dropped out of high school as he solely wants to focus on computers. Surprised by his ambition, clarity of thought, confidence. Far from starting a company (far is a relative notion in the world of founder evolution), we feel this grant could start a very positive trajectory.
Gavin Uberti and Robert Wachen
Gavin Uberti and Robert Wachen
The Etched founders are a category on their own. From my notes in March 2024: “Impressive how also Robert holds his ground so comfortably, always to the point, super high signal, all the while me thinking I’m pushing with tough questions. And I thought Gavin was the sole genius in this club.” They seem to compress 5 years worth of work into 6 months. A friend commented: "Feels like a couple of kids that stole a car to joyride and do some fundraising on the side, it all seems too easy to them." Both are Harvard dropouts who are taking on Nvidia. Founded in 2022, their startup attracted a deep bench of SV talent, building an AI chip which runs transformer-based models orders of magnitude faster than Nvidia.
Harry O'Connor
Harry O'Connor
Harry dropped out of high school to work full-time on building humanoid robots, aiming to make them as common as the car. He spent the last four years developing a new kind of AI control system which takes the same inputs humans have and directly controls the robot, allowing it to adjust the way it walks depending on the terrain presented. This means it can walk almost anywhere humans can, unlike current competitors. Harry thinks we are close to a ChatGPT moment in robotics where we see reinforcement learning go to another level. Already now, he gets things done in ways that would require an old Boston Dynamics years and tens of millions of dollars. Harry won two awards in the BT Young Scientist competition - the same one as the Collison brothers - and was recently awarded the Emergent Ventures fellowship. Immediately after selection, Harry signed his first SAFE pre-seed investments for $250k.
Molly Mielke
Molly Mielke
Molly is obsessed with finding and supporting outlier talent. She started her first micro VC fund at the age of 22. Consequently, she used the little earnings she had to write <$5k grants to young people (<25) pursuing ideas that show early promise of someday becoming a company (e.g. funding for research, building a prototype, or paying living expenses).
Satvik Agnihotri
Satvik Agnihotri
Satvik believes in the transformational power that exists in systems level coordination. In grade 11, he worked on an advisory project for Shell’s innovation team, initiating his curiosity into supply chain. Over time, Satvik focused on transportation networks and, under the guidance of industry experts, built himself a rigorous understanding of domestic trucking in the USA, and the network to actualize change. He is currently building analytical tools for enterprise trucking carriers to re-engineer their fundamental operating networks, and strongly believes strongly in one’s ability to execute through a commitment to specific goals and strong leadership.
James Lin
James Lin
Most biologists despise or don’t have the aptitude for quantitative work, and world-class computational talent brain-drains into AI and big tech. James wants to change the field of biology through computation and machine learning. He recently founded Kaido, a biodefense company. There are only two labs in the world researching genome recoding. Though both labs are world-class, James believes there is a great opportunity for computational biologists in the field. He raised $200k in philanthropic grants, hired researchers, wrote the majority of the first literature review, started model design and engineering, and met with hundreds of engineers and researchers from the best labs in the world (Church, Doudna, etc.) and all over industry (biomanufacturing, defense, agriculture, etc.) to collaborate on research pathways. Hard to imagine a biosecurity team out there not in touch or engaging with James.
Marley Xiong & Raffi Hotter
Marley Xiong & Raffi Hotter
Studied Computer Science & Biology at McGill, left to work on neurotechnology at Google X, left again to start a 26-person microcampus in New Mexico during the COVID-19 pandemic. They want to change the field of neurotechnology, building a neural interface decoding visual imagery directly from the brain. Building a brain scanner that will turn your thoughts and memories into images. If you can build a brain scanner with merely one-centimetre spatial resolution, sampling once a second, you’re already at 1.000 bits/s of bandwidth - orders of magnitude above existing human capabilities like speech (~10 bits/s) or typing (~3 bit/s). Our thinking: since they’re tackling such a huge problem, they might not exactly solve this one, but they might come across a very interesting application along the way. Unsure how fast they could have a working device, but 100% on the inspiration scale.
Luke Marks
Luke Marks
Luke is 16 years old and wants to drop out of high school. Smart, passionate, open-minded. He sincerely asked for feedback, not many candidates get to this point. His goal is out of the ordinary: “make progress on digitizing a copy of his mind and accelerating it at the speed of light (in photonic informational form) in an arbitrary direction to escape the light cone of anything originating from Earth after that point.” Luke isn’t the first builder to be obsessed about longevity and death, but we’ve not met anyone who thinks it’s a matter of time before superintelligence comes close to wiping out humanity. We love how people go beyond education or second-hand knowledge: in Luke’s words "Language models have been my primary tutor as of late, which I use by invoking teaching simulacra of the most fantastic variety.”
Adarsh Hiremath
Adarsh Hiremath
Dropping out of Harvard before starting junior year, Adarsh founded Mercor, which is using AI to automate the entire global hiring stack, from sourcing to vetting to payment. They believe that as LLMs and AI get better, the cost to vet talent will approach zero. Mercor recently raised $3.6M from General Catalyst after bootstrapping to $1M+ in ARR, 100.000+ users, and a 14-person team. We never had so many people endorse a founder. When classmates made fun of his speaking style in middle school, he decided to take public speaking classes. Soon, he became addicted, and not much later was the first in history to win all three national debate tournaments in the same year. He feels his obsession with ‘switch side debate’ - hardwired his brain to think from first principles, entertain even the craziest viewpoints, and always consider the broader social and political implications of his work.
Sara Kemppainen
Sara Kemppainen
Dropped out of the Sciences Po / Columbia University dual degree program to dive into the world of start-ups, Sara first was Head of Program at Slush, Europe’s premier start-up conference. Supported by Fifty Years, she built ground-up two grant programs to support early-stage research in underfunded and deeply impactful areas of science, raising nearly $2M in philanthropic donations. One in women's reproductive health and another in bio x climate research. Repro Grants is a 'fast grants' program that awards $25k-$100k to ambitious research projects aiming to deepen our understanding of female reproductive biology. Not only was most pharma testing geared towards administering and optimizing medication on male mice during the last century, but the USA today inhibits crucial research based on ill-directed MAGA voices acting on ethical dubious grounds against IVF and female reproductive biology.