talent eng @spacexai | 👼 forward deployed angels | 2x founder | @uwaterloo

San Francisco, CA
Founders have an incredibly difficult job. Creating something from nothing is insanely hard. I try to provide more than just capital and be as useful as possible in removing barriers so founders can focus on building. It’s a privilege to be working with unapologetically ambitious founders like @weberwongwong
enough about forward-deployed engineers we need more forward-deployed angels was thinking about this because one of our angels Umesh Khanna (@forwarddeploy) has just been pulling up on Sundays and going deep with us on the product problems we're dealing with, designing growth loops, sharpening our "aha" moments and more. It’s been super helpful very lucky to have him aboard the FLORA cap table
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Just in time for my delta flight 😂
Replying to @benaratame
underdog does not need wifi to run!
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Another Canadian doing some great work 🇨🇦 Congrats @0xSigil
Introducing Underdog, your Private Personal AI on devices you already own Today we're announcing our backing from @a16z @khoslaventures @HummingbirdVC Anthology (@AnthropicAI @MenloVentures) @patrickc @naval @rauchg @polynoamial @Thom_Wolf @Mascobot @tszzl @OfficialLoganK and other top AI leaders Our mission is to provide free, capable, reliable and private AI to billions of people. Underdog’s Law: today’s frontier intelligence reaches your devices in six months. We’re starting with fast, capable AI that runs on consumer hardware. By co-designing models and inference engines, we’re pushing the frontier of capability, speed, power and data efficiency. Our research also spans agentic commerce, confidential inference, and how AI will reshape the internet economy. Privacy and capability no longer needs to be a tradeoff. If you believe in this future, join us. Time to build.
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Frontier getting Starlink before Delta 🤦
Plot twist: Your next flight might have better Wi-Fi than your home. @Starlink, Wi-Fi coming in 2027. 🛜✈️ news.flyfrontier.com/frontie…
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Umesh Khanna 🇨🇦🇺🇸 retweeted
I'm hiring for our Talent Engineering team at @SpaceXAI! Looking for people who love working with exceptional humans as much as (or more than) building product. A few things that we look for: 1) You’re an engineer who can build things to get the job done, being able to 80/20 most things. 2) You care about people and you've been making intros, supporting founders, and bringing great people together for years, without calling it a job. Your skillset aligns with that of a VC (and you might be one someday!) 3) You’re naturally magnetic in communities. People take your calls because you genuinely love to help and care about them! 4) You don’t wait to be told what to do, you've been a go-getter and can get shit done. If any of these resonate and you want to be a critical part to the inner workings of a frontier lab, then I'd love to meet! 👋 Warm intros through a mutual otherwise feel free to email me at talent-eng@x.ai!
Made with AI
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Umesh Khanna 🇨🇦🇺🇸 retweeted
Seeing @shaunmmaguire go to war like that for a port co and be ride or die for his founders restores my faith in honor among VCs
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Legends just getting started ⭐️
Proximal builds infrastructure that enables AI to improve from real-world experience. In the past year, we have grown to more than $200M in annualized revenue helping frontier labs and enterprises improve coding agents. Now, we are expanding beyond software engineering. Recent progress in mathematics demonstrates what happens when models are trained in domains with massive amounts of public data and easy verifiability, making it easy to find weaknesses, generate training tasks, and iterate quickly. We build infrastructure that enables this feedback loop in other domains: we are excited about a world in which AI systems design targeted drugs, accelerate chip design, and rewrite legacy software that still runs hospitals, power grids, governments, and other critical infrastructure. Since starting, we have assembled a small team of researchers and engineers and built world-class infrastructure for post-training and synthetic data research to overcome the challenges of scaling manual data curation. Our team comes from Cursor, Google DeepMind, Meta Superintelligence, Prime Intellect, Citadel, and Jane Street. More than half are former founders. We’re fortunate to be backed by investors who share that vision, including @generalcatalyst who led our $15M Seed Round at a $300M valuation, as well as @chemistry, @svangel, @dvlamoen and individuals like @LiamFedus, @kevinweil, and @bernhardsson
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Umesh Khanna 🇨🇦🇺🇸 retweeted
Replying to @OpenAI
uhhh
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Can’t believe we saw this before launch with the xAI hackathon winners 🎉 Congrats to the @SpaceX team!
Liftoff of Starship!
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Umesh Khanna 🇨🇦🇺🇸 retweeted
hopped on the @a16z pod with @eriktorenberg, @omooretweets, @joshelman to chat about @cosign but, what is a Cosign? It’s a small slice of your reputation- your personal credibility- attached to a person you want to vouch for. A Cosign aims to capture what a résumé or a generic connection cannot: the strength and meaning of a relationship. We have three core endorsement prompts: - who shaped your career? - who is someone you would work with anywhere? - who is a person to watch - someone you think is going to be a star, and the world doesn't know it yet. We want to make belief in someone more specific and useful. Let's see if it works 😅 Would love any early feedback
Who believed in you first? Silicon Valley runs on that question. a16z's Erik Torenberg, David Booth, Josh Elman, and Olivia Moore on Cosign: Cosign is a curated professional network for the startup community. Profiles are built from endorsements, fundraises, and talent moves, with a private layer to signal who you'd fund or hire. Erik ran a small version of this seven years ago, emailing a few hundred people and asking each for one person to watch. One of the answers was Russell Kaplan, then a 22-year-old engineer at Tesla, now president of Cognition. Olivia on why this matters: "The most valuable data in all of Silicon Valley is who has conviction in who." Investors chase it every day and still struggle to find it. An engineer choosing between five offers has almost no way to get it at all. Paul Graham cosigned Sam Altman in 2009, six years before OpenAI was founded. Ryan Hoover cosigned Erik early at Product Hunt. Silicon Valley has always run on cosigns from people whose word carries weight, and until now nobody kept the record. The conversation closes on the question of why anyone would share their alpha. David's answer is that the person you cosign today is the one raising a round in two years, and when they do, they remember who believed in them first. 0:55 Twitter as a credential 3:05 Silicon Valley is a race to discover talent 4:10 The 3 questions on every Cosign profile 5:45 The email that found Russell Kaplan at 22 6:15 Conviction is the scarcest data 9:50 Why Cosign is free and strictly positive 11:05 Seeing things before the market does 13:00 Sending private "I'd fund them" signals 18:35 Endorsements that don't vanish 23:05 Recognition for the unsung engineer 29:40 Building LinkedIn Jobs in 2004 34:25 AI made human endorsement scarce 36:45 Why nobody has disrupted LinkedIn 42:10 Your Cosign profile may already exist 46:25 Silicon Valley always ran on cosigns 48:10 "Why would I give away my alpha?" YouTube: piped.video/-ywZlfznTa4 @eriktorenberg @david__booth @joshelman @omooretweets
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Incredible group making sure we keep on having the resources for the future
Today we're announcing $75M to build Solcoa One, our 500-tonne rare earth metallization plant in Nevada. At Solcoa, we believe rare earths are the foundation of America's next great industrial era. An era we intend to win on the merits, with superior American technology.
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Umesh Khanna 🇨🇦🇺🇸 retweeted
SpaceXAI
wow big move. troy and eric are truly world-class
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.@chrisbarber made breakoutlist.com which actually led me to making some of the career decisions I did earlier on in my career. Grateful to be on a new list by him with such incredible angels 🙌 If you’re building something impactful, i’m happy to help as an angel or be a sounding board. Being a founder is one of the toughest things you can do, but having the right people around the table makes it just a little bit easier 🚀
I asked people: "who are the best active angels in AI?" 5 votes: Jeff Dean (@JeffDean) 4 votes: Umesh Khanna (@forwarddeploy) 3 votes: Sholto Douglas (@_sholtodouglas) 3 votes: Thomas Wolf (@Thom_Wolf) 2 votes: Daniel Chang (@dnnssl2) 2 votes: Elad Gil (@eladgil) 2 votes: Eric Glyman (@eglyman) 2 votes: Logan Kilpatrick (@OfficialLoganK) 2 votes: Michael Chen (@michaelzchen5) 2 votes: Nat Friedman (@natfriedman) 2 votes: Noam Brown (@polynoamial) 2 votes: Philip Bogdanov (@philip_bogdanov) 2 votes: Sarah Zeng (@sarahzengy) 2 votes: Tim Luong (@chongz) 2 votes: Zach Frankel I asked people to focus on angels that work in AI. People couldn't pick themselves. 3 people picked me; I left myself off the list. I didn't vote.
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Welcome to the @SpaceXAI team @eric_luhman1 @troyluhman 🚀
👀 Eric Luhman (@eric_luhman1) and Troy Luhman (@troyluhman) have left OpenAI.
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Incredibly excited to be working with my favorite humans, welcome to the team! 🚀
I am excited to be starting a new role at Cursor/SpaceXAI! I will be working on long term research with @ellev3n11 and the amazing team here. Can't wait for what comes next!
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The @HackTheNorth name tags are 🔥
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Umesh Khanna 🇨🇦🇺🇸 retweeted
Through the VOICE trial, Terry is using his Neuralink implant to help fine-tune a brain-to-voice interface for himself and others who can’t speak. He trained the algorithm first by miming speech as best he could, then by simply thinking the words and hearing them come out in his own natural voice. Powered by Grok Voice from @SpaceXAI
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Hello World
Grok Bot can talk now.
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