About

Who I am

I'm an AI founder-operator and Partner/CTO at Embedding VC, helping technical founders turn ambitious ideas into real products, teams, and companies.

How I got here

I built my foundation in NLP, ranking, information retrieval, and social media search through research at USC/ISI, Penn State, and Microsoft Research Asia. At USC/ISI, I built a real-time Twitter search system awarded “Best System” at the 2011 TREC Microblog Track, a geographic summarization system (GeoXray) later acquired by TerraGo, and biomedical data integration systems for NIH research across six medical centers. I co-authored 10+ research papers. That work gave me a deep, pre-hype understanding of how language models, retrieval systems, and large-scale text processing actually work.

What I learned building at scale

At Google, I led the design and launch of Ads Reach solutions across major customer-facing surfaces, built a team of 7 engineers, and worked with infrastructure teams to reduce service latency to sub-10ms. At Snap, I led engineering for Discover & Stories, managing and scaling an 80+ person engineering org and building Snapchat's personalization platform from the ground up to 200M+ daily viewers. Between them, I was a Principal Software Engineer at Houzz, re-architecting ads systems and managing large-scale infrastructure migrations.

What I learned founding Youpi

I founded Youpi to explore AI-native consumer products. We raised from top investors and built a 12-person highly-calibrated team to launch 10+ AI consumer products, including Realm AI, a consistent-character social creation app for AI-powered visual stories, and Synco AI, a real-time AI copilot combining streaming transcription and LLM reasoning for live conversations.

That journey produced hard-earned lessons across product strategy, ML systems, real-time AI infrastructure, GTM, pricing, hiring, fundraising, and founder psychology. It gave me a clear-eyed understanding of where AI creates real user value and where it does not.

What I do now at Embedding VC

My current work spans AI investing, venture studio building, recruiting infrastructure, and data/evaluation workflows. I help technical founders navigate product, systems, talent, and go-to-market.

Current frontier work

Areas I'm actively studying, building, and investing around:

How I help founders

I bring a rare combination of large-scale engineering leadership (80+ person org, 200M+ daily viewers), founder scar tissue (12-person team, 10+ AI consumer products, raised funding), deep AI systems intuition (NLP research, TREC awards, 10+ papers), and practical GTM lessons to help technical founders avoid early traps and focus on the real bottlenecks sooner.