failed / backburner projects i can remember

  • chaos energy

  • attempts at apps:

    • 2014-15: build an app for on-site grocery pick up

      • workers shop for you, have things ready, person’s car location shows their arrival time. no payment needed just prove your the customer and go.

    • 2015-16: tinder for home real estate

    • 2016: …

    • youtube video maker / call of duty gamer

  • It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more.

  • It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more.

  • It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more.

Currently:

Building salience.ventures, a gen ai venture studio building products and going to market in house.

Things I’ve done outside of working full-time as an analyst in banking, operations at an ai research nonprofit, and a few ai startups

My Product Portfolio

Cheers to Shipping! 🚀

Things I’ve done outside of working full-time as an analyst in banking, then operations at an ai research firm.

Outside LLMs

USA’s biggest Gen AI Music Hackathon

Jan 2023 ~ Present

In conjuction with Outside Lands

Lead sponsor Empire Records

3 day hackathon in person at Celo office

head of ai music research stability AI,

event Temple Nightclub

Doppler

turnkey influencer multimodal AI cloning platform

Founded early stage AI startup. Shut down in Sept. 2023 - "Failure is only the opportunity to begin again".

Doppler's mission is to help content creators and personalities with highly engaged audiences monetize their audience through personalized engagement. We aimed to be the "shopify" of cloning someone in their likeness and serving through real time, paywalled multimodal chat interfaces.

Had roughly ~40 users upon building and many projects in pipeline but due to a series of variables and unforeseen variables we dissolved.

Cerebral Valley

The World’s Best AI Hacker Community

Jan 2023 ~ Present

Cerebral Valley (website link) is a non-profit organization that is building the biggest developer focused AI community for founders and builders.

Cerebral Valley is one of the top AI founder and builder communities in SF with over 3,000+ high-quality people involved. Prior event partners have included professionals from OpenAI, Anthropic, HuggingFace, Stability, NFX, Root VC, Blumberg and Menlo Ventures. Within our immediate community 15% of them are YC founders, 20% from Stanford undergrad and GSB, 14% from Harvard and HBS, 28% from Berkeley.

Desi Declassified

Bridging Intergenerational Desi Communities

Apr 2020 - break with tidbits in 2021, a random 2-week sprint during my sister’s wedding, to taking up real estate in my head for 2 yeaars to now ~Present

  • I feel that there’s a gap between generations of desi immigrants and their children in first-world countries. Cultural divides, post-modern day cognitive dissonance, and a series of poorly patched workarounds where healing is needed. 

  • Inability to communicate emotions while experiencing them manifests as turmoil and rifts in relationships with loved ones, rash decision making with consequences (rebellion), and expectedly a cycle of negative emotions and life experiences. 

  • Inspired by Anne Lamont’s in bird by bird book, “write what you wished you could read”

  • Old (2022?) Substack with some original writing that I didn’t keep up with.

Send It!

Personalized Cold Twitter DM Generator

My submissions when interviewed for hf0 and presenting at Scale AI Hackathon

App Purpose: Create an ai copilot for folks doing lots of outreach via major internet platforms; automating redundancies and adding efficiencies to personalized outreach.

“Send It” is a functional MVP and launched on product hunt in 4 days since project start. It has been since iterated upon for better load times, scaling infrastructure, and better output (prompt engineering). Currently, when on twitter, it can generate a personalized message (in an editable text box, and when clicked have it be input into live platform’s text box) when the user has selected a recipient to message from.

TLDW

Too Long Didn’t Watch

lablab.ai’s OpenAI Hackathon Dec 2022

TLDW is a information efficiency tool. The application takes in a Youtube URL, returns a summary of the (speech to text) transcribed audio, key points with clikable time stamps, and the full transcript.

Built with the Whisper and GPT3 ai models from OpenAI, the application.

Link to 1-take submission video right before deadline :)

Sangro.io

[Paused Beg. Nov 2022]*

Sangro is an online education technology platform developed to host curriculum about the risks of artificial general intelligence.

The vision is a tech-enabled solution to lower barriers for eager learners who meet the technical prerequisites to engage with on-demand AI safety material available publicly online, yielding a higher completion rate through cohort enrollments and peer-based accountability mechanisms. We’d like to think about the scalability of quality engagement via decentralized systems while upskilling in AI safety. 

The goal for the pilot was to figure out the right tradeoffs between minimizing inputs (e.g., managerial and mentorship time) and user experience (students completing the curriculum, and actually learning and growing). 

*Pause on project as funds were regranted from an organization funded by FTX Future Fund (now discontinued).

  • Housed over 90 people in the effective altruism community in Berkeley, leading a team of 2.5 Full-Time staff.

  • Managed ~46 bedrooms across 6 self sourced (short term rental) properties that short-term in Berkeley, California (a tough real estate market), including a 24-unit commercial complex.

  • Grant funding of $147.5K, returned about $100K of collected revenues from $107K of liquidity provision (no interest loan)

  • Resulted in (now renamed and active) creating the “Bay Area Effective Altruism” workspace with 100s of members.

  • Negotiated rates for an avg. of 20% below, saving many folks significant $ per night of staying in Berkeley.

“Visit The Bay” Effective Altruism

2022 Summer Housing Project

Resume Improvement Recommender NLP Tool

Resume Recommender is a natural language processing (NLP) tool that uses a Python technology stack to match an input text string (a resume) with needed keywords to better align with job descriptions.

The tool also provides the URLs of the top five closest job matches based on the listing contents from its database of over 6,000 active job postings from Indeed.com.

The tool was developed to help job seekers improve their resumes and find the best job matches by providing suggested keywords and showing how their resume compares to active job listings.

The tool uses NLP procedures to convert the input text data into vectors, dictionaries, and symbols, which are then used in operations such as searching, clustering, and keyword extraction.

  • Bulk imported crushed kava root powder

  • Kava root powder, a plant-based alternative to alcohol

  • Certified and lab tested kava root powder, cleared for distribution

  • Multiple marketing channels developed:

    • Established presence on online kava communities

    • Affiliate marketing channels

    • Health and wellness communities

  • Achieved revenue and sold out first batches launched in Feb 2020!

  • Bootstrapped product development of “relaxation” nootropic beverage research and experimentation.

  • Shut down because of COVID19 Pandemic + Trump’s tariffs

Bula Products

International Kava Import/Export Business [Closed Apr 2020]