Ciridae

I’ll be joining Ciridae full-time in June.

Ciridae is tackling what I think is the most important problem in AI: transforming the real economy and uplifting the people in it. Since we announced our seed today, I want to share with my loved ones, my friends, and others, why.

My parents (and most adults I grew up with) own businesses. Though hardworking, curious, and manifestly brilliant, they are not polished, Ivy-educated entrepreneurs. Rather, they were the beneficiaries of the great technological transformation of China over the past decades.

They are the generation most impacted by technological change: my dad sometimes wonders whether his memories of rural Hunan, so distinct from modern Shenzhen, were a dream. Having been so impacted by a technological transformation, they are curious about the next, even when they don’t quite understand it: my dad urged me to learn about Bitcoin when I was 8; he didn’t buy any because he didn’t understand it. Naturally, when I’m back home, my parents and their friends ask what I’ve learned about computer science and “AI”. They know the next wave of technology could transform their businesses—from property management, to real estate brokerage, to construction cost auditing. They just don’t know how.

I spent part of the last six months helping my family and family friends. I went in knowing that the work is valuable, and came out understanding how difficult it is: to really transform a business around technology—as Jack Soslow, our CEO, told me—one has to solve more than a dozen hard problems at once. I haven't failed drastically in most things I've done, but here, somewhat embarrassingly, I learned that there are difficult but important—very important—problems that I was not fully qualified to solve.

Ciridae has a clearer focus and a better plan for this than I could ever have on my own. I am lucky to join such a unique team, whose rare combination of kindness, joviality, pursuit of excellence, and mature grounding in reality both makes it delightful to work with and brings out the best in me. And I am especially lucky to be tackling—together with them—the most difficult, ambitious, and personally meaningful problem I can imagine: sharing the dividends of technological progress with the people who form the bedrock of our socio-economic life.