Hi, I'm Chappy!
I taught myself to code at 12, got completely hooked, and spent much of my teens cranking out iOS apps. With a lot of tinkering and some incredible luck, one I built in high school became the #1 homework planner in the world and was acquired during college.
That early success led me to my dream job at Apple and put me at the frontier of what technology could do, first in AI/ML R&D and then on the teams building Vision Pro and the earliest prototypes of what became Apple Intelligence. The work was exhilarating. For a while, it felt like the center of the universe.
At the same time, a question from my senior year of college was becoming an obsession. My final paper on GPTs and the technological singularity convinced me that the widening gap between the pace of technology and society's capacity to adapt would be the defining challenge of my lifetime. If ASI could be humanity's final invention, I wanted to dedicate my career to helping us build it wisely and turn its power into broadly shared human flourishing.
When ChatGPT launched, it felt like the timeline had collapsed overnight. I started inviting friends into my living room each week, and that gathering eventually became The AI Collective. Through the community, I met two brilliant Stanford PhDs and left Apple to co-found Cofactory, a venture-backed AI agent startup. For a while, I was building both the company and the community. As AIC grew, it became increasingly clear that this was where I could make the most distinctive contribution, so I eventually chose to focus on it full-time.
Over the next three years, we grew AIC into a global nonprofit with over a quarter-million members and hundreds of chapters around the world. Today I serve as chairman and AIC remains central to my life. An exceptional leadership team now runs the organization day to day, bringing more people into the mission and allowing us to accomplish far more together.
I am now returning to the kind of work that has always energized me most: starting from zero, learning at full speed, and working with exceptional people on a problem that matters. I am searching for the idea and team I want to commit the next decade to, with the ambition to build something at the frontier of AI that can reach enormous scale.
Alongside my own building, I serve on the board of the Thomas Jefferson Partnership Fund and selectively invest in and advise early-stage founders.
The rest of my life is similarly nerdy. I'm an incurable bookworm and lifelong autodidact, compete in natural bodybuilding (INBF/WNBF), and spend an unreasonable amount of time designing personal systems for how I learn, work, and live. I occasionally write and speak about what I am learning along the way.
If you are working on an important problem, want to build something unusually ambitious, or simply think we would have a fascinating conversation, I would love to hear from you.
Weightlifting
Systems
Projects
Homework App (Acquired)
An iOS app I built back in high school for organizing and keeping track of my homework assignments. Ended up becoming the #1 homework app on the App Store and got acquired by Haystack AI!
Musings
Featured Talks
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless yet be determined to make them otherwise.”
“Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.”
“History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.”
“The more voluntary suffering you build into your life, the less involuntary suffering will affect your life.”