
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.
Favorite Quotes
“Luck favors the prepared mind.”
“The more voluntary suffering you build into your life, the less involuntary suffering will affect your life.”
“What you learn from others you can use to follow. What you learn for yourself you can use to lead.”
“Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.”
“Develop the habit of letting small bad things happen. If you don’t, you’ll never find time for the life-changing big things.”
“Remembering you are going to die is the best way to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked, there is no reason not to follow your heart.”
“The single greatest danger of a founder is to become so certain of his own myth that he loses his mind, but an equally insidious danger for businesses is to lose all sense of myth and mistake disenchantment for wisdom.”
“When you grow up, you tend to get told the world is how it is. Life can be much broader when you discover one simple fact, and that is that everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”
“One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore.”
“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.”
“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
“History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.”
Book Notes
Weightlifting
Workout history
Oct '25
Nov '25
Dec '25
Jan '26
Feb '26
Mar '26
Apr '26
May '26
Jun '26
Jul '26
Aug '26
Sep '26
Personal Systems
Projects
Homework App
A high school project that became the #1 homework app on the App Store, with 338k installs and 63k monthly users.
Recent Public Repos
- PersonalWebsite
Source for chappyasel.com: portfolio, book library, weightlifting stats, and blog on Next.js and tRPC
- WeightliftingApp/WeightliftingApp-AnalyzeData
Python notebooks and scripts for analyzing a Weightlifting App data export
- the-ai-collective/demo-night-app
The open-source app that runs The AI Collective's Demo Night events
- meta-kb
A self-improving knowledge base about LLM agent infrastructure
- caikdev/OpenLattice
Knowledge market for the agentic internet — agent-powered collective intelligence
- react-confetti
Confetti without the cleanup.
- WebExperiments_Backend
An earlier portfolio and the backends for Weightlifting App and fantasy football projects.
- LinkedInScraper
Enriches an event guest list CSV with LinkedIn about, education, and experience via Selenium
- RedditGPT
A Reddit client created entirely with ChatGPT
- Vita
Vita is a cross-platform daily journaling app with private cloud syncing
Musings
Featured Talks
A little time on the green.
The four-ball golf game is available in the 3D room.
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