Hi, I'm Chappy!
I taught myself to code at 12 and got completely hooked. I spent much of my teens cranking out iOS apps, and with a lot of obsession and some incredible luck, one I built in high school became the #1 homework planner in the world and got acquired while I was still in college.
That drive to build at a bigger scale led me to my dream job at Apple, where I worked on the top-secret teams that launched the Vision Pro and the early prototypes of Apple Intelligence – presenting multimodal AI agent demos to execs right below Tim Cook.
But here's what changed everything. My senior year of college, I wrote my final paper on the technological singularity – right when GPT-3 had just dropped. That research rewired my brain. It helped me realize four things: that AGI is probably the most significant advancement in the history of the universe. That my technical skills weren't durable – AI would be better at coding than me within the decade, and what actually matters is EQ and relationships. That society isn't remotely ready, and we as technologists have a responsibility to be stewards of that transition. And that AI itself is both the threat and the tool we need to solve it. All of that pointed me in one direction: community.
When ChatGPT launched, I started building again – this time a weekly meetup with friends we called The AI Collective. I also left Apple to co-found Cofactory with a couple of brilliant Stanford PhDs, a venture-backed AI startup (we were Mercor and Cognition's first customers – both now multibillion-dollar companies). But the Collective was where the real conversations were happening – not just about what to build, but about what all of this means. I chose the mission.
The first nine months were brutal – texting dozens of people a day, flying to three cities in a week, no salary, trying to convince people to open chapters. It felt like building a house of cards. Then we hit an inflection point with our global launch, and suddenly the flywheel had its own momentum.
Today, The AI Collective is 200,000+ members strong with 400+ volunteers running 150+ chapters across 50+ countries – a non-profit building the social infrastructure for AGI. Because in-person conversation is the only place to actually wrestle with the complexity of what's coming. And I think we're less than 1% of the way there.
Outside of this, I'm a competitive natural bodybuilder (INBF/WNBF) — the discipline keeps me grounded and it's become a whole second identity at this point. I also read 50-100 books a year (books.chappyasel.com).
If you're wrestling with the same questions, I'd love to meet you. That's literally why we built this!
Personal Operating Manual
Book Notes
Musings
Projects
“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.”