We met two years ago during the second week of our MBA at Berkeley. Someone organized a 'future-founders' meetup at the Courtyard and at least half the class showed up. At some point, we ended up at the same table talking about entrepreneurship and AI. It was mid-2023, still early in the 'AI for everything' trend.
Haritha decided to dive into product management, and I into venture capital, both with a focus on AI. She became president of the AI club and I led the VC club, a testament to our enthusiasm.
After her summer internship at AWS, Haritha began tinkering and exploring startup ideas. She built an AI SDR prototype that got her into the Foundation Capital's incubation program. Meanwhile, I spent my first year investing in pre-seed and seed startups, watching closely how LLMs' productization was unfolding and being commercialized. After my summer, it was clear I wanted to build, but I didn't know with whom.
Our paths crossed again at the end of 2024 when Haritha reached out, asking for 'investor' guidance on what she was building. The conversation went so well that the week after, I reached out and proposed we build together. She told me she was thinking the same.
We started tinkering, building small prototypes around deep research for financial reasoning and agentic systems for investor relations professionals. It showed us we have great flow and that we can have open, honest and hard conversations.
The end of the two-year program was close, and although we wanted to build together, we didn't have the financial runway to do so. Haritha received an offer from Windsurf to become the fourth product hire. We talked and decided it was in her best interest to take it.
You probably know what happened at Windsurf next. It was a real Silicon Valley episode and nine crazy weeks for her. She learned a ton, met amazing people, and was offered a role at Cognition. Instead, she took a buyout. Around the same time, I was playing with the idea for an always-on, computer-based AI assistant, but missing a good partner.
Haritha called me the first week of August to say she was planning to leave Cognition and wanted to start something together. I immediately said yes. She resigned after that.
For the past month, we have been exploring and building small projects, looking for the right space to dive into. We are not sure yet what we will build, but we have conviction about doing it together, although we have some cool ideas we are testing now.
We are looking for great, smart humans who will support us early on and throughout this journey.
> Haritha Nair: Software and ML engineer. Built sales copilot at Microsoft, co-creator of GitHub copilot for voice, and worked on reinforcement learning and multimodal ML. Fourth product manager hire at Windsurf/Cognition (Devin).
> Renzo Viale: Economist and self-taught programmer. Worked as a wealth manager and product manager. Led data and ML product adoption for non-technical business teams across industries. Early-stage investor at Bee Partners and NFX.