Delian Asparouhov

Asparouhov was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, to two mathematicians; at age 3 he moved with his parents to the United States, where they pursued doctorates at the California Institute of Technology. When he was in fourth grade, the family moved to Utah after his mother received a faculty appointment at the University of Utah.⁠[1][2][1][1]

From seventh grade he spent six years in the International Baccalaureate program at West High School in Salt Lake City, where he was head of software for the school’s robotics club; in 2011 he was one of two Utah students to win the Siemens Award for Advanced Placement, given to students with perfect scores on all of their AP exams. He recalls that he started coding in fifth or sixth grade.⁠[1][1][1][1]

He entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) at 17, did research in artificial intelligence and competed in a varsity sport, and helped set up an extracurricular entrepreneurship class called “Get Shit Done,” in which students with side projects met weekly to work together and held a demo day at the end of the semester. In the summer between his freshman and sophomore years he interned on the Android engineering team at Square, and several essays he wrote at the time reached the top of Hacker News.⁠[3][3][3][3][4][5]

In 2013, Asparouhov was selected for the Thiel FellowshipThiel FellowshipThe Thiel Fellowship is a two-year grant program started by investor Peter Thiel and run by the Thiel Foundation that funds young people who skip or stop out of college to build new things instead. The program has been criticized by figures in education for encouraging young people to leave college.Open the full entry, which gives young people under 20 $100,000 to leave college and start companies, and he officially dropped out of MIT on June 7. He explained that he had already completed most of his computer science degree requirements and had only the introductory courses he had skipped left, but MIT would not let him graduate without taking them.⁠[6][6][6][6]

With Eric Bakan he co-founded the health technology company Nightingale, which first looked at communication problems in Coumadin clinics and in July 2013 launched iOS and Android apps that give patients custom medication reminders based on their lifestyles and let caregivers track patients’ compliance.⁠[3][6][6][6]

He later ran growth at Teespring. He wrote that Keith Rabois was on Teespring’s board, which was how he was recruited to work with Rabois; he also recalled that Teespring had relied on a single user base and traffic channel that was in constant decline, taking the company from $5 million to $250 million within a few months, and that the team wrongly assumed the growth would continue.⁠[5][7][8]

He then became a principal at Khosla VenturesKhosla VenturesKhosla Ventures (KV) is an American venture capital firm founded in 2004 by Vinod Khosla, the founding CEO of Sun Microsystems, and headquartered in Menlo Park, California. It made heavy early bets on clean technology, became OpenAI’s first venture capital investor in 2019, and its portfolio also includes companies such as DoorDash, Block (formerly Square), Impossible Foods, and Rocket Lab.Open the full entry. He lists the investments he led there as Sword Health’s Series A, Eight Sleep’s Series B, and seed rounds in Akash Systems and Truework; in his published Sword Health investment memo, he proposed that Khosla Ventures invest $5 million of a $7.5 million Series A.⁠[5][9][10][11][11]

In February 2019, Keith Rabois left Khosla Ventures to join Founders Fund, the firm started by Peter ThielPeter ThielPeter Thiel is an American entrepreneur and investor, a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, and the first outside investor in Facebook. He is a partner at the venture capital firm Founders Fund and founded the Thiel Fellowship, which funds young people to leave college and build new things; his public skepticism of higher education, his support for Trump in 2016, and his funding of litigation against Gawker Media have drawn controversy.Open the full entry, as a general partner, and Asparouhov joined at the same time as a principal. That month he began publishing the “Lessons from Keith Rabois” essay series on his personal website, covering investing, management, operations and hiring lessons learned from Rabois.⁠[12][1][12][7]

He lists the investments he has led at Founders Fund as including Ramp Financial’s seed and Series A, Sword Health’s Series A2, and seed rounds in Varda, Hadrian, Regent and others; he has also made two personal angel investments. By February 2024 he was one of about a dozen partners at Founders Fund.⁠[10][10][10][10][1]

Asparouhov says he had been thinking about space manufacturing since around 2010 and originally planned to build experience and wealth investing in conventional technology before entering the space industry at around 40; the breakthrough in reusable rockets in 2017 led him to act sooner, and after finding no company to invest in, he decided to start one himself. He and Trae Stephens of Founders Fund recruited Will Bruey, an engineer who had worked at SpaceXSpaceXSpaceX is a company founded by Elon Musk in 2002 whose businesses include space transportation, Starlink satellite communications and artificial intelligence. It went public in 2026 under the ticker SPCX.Open the full entry; Varda was incubated at Founders Fund, announced its seed round in December 2020, and Asparouhov became its president.⁠[2][2][2][2][13][13]

At the time of the 2021 Series A, he said Varda’s value lay in using space to benefit people on Earth rather than sending people to space, and that the company’s focus on pragmatism would deliver results within 18 months.⁠[14][14][14]

In 2021 and 2022 he hosted the Operators podcast on Substack, interviewing people in operating roles at startups rather than founders, investors or chief executives, with guests from companies such as Stripe, Instacart, Snowflake and DoorDash, and published transcripts of each episode.⁠[15][15][15][15][15][15][15]

Asparouhov is a private pilot. He wrote that on the evening of February 22, 2025, the small plane he was flying lost power at 2,600 feet over Mountain View, California, after exhausting its usable fuel, leaving him unable to glide to Moffett Field or Palo Alto Airport; he declared an emergency, decided against landing on the traffic-packed Highway 101, and about four minutes later made a forced landing on the grass of a golf course, where the nose wheel gave out and the plane tipped over and skidded about 50 feet. A year later he published an essay about the experience, writing that he afterward restructured his work schedule and moved to San Francisco.⁠[16][16][16][16][16][16][16][16][16][16]

Asparouhov co-founded The Hill & Valley Forum with Jacob Helberg and Christian Garrett. The bipartisan, bicoastal organization aims to rebuild the connective tissue between Washington and Silicon Valley, aligning policymakers, technology builders, investors and national security leaders around the policies, capital and capabilities needed to maintain U.S. leadership in emerging technologies. In March 2026, the forum announced its annual convening, entering its third year, for March 24 in Washington.⁠[17][17][17][17]

When Varda reached its collaboration with United Therapeutics in May 2026, Asparouhov said it was the first time a large public company was using its own capital to develop a product in microgravity; he also said Varda’s long-term goal is to be a pharmaceutical company that operates in space, with its internal pharmaceutical business as the largest customer for its reentry systems. When Varda closed its Series D that September, he said the company was founded on the conviction that the first product made in space and consumed on Earth would be a pharmaceutical, and that the round would help it increase its cadence and deepen its pharmaceutical partnerships.⁠[18][18][18][19][19]

Personal website: https://delian.io/ (opens in a new window)⁠[20]

Founders Fund: Official website: https://foundersfund.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[21]

Varda Space Industries: Official website: https://www.varda.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[21]

X: Public account: https://x.com/zebulgar (opens in a new window)⁠[21]

Operators (podcast): https://delian.substack.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[5]