Robert Wachen

The Thiel Foundation’s list of fellows published in 2024 gives his hometown as Potomac, MarylandMarylandMaryland is a Middle Atlantic state of the United States, deeply indented by Chesapeake Bay and bordered by Pennsylvania, Delaware, Virginia, the District of Columbia and West Virginia; its capital is Annapolis and its largest city is Baltimore. One of the original 13 states, it ratified the U.S. Constitution on April 28, 1788, as the seventh state to do so, and had a population of 6,177,224 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry. The Observer, the student newspaper of Winston Churchill High School (WCHS), wrote in February 2022 that he was a member of the school’s “Class of 2020” and was then attending Harvard UniversityHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry.⁠[1][2]

VnExpress International wrote in September 2026 that he was “a coder” who lived on the same floor as Gavin UbertiGavin UbertiGavin Uberti is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Etched, a company that develops specialized inference chips and cluster systems for running large AI models, starting with Sohu, a chip designed only for transformer models; he is a member of the 2024 class of the Thiel Fellowship.Open the full entry at Harvard and was then running an education technology company; CNBCCNBCCNBC is an American business and financial news cable channel launched by NBC in 1989; it merged with its rival FNN in 1991 and since January 2026 has been part of Versant Media Group, spun off from Comcast.Open the full entry wrote in June 2024 that he had been Gavin Uberti’s college roommate.⁠[3][4]

The Observer wrote on February 13, 2022 that he had founded Mission: Mentor, a free college preparation service, to simplify a confusing admissions process. He said, “Part of it came out of frustration with the admissions process”; he recalled that when applying he was always on YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry or RedditRedditReddit is an online platform that organizes content and discussion around interest-based communities, founded by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian in 2005. Users take part in communities by posting, commenting, and voting; its operating company, Reddit, Inc., listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2024.Open the full entry looking for information, that it was scattered, and that he was surprised nobody had brought it together.⁠[2]

The article states that this led him to the idea of a virtual college counselor; he first recruited friends from Harvard to build a scholarship database and then expanded the team to students outside Harvard. They made a website and advertised it on TikTok, getting 2,500 users within the first week. The article says he was then spending 80 to 100 hours a week on the project.⁠[2]

The article states that in August Mission: Mentor released “Operation College Application,” a 13-part event series hosted entirely online in which more than 2,000 students took part, with speakers including admissions officers, college counselors, scholarship representatives and online influencers; he said, “People are really looking for this high-quality expert advice.” When the article appeared, the core team, which included a senior at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), was updating the website, the waitlist had more than 5,600 people on it, and the team was building a system to recommend scholarships and send deadline reminders; students could join the waitlist and subscribe to “bimonthly” newsletters sorted by grade.⁠[2]

The article states that he kept his ties to his old school: WCHS guidance staff shared resources with him when he started, he publicized the service to the school community at launch, and many early users came from WCHS, some of whom became interns. He said that students of the Class of 2022 pursued their interests in unique ways and that students had obtained patents, started organizations and raised money for nonprofits. He called online opportunities “the great equalizer” and said, “there’s a lot of untapped potential that’s being wasted.” He said he knew of no other group led by college students doing the same work.⁠[2]

The Observer wrote in February 2022 that he was then taking part in “Harvard’s Prod Program,” which worked with 20 seniors from Harvard and MIT to turn their ideas into ventures and was based that year in Mexico City; the photo caption states that Mission: Mentor’s new website was being worked on during “Harvard’s Venture Program,” held in Mexico City throughout January 2022.⁠[2]

VnExpress International writes that he later ran Prod, a student-run nonprofit startup accelerator in Cambridge, MassachusettsMassachusettsMassachusetts (officially the Commonwealth of Massachusetts) is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States; its capital and largest city is Boston. One of the original 13 states, it ratified the U.S. Constitution on February 6, 1788, the sixth state to do so. Its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 7,029,917.Open the full entry, which produced the AI hiring platform MercorMercorMercor is a San Francisco-based artificial intelligence company that began as an AI hiring platform and shifted to recruiting domain experts such as doctors and lawyers for major AI labs to supply data for model training and evaluation, with its valuation rising rapidly over several funding rounds.Open the full entry. His biographies on the RAISE Summit speaker pages and on the page of an EtchedEtchedEtched develops AI inference chips and rack systems, co-designing silicon, memory, interconnects, software and manufacturing for large-model inference.Open the full entry event at MIT call him a co-founder of Prod and give the combined valuation of Prod’s cohort companies as more than $50 billion (“50B+ cohort valuation”).⁠[3][5][6]

Scott Kirsner of MassLive wrote in March 2026 that Prod formed in 2021 to support undergraduates at MIT, Harvard and Stanford UniversityStanford UniversityStanford University is a research university in California founded by Leland and Jane Stanford in 1885 and opened in 1891.Open the full entry who want to create startups, and that just three of the companies that had been through the program—Mercor, Etched and Cursor—were estimated to be worth $45 billion on the basis of recent investment rounds. The article states that many of Prod’s original founders and former presidents now live in San Francisco, running companies like Etched.⁠[7]

CNBC writes that Gavin Uberti and Christopher ZhuChristopher ZhuChristopher Zhu (usually written Chris Zhu by his company and the press) is a co-founder of Etched, a company that develops specialized inference chips and cluster systems for running large AI models; he is a member of the 2024 class of the Thiel Fellowship.Open the full entry started to work on a chip company after a summer internship in which Gavin Uberti worked on compilers, and that the pair dropped out of Harvard in 2022 and added Gavin Uberti’s college roommate, Robert Wachen. TechCrunchTechCrunchTechCrunch is an American technology news outlet founded in 2005 by Michael Arrington and Keith Teare and headquartered in San Francisco; it mainly covers technology companies, startups, and venture capital, and hosts events such as TechCrunch Disrupt. Its ownership passed successively through AOL, Verizon, and Yahoo, and in 2025 Regent announced its acquisition.Open the full entry wrote in June 2024 that Etched was founded by a pair of Harvard dropouts, Gavin Uberti and Christopher Zhu, who, along with Robert Wachen and former Cypress Semiconductor chief technology officer Mark Ross, sought to create a chip that could do one thing: run AI models.⁠[4][8]

TechCrunch and VnExpress International give 2022 as the year Etched was founded, while SiliconANGLE gives 2021. TechCrunch wrote in July 2026 that Etched was founded by three Harvard dropouts who left school without knowing how to raise money or hire; the article states that the founders set up the servers needed to run chip-design tools in an early employee’s garage, and that whenever they needed rebooting, the employee would call his wife, who would press the reboot button.⁠[9][3][10][11]

He recalled in July 2026 that he landed in the San Francisco Bay Area after telling his parents he was leaving school to do a startup, with neither an office nor an apartment lined up, and slept on the floor of a friend’s unfurnished house: “I remember staying in my friend’s house that they were about to sell, using a towel as a blanket.”⁠[11][3]

Brian Schechter, a partner at Primary Venture Partners, wrote in June 2026 that Primary led Etched’s seed round in March 2023, having never before invested in a semiconductor company. TechCrunch wrote in June 2026 that Etched’s founders said on Patrick O’ShaughnessyPatrick O’ShaughnessyPatrick O’Shaughnessy is an investor and podcast host who has hosted the interview show Invest Like the Best since 2016, founded the early-stage investment firm Positive Sum in 2020 and serves as its CEO, and is also founder and CEO of the media company Colossus.Open the full entry’s Invest Like the BestInvest Like the BestInvest Like the Best is a business and investing interview podcast hosted by Patrick O’Shaughnessy. Launched in 2016, it features conversations with investors, founders and experts about their ideas, methods and stories; the show is now part of the Colossus podcast network.Open the full entry podcast that in 2023 they struggled to attract investors even with a 30-page memo arguing that AI would eventually need specialized chips, not just general-purpose GPUs, and that every major investor they pitched passed; the article adds that the company was then operating month to month, “close to running out of cash.”⁠[12][9]

On March 20, 2024, the Thiel Foundation announced its new class of 20 Thiel Fellows, each of whom receives $100,000; he, Gavin Uberti and Christopher Zhu were all selected for the Thiel Fellowship with Etched. His entry in the list reads: “Etched is solving the compute cost and speed bottlenecks hampering every company on this list. Specialized AI chips are inevitable and will change the world.”⁠[1]

Primary, an investor in Etched, writes in its post announcing the Series A that the three were one of the first teams to receive the Thiel Fellowship collectively; TechCrunch also wrote in June 2024 that all three are Thiel Fellowship alumni, and in June 2026 that he and Gavin Uberti dropped out of Harvard and became Thiel Fellows to found Etched.⁠[13][8][9]

CNBC, in its June 25, 2024 article on Etched raising $120 million, calls him Etched’s “operating chief.” He said, “The reason we were so excited about what we’re doing, why we dropped out of school and we’ve convinced so many people to leave these chip projects — this is the most important thing to be working on,” and “The entire future of technology is going to be shaped by whether the infrastructure can handle the scale.” CNBC writes that the company had settled in Cupertino, CaliforniaCaliforniaCalifornia is a U.S. state on the Pacific coast; its capital is Sacramento and its largest city is Los Angeles. California was admitted to the Union on September 9, 1850, as the 31st state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 39,538,223, the largest of any state.Open the full entry, had 35 employees and offered housing stipends to new hires.⁠[4]

TechCrunch wrote the same day that the round was co-led by Primary Venture Partners and Positive Sum Ventures and that its angel backers included 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, GitHub chief executive Thomas Dohmke, Cruise co-founder Kyle Vogt and Quora co-founder Charlie Cheever. Looking back on the Series A in June 2026, Brian Schechter wrote that he had built a commercial machine and closed tens of millions of dollars in purchase orders before the Series A, and that his “deal-making superpower” had also emerged in raising capital, bringing more than $100 million into the business from strategic investors; around the Series A, Mark Ross moved from adviser to chief technology officer and the company secured 4nm capacity at TSMCTSMCTSMC is a semiconductor manufacturer headquartered in Hsinchu, Taiwan, that pioneered the pure-play foundry model and manufactures chips for hundreds of customers worldwide.Open the full entry.⁠[8][4][12]

TechCrunch wrote in June 2026 that an unannounced $500 million round had closed the previous December at a $5 billion post-money valuation, led by Stripes, with investors also including VentureTech Alliance, Jane Street, Hudson River TradingHudson River TradingHudson River Trading is a proprietary trading firm headquartered at 3 World Trade Center in New York. Through its broker-dealer HRT Financial LP it trades for its own account and makes markets in US equities, options and futures, and it also handles part of the customer order flow of the retail broker Robinhood.Open the full entry, Two Sigma and Ribbit CapitalRibbit CapitalRibbit Capital is a venture-capital firm founded in 2012 by Meyer “Micky” Malka and headquartered in Palo Alto, California. It began with financial-technology investing and has expanded into AI, commerce and related infrastructure. Its investments include Coinbase, Robinhood and Nubank.Open the full entry; angel investors included Andrej KarpathyAndrej KarpathyAndrej Karpathy is an AI researcher and educator, one of the founding members of OpenAI, who served as Tesla’s Director of AI and led the Autopilot computer vision team from 2017 to 2022, founded the AI education company Eureka Labs in 2024, and joined Anthropic in 2026 to work on pre-training research; at Stanford he designed and taught the university’s first deep learning course, CS231n, and he coined the term “vibe coding.”Open the full entry, Geoffrey HintonGeoffrey HintonMachine learning researcher.Open the full entry, Fei-Fei LiFei-Fei LiFei-Fei Li is an American computer scientist, a professor of computer science at Stanford University and founding co-director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, and the co-founder and CEO of the spatial intelligence company World Labs. She led the creation of ImageNet and has served as a vice president at Google and chief scientist of Google Cloud, as well as an independent director of Twitter. Since 2026, she has served as senior advisor on artificial intelligence to Stanford’s president and co-chair of the HAI advisory council.Open the full entry, Arthur MenschArthur MenschArthur Mensch is a machine learning researcher and the co-founder and chief executive officer of Mistral AI; he graduated from École Polytechnique and Télécom Paris and holds a PhD from Université Paris-Saclay. He did postdoctoral research at École Normale Supérieure and then joined DeepMind, where he worked on language model research including Chinchilla. In 2023, he co-founded Mistral AI with Guillaume Lample and Timothée Lacroix, and he is responsible for the company’s strategy, product, and sales.Open the full entry and Scott WuScott WuScott Wu is an entrepreneur with a background in competitive programming and the co-founder and CEO of Cognition, the artificial intelligence software engineering company that developed the AI coding agent Devin.Open the full entry, and Stanley DruckenmillerStanley DruckenmillerStanley Druckenmiller is an American investor and philanthropist. He founded the hedge fund Duquesne Capital Management in 1981 and ran it until 2010, managed George Soros’s Quantum Fund from 1988 to 2000, and now leads the Duquesne Family Office, which manages his own capital.Open the full entry and Peter Thiel were also on the cap table. Primary’s post calls the December 2025 round the Series B.⁠[9][12]

On June 30, 2026, Etched issued a press release, datelined San Jose, California, announcing that it had come out of stealth with a working chip, more than $1 billion in signed customer contracts and $800 million raised in total. The release quotes him: “Our approach from the beginning has been to build for gigawatt-scale,” and “Production is the product.” He added that the companies that matter will be those that can translate technology into systems that can be manufactured, deployed and operated at massive scale, and said, “We’re as focused on operations as we are on frontier research.” The Next Web’s article of the same day also carries the first two remarks and paraphrases his point about manufacturing, deploying and running at scale.⁠[14][15]

In the release, Ken Fox, founder and partner at Stripes, said, “Gavin and Rob have resourced an incredible team around the ambition,” including leaders from NVIDIANVIDIANVIDIA is an American semiconductor and computing technology company that provides graphics processing units, artificial intelligence infrastructure, networking interconnects, and computing software, and is listed on Nasdaq under the ticker NVDA.Open the full entry, GoogleGoogleGoogle is an American technology company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and incorporated in 1998. It became an Alphabet subsidiary in 2015. Its businesses include internet search, advertising, software platforms, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry’s TPU program and Broadcom. TechCrunch that day called him Etched’s president (“president Robert Wachen”) and wrote that, although the press release described the company as “coming out of stealth,” he and Gavin Uberti had been talking to TechCrunch about their chip plans since 2024.⁠[14][9]

TechCrunch wrote on July 23, 2026 that Etched had closed a $300 million Series C at a $10.3 billion valuation, led by Sequoia CapitalSequoia CapitalSequoia Capital is a venture capital firm founded by Don Valentine in 1972, investing from the seed stage through the growth stage. Its historical investments include Apple, Cisco, Google, YouTube, Airbnb, and Stripe; in 2021 it introduced the Sequoia Capital Fund structure, which can continue to hold public securities, and in 2023 its regional businesses became independent brands and partnerships.Open the full entry with Andreessen HorowitzAndreessen HorowitzAndreessen Horowitz (a16z) is a venture capital firm founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. It invests from the seed stage through the growth stage and provides operational support to its portfolio companies.Open the full entry, SK hynixSK hynixSK hynix is a South Korean memory semiconductor company headquartered in Icheon, Gyeonggi Province, that makes DRAM, high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and NAND flash; its shares trade on the Korea Exchange. It began in 1983 as Hyundai Electronics, was later renamed Hynix Semiconductor and joined SK Group in 2012. In the third quarter of 2026 its quarterly revenue exceeded 100 trillion won for the first time.Open the full entry, Jane Street and Diffusion Capital; the article calls him co-founder and chief operating officer (COO), names him as the source of the funding news, and states that the valuation had doubled in about seven months, that the company calls it the highest valuation ever for a Sequoia-led Series C, and that other backers include Peter Thiel, Andrej Karpathy, Dylan FieldDylan FieldDylan Field is the co-founder and CEO of Figma and an angel investor. He studied computer science and mathematics at Brown University, explored browser-based design tools with Evan Wallace, and founded Figma in 2012 with support from the Thiel Fellowship. His personal history also includes collecting digital art and investing in companies such as Mercury and Socket.Open the full entry and Amjad MasadAmjad MasadAmjad Masad is a Jordanian-American software engineer, entrepreneur, and angel investor, and the co-founder and chief executive officer of Replit. He worked on developer tools at Codecademy and Facebook, founded the company Replit in 2016, and led its development from a browser-based programming environment into a platform for creating AI applications.Open the full entry. Primary wrote in a post the same day that in under four years Gavin Uberti, Robert Wachen and the team had assembled hundreds of engineers.⁠[11][16]

He explained in the article that Etched’s systems can run any AI model, including Mixture of Experts models such as DeepSeekDeepSeekDeepSeek is a Chinese AI company developing large language models and providing generative AI services through websites, applications and APIs.Open the full entry and Qwen and the non-transformer state-space model Mamba. He said, “Inference is built in two stages,” namely “prefill and decode”; the company built a chip for the prefill stage whose speed, he said, comes from “by running at a much lower voltage than any other AI chip. We call this low-voltage inference,” and for the decode stage a new memory and “interconnect technology that we call cluster-scale memory,” of which he said, “It allows many chips to connect together and use a shared memory pool at a very, very fast, low latency.”⁠[11]

The article states that only investors and early customers had then used the systems and that Etched had won over its investors through private demos at its office. He named Andrej Karpathy, Noam BrownNoam BrownNoam Brown is a research scientist at OpenAI who works on reasoning, reinforcement learning, self-play, and multi-agent AI. The poker programs Libratus and Pluribus, which he developed with his advisor Tuomas Sandholm, defeated top professional players; at Meta he helped develop CICERO, an AI for the game Diplomacy; and at OpenAI he was a foundational contributor to reasoning models such as o1.Open the full entry and Geoffrey Hinton as well as all the investors in the round, saying, “these are all people who actually tried the hardware and are very excited about it”; he referred to Andrej Karpathy as “from AnthropicAnthropicAnthropic is an artificial intelligence research and product company founded in 2021 that develops the Claude models, assistant, and tools such as Claude Code, and operates as a public benefit corporation. Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei are its co-founders, and its research covers model safety, interpretability, and steerability.Open the full entry” and to Noam Brown as “from OpenAIOpenAIOpenAI is an artificial intelligence research and product organization founded in 2015 that develops the GPT model series, ChatGPT, Codex and a developer API, and conducts research on image, speech, video and intelligent agents. After its 2025 restructuring, the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation continues to control the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC. Its growth has involved large-scale fundraising and compute partnerships, and has also been accompanied by controversies over governance, copyright, privacy and AI safety.Open the full entry.”⁠[11]

Of the journey he said, “We had no idea how hard it was going to be,” and “I think we still have to be humbled by what it will take to actually get to scale.” The article states that 400 people worked in Etched’s office, which also housed a 2-megawatt data center, and that the company had opened an 80,000-square-foot, 10-megawatt facility in Milpitas, near its main office in San Jose; he said, “We’re running tokens in our lab today, working with some of the largest AI companies in the world.” The article notes that he now has a blanket and a mattress, and he joked, “and a pillow even. Multiple pillows.” He said, “It’s come a long way. It’s a very, very different world,” and “But I think, when you really think something’s possible, and you just work at it for a long time, you can do it.”⁠[11]

The article’s lead image is a photograph of him alone, captioned “Etched co-founder COO Robert Wachen” and credited to Etched; the caption of a second photograph states that it shows him (seated, middle) and Gavin Uberti with Sequoia Capital partners Abhishek Malani (spelled Abishek Malani in the caption) and Sonya HuangSonya HuangSonya Huang is a venture capitalist and a partner on Sequoia Capital’s growth team who has co-authored several Sequoia essays on generative artificial intelligence with Pat Grady.Open the full entry. Sequoia Capital’s founder page states that Sequoia partnered with Etched in 2026, with Sonya Huang and Abhishek Malani as the partners.⁠[11][17]

On August 18, 2026, Etched announced that it had raised another $700 million at a $21 billion valuation in a round led by Jane Street, which had tested and bought its hardware; TechCrunch writes that the valuation had risen by nearly $11 billion in a month and that the other investors include Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Peter Thiel, Tiger Global, Bain Capital Ventures, Neo, Stripes, Primary, Positive Sum, Diffusion, Argo and Blackstone. SiliconANGLE writes that Jane Street was Etched’s first customer and had installed an Etched-powered rack in its data center the previous month.⁠[18][10]

In this article TechCrunch again calls him co-founder and chief operating officer and uses the photograph of him alone as its lead image. He said that investors were excited because Etched had designed from scratch two new components that speed up inference. The article states that Etched still faced an early perception that it hard-codes one model into each chip, which had been its original plan but no longer applies, and that its systems can run any frontier model.⁠[18]

VnExpress International wrote on September 1, 2026 that Gavin Uberti, Robert Wachen and Christopher Zhu were all 24 and that Etched had more than 400 employees and had booked more than $1 billion in orders. The article quotes him: “We may be the only AI chip that was built by a startup that was successful on the first try.”⁠[3]

As of November 2026, the team section of Etched’s official homepage lists him as “Co-Founder & President,” with the biography “Harvard Thiel Fellow. Co-founded Prod ($100B+ cohort valuation) and Mentor Labs (acq. by Crimson Education).”⁠[19]

Sequoia Capital’s founder page likewise presents him (as Rob Wachen) as co-founder and president of Etched, which it says builds frontier inference clusters designed to run the world’s most advanced AI models faster and more efficiently.⁠[17]

The speaker pages of both the 2025 and 2026 editions of RAISE Summit list him as “Co-Founder & President” of Etched; the biography describes Etched as “a startup building AI chips that are more than 10x faster than GPUs” and him as a Thiel Fellow and a Harvard dropout.⁠[20][5]

The page of an event titled “Etched @ MIT” on the event platform Luma (marked as a past event, with no date shown) states that Prod was hosting the Etched team back at MIT, in room 3-133 at 33 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, Massachusetts, presented by Etched; he is listed as a host together with James Halderman, Carter Wilcox and Vennela Jonnala. The page states: “Since dropping out 3 years ago, Gavin, Chris, and Robert have built one of the most impressive startups in the AI hardware” space. Besides him, the speakers listed are Christopher Zhu (as Chris Zhu), Carter Wilcox, head of special projects and previously chief of staff to Noam ShazeerNoam ShazeerNoam Shazeer is an artificial intelligence researcher and software engineer and one of the authors of “Attention Is All You Need,” the 2017 paper that introduced the Transformer architecture. He worked at Google from 2000 to 2021, co-founded Character.AI with Daniel De Freitas in 2021 and served as its CEO, returned to Google in 2024 as a co-lead of Gemini, and announced in June 2026 that he would join OpenAI.Open the full entry, Ryan Xiao of Etched’s ASIC team (MIT ’25) and Quinn McIntyre, then president of Prod; his biography reads “Harvard Thiel Fellow. Co-Founder and President of Etched, Co-Founder of Prod (50B+ cohort valuation).”⁠[6]

Brian Schechter, a partner at Primary, writes in the post announcing the Series A investment that Gavin Uberti’s co-founders Robert Wachen and Christopher Zhu (Chris Zhu in the post) are “both equally remarkable in their own rights.” In his June 2026 post he wrote, “Notably, Rob was emerging as a generational leader,” describing him as able to see several steps ahead across technical, commercial and cultural challenges, to identify problems, make plans, rally talent and push through setbacks, and as a complement to Gavin Uberti’s deep technical focus.⁠[13][12]

Vin Sachidananda, a partner at Radical VenturesRadical VenturesRadical Ventures is an artificial intelligence-focused venture capital firm founded by Jordan Jacobs and Tomi Poutanen shortly after the 2017 launch of the Vector Institute in Toronto. It invests from incubation and seed through growth and pre-IPO stages, and its portfolio includes companies such as Cohere, Waabi, and World Labs. In 2026, it co-led the investment in Discovery Loop, founded by Jeff Dean and others, and completed the first close of its late-stage Radical Breakouts Fund.Open the full entry, writes in a post titled “The Future of AI Inference” that co-founders Gavin Uberti and Robert Wachen scaled the Etched team from 20 to more than 400 engineers in under three years, drawing veterans from NVIDIA, Google, Broadcom and SK hynix.⁠[21]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertwachen/ (opens in a new window).⁠[5]

Etched: Official website: https://www.etched.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[19]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[22]