Sigil Wen

At 17, Wen flew from Toronto to San Francisco with few connections and for a time slept at the WeWorkWeWorkWeWork is a flexible workspace company founded in New York in 2010 by Adam Neumann and Miguel McKelvey. It provides private offices, coworking space, meeting rooms and enterprise workplace services. After withdrawing its IPO plan in 2019, it went public through a BowX merger in 2021, entered Chapter 11 in 2023 and emerged from restructuring in June 2024, continuing as a private company.Open the full entry at 44 Montgomery; by his own account, he opted out of the M&T program at the University of PennsylvaniaUniversity of PennsylvaniaThe University of Pennsylvania, commonly called Penn, is a private research university and Ivy League member in Philadelphia. It traces its origins to a 1740 charity-school project; Benjamin Franklin proposed his academy in 1749, classes began in 1751, and a 1791 merger established the institution under its present name. Penn has 12 schools, with undergraduate education concentrated in arts and sciences, engineering, nursing and Wharton. Enrollment totaled 29,384 in fall 2025, and the fiscal 2025 endowment was $24.81 billion. As of October 2026, J. Larry Jameson was president, with his term scheduled to end on June 30, 2027.Open the full entry to work on AI instead. On August 27, 2021, David HolzDavid HolzDavid Holz is an American entrepreneur, the founder and CEO of the AI image generation service Midjourney, who earlier co-founded the hand-tracking hardware company Leap Motion; his remarks on training data sources, content moderation, and medical hardware have repeatedly drawn controversy.Open the full entry showed him the first version of the Midjourney image-generation model he had trained. That year, Naval RavikantNaval RavikantNaval Ravikant is an entrepreneur and angel investor and a co-founder of AngelList. Early on he co-founded the review site Epinions; he and Babak Nivi later grew AngelList out of the startup-fundraising blog Venture Hacks, and he co-founded the cryptocurrency hedge fund MetaStable Capital and Spearhead, which backs founders to make angel investments. His views on startups and life were compiled into the book The Almanack of Naval Ravikant.Open the full entry brought him to an event hosted by Chris DixonChris DixonChris Dixon is a programmer, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist, and the founder and managing partner of a16z crypto. He co-founded SiteAdvisor and Hunch, helped create Founder Collective, and later joined Andreessen Horowitz, investing in technology companies such as Coinbase. He is also the author of Read Write Own and has long written about blockchains, network ownership, the open internet, and the combination of AI and crypto.Open the full entry, where he came to know Andreessen Horowitz.⁠[1][2][1][1][2]

He then lived for 11 months in a hacker house with people including 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, working alongside researchers and engineers who helped create DALL·E, Whisper, GPT-3, and Stable Diffusion, and he also coded alongside people such as Perplexity founder Aravind Srinivas and OpenAI researcher 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. When Anthropic co-founder Ben MannBen MannBen Mann (Benjamin Mann) is a co-founder of the AI company Anthropic. He previously worked at OpenAI on infrastructure, efficiency, and safety for GPT-3 and is one of the authors of the GPT-3 paper; as of 2026 he works on Anthropic’s Labs team, which incubates experimental products.Open the full entry came to the hacker house to code, he invited Wen to test a Slack bot as one of its first few users; it became Claude, which launched publicly in 2023.⁠[1][2][3][1][2]

Wen is from Toronto, Canada, and is a self-taught engineer who did not go to college. From August 2022, he was an adviser to the app Airchat; in February 2023, he became its founding engineer, and from April 2023 to August 2024, he was a senior AI engineer, responsible for the invite growth loop and AI features such as speech-to-text and translation, and he helped recruit the engineering team. Airchat was later acquired.⁠[4][1][5]

In November 2022, at 19, he became the youngest member of the angel investing program Spearhead, learning to invest from Naval Ravikant and Jeff Fagnan, and made early investments in companies including Etched and Kerna Labs.⁠[5][1]

In November 2024, Wen founded Extraordinary (extraordinary.com) in San Francisco, which helps founders, engineers, researchers, and creators prepare applications for U.S. visas such as the O-1 and EB-1A. He served as CEO until February 2026, after which the company’s operations lead took over as CEO and he became executive chairman. The company states that it is not a law firm.⁠[5][6][1]

On May 22, 2025, the Thiel Foundation announced the 15 members of its 2025 class of Thiel Fellows, with Wen selected for his Extraordinary project. Each fellow in the class receives $200,000 over two years.⁠[4]

On February 18, 2026, Wen released the autonomous AI agent Automaton under the Conway Research name, saying it could improve and replicate itself and make payments in USDC through a crypto wallet; he also introduced the term “Web 4.0.” The related post drew nearly 6 million views, and the project gained more than 1,000 GitHub stars within 24 hours of release.⁠[7][8]

The experiment stirred controversy in the crypto community: a community-launched CONWAY token briefly reached a market capitalization of about $11 million before falling sharply; Vitalik Buterin publicly criticized the approach of lengthening the feedback loop between humans and AI, and some experts said “Web 4.0” was merely a marketing term.⁠[7][8]

Since March 2026, Wen has been the founder and CEO of Conway Research. Conway Research describes itself as a frontier AI and cryptography lab focused on models that run quickly on devices; its first product is the AI product Underdog.⁠[5][1][9]

Wen launched Underdog, Conway Research’s first product, on X, describing it as a private personal AI that runs on devices users already own. The same day, Andreessen Horowitz published a post by Chris Dixon, Gabriel VasquezGabriel VasquezGabriel Vasquez is an investment partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he focuses on AI application investments and spearheads the firm’s global investment strategy; he is based in New York. Before joining a16z, he was part of the pricing strategy team at Oscar Health and a technology investment banking analyst at J.P. Morgan, and he graduated from the University of Texas at Austin.Open the full entry, and Elizabeth HarkavyElizabeth HarkavyElizabeth Harkavy (commonly known as Liz Harkavy) is a partner on the investment team of a16z crypto, part of Andreessen Horowitz, focusing on “web 2.5,” picks and shovels, and decentralized infrastructure. A graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she was a founding engineer at Corsali (later renamed Vana) before joining a16z.Open the full entry announcing that it was leading Conway Research’s first funding round; a16z had backed Wen before and said Underdog could help people make decisions and reclaim their time on their own devices, even offline.⁠[10][2][2][2][2]

The round was completed in April 2026. Other institutional backers were 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, Hummingbird VenturesHummingbird VenturesHummingbird Ventures is a venture capital firm founded by Barend Van den Brande and based in London and Antwerp, Belgium, that invests in “outlier” founders without limiting itself to particular sectors or regions; its early investments include Peak Games, Kraken, Deliveroo, BillionToOne, and Lovable.Open the full entry, Anthology (the partnership fund between Anthropic and Menlo Ventures), SV AngelSV AngelSV Angel is a San Francisco venture capital firm cofounded in 2009 by angel investor Ron Conway and former Google executive David Lee. It typically writes small follow-on checks in seed rounds and has invested in companies such as Airbnb, Pinterest, and Dropbox; in 2018 it said it would no longer raise new funds from outside investors, and from 2022 it set up growth funds.Open the full entry, and Breakneck, and the 18 angel investors included Patrick CollisonPatrick CollisonPatrick Collison is an entrepreneur who grew up in Ireland. In 2010 he cofounded the payments and financial infrastructure company Stripe with his brother John Collison and serves as its chief executive; he is also a cofounder of the biomedical research organization Arc Institute and has been a director of Meta since 2025.Open the full entry, Naval Ravikant, Guillermo Rauch, Noam Brown, Thomas WolfThomas WolfThomas Wolf is a co-founder and the chief science officer of Hugging Face who has helped drive open-source tools such as Transformers, the BigScience open research collaboration, and robotics projects. He worked in physics research and patent law before turning to machine learning, and his public work focuses on lowering the barriers to using AI models, data, and development tools.Open the full entry, and Charles SonghurstCharles SonghurstCharles Songhurst (commonly known as Charlie Songhurst) is a technology investor and former general manager of global corporate strategy at Microsoft who has invested in startups since 2013, backing more than 500 startups worldwide; he has been an independent director of Meta since December 2024.Open the full entry.⁠[11][10][3][11][11]

a16z traced Underdog to Wen’s own experience: while he was living alongside Karpathy, a bug in a popular email app exposed his private emails to other users; he had also gotten GPT-2 running on his Apple Watch and later helped bring Whisper to the iPhone at Airchat.⁠[2][2][2]

Personal website: https://sigilwen.ca/ (opens in a new window).⁠[1]

Extraordinary: Official website: https://extraordinary.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[6]

X: Public account: https://x.com/0xSigil (opens in a new window).⁠[9]

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/sigil/ (opens in a new window).⁠[5]

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: Public channel: https://www.youtube.com/@SigilWen (opens in a new window).⁠[12]