Great ideas rarely
emerge from isolation
Median is a community of exceptional technologists building at the frontier. Our members are scientists, engineers, and founders working on what's next. We support them with the peers, structure, and space to do the best work of their lives.
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Our Members
A Modern Day Xerox PARC
1,000+ technologists have been part of Median. They come from every corner of technology and science: AI researchers, repeat founders, deep-tech engineers, creative technologists, and domain experts. Here are some of their stories.
First Time Founders
Scott Wu
Scott Wu
Three-time IOI gold medalist who first joined Median in 2017, Scott co-founded Lunchclub out of the community. He's now the co-founder and CEO of Cognition, the lab that built Devin, the first AI software engineer, and one of the fastest-scaling AI companies today.
Tuhin Srivastava
Tuhin Srivastava
After a stint as a data scientist at Gumroad, Tuhin joined Median and explored widely before founding Baseten, the ML model inference and deployment platform now used to ship AI products at production scale. Baseten is now a unicorn.
Amit Jain
Amit Jain
After working on computer vision technology at Apple, Amit joined Median and co-founded Luma AI, the generative AI lab building multimodal world models for video and 3D. Luma has become one of the breakout companies in generative media.
Anurag Goel
Anurag Goel
The eighth employee and Head of Risk at Stripe, Anurag joined Median and founded Render, a modern cloud platform that lets developers build, deploy, and scale applications without managing infrastructure, now used by hundreds of thousands of developers.
Trisha Kothari
Trisha Kothari
An early engineer and PM at Affirm, Trisha joined Median and co-founded Unit21, the API and dashboard layer that helps banks and fintechs detect money laundering, fraud, and other complex financial risks.
Fangchang Ma
Fangchang Ma
After spending years at Apple shipping lidar-based depth-prediction algorithms, Fangchang came to Median and is now building Nuance Labs, the first human foundation model that understands and expresses emotion in real time across speech, facial expression, and body language.
Repeat Founders
Waseem Daher
Waseem Daher
MIT-trained engineer and 3-time founder, Waseem co-founded Ksplice (acquired by Oracle) and Zulip (acquired by Dropbox) with the same group of MIT friends before joining Median. He founded Pilot, the modern finance team that handles bookkeeping, tax, and CFO services for growing companies.
Tanay Kothari
Tanay Kothari
Also an IOI medalist, Tanay first founded and built FeatherX, an e-commerce personalization platform acquired in 2020. He joined Median and went on to co-found Wispr AI, a neurotechnology company building a faster, more natural interface between people and their devices.
James Cadwallader
James Cadwallader
A repeat founder who'd built and exited his last consumer company, James came to Median in search of a technical co-founder. He met Dylan Babbs at Median and they co-founded Profound, the analytics and influence platform helping the world's biggest brands stay visible across AI search.
Brandon Hill
Brandon Hill
A Stanford grad and former student body VP who worked at the White House before founding Greo, a platform for healthier dialogue on social issues, Brandon joined Median and co-founded Vori, the modern AI-powered operating system for the grocery industry.
Feross Aboukhadijeh
Feross Aboukhadijeh
As a prolific open-source maintainer, serial entrepreneur, and longtime Stanford CS lecturer, Feross joined Median and founded Socket, the cybersecurity platform that defends companies against open-source supply-chain attacks.
Caroline Ingeborn
Caroline Ingeborn
After co-founding and running Toca Boca, the children's-app studio she scaled past $50M in revenue, Caroline joined Median to start a second company, Leap, focused on combatting the loneliness epidemic through social products. After Leap wound down, she became COO of another Median company, Luma AI.
Technical Researchers
Logan Graham
Logan Graham
After spending time as an Advisor to the UK Prime Minister's Office, Logan joined Median to explore the open question of AGI governance. He's now Head of the Frontier Red Team at Anthropic, where he leads the team responsible for stress-testing frontier models against catastrophic risks.
Tom McGrath
Tom McGrath
After co-founding the interpretability team at DeepMind in London before moving stateside for Median, Tom co-founded Goodfire as Chief Scientist. He's building mechanistic-interpretability tools so frontier-AI teams can understand and shape what their own models are actually doing. Goodfire is now a unicorn.
Tom Brown
Tom Brown
A serial entrepreneur and Grouper co-founder, Tom joined Median to explore ideas for a new consumer startup. A peer ML learning group inside the community pulled him in a different direction. He left to join Google Brain, then OpenAI, where he led the engineering team for GPT-3, and has since co-founded Anthropic.
Alexandar Perez
Alexandar Perez
MD with a CS PhD, Alex was the lead author on a landmark paper showing that CRISPR can be used to target and kill cancer cells in a cancer-specific way. He founded Silico Therapeutics out of Median to translate that research into therapeutic and analytics products for the CRISPR ecosystem, and now continues that mission as a researcher at UCSF.
Matthias Kling
Matthias Kling
After two decades as a Stanford physics professor advancing ultrafast electronics, nanophotonics, quantum physics, and simultaneously co-founding Aireo, Matthias joined Median to start Matter42, manufacturing 2D materials for the semiconductor industry.
Abhinav Shrivastava
Abhinav Shrivastava
A robotics PhD from Carnegie Mellon and computer-vision professor at the University of Maryland, Abhinav joined Median and is now co-founder and CEO of Vamana, building high-performance data infrastructure that makes AI model training and inference dramatically faster and cheaper.
Deep Tech Builders
Shreepoorna Rao
Shreepoorna Rao
Building drones since 8th grade, Shree led the IIT Madras Aeromodeling Club and sold an early DeFi project before joining Median. He's now the founder and CEO of Arctus Aerospace, building high-altitude unmanned airplanes for earth observation, geospatial data, and defense.
Bill Chang
Bill Chang
Previously, Bill was Chief System Engineer on Tesla's Dojo supercomputer. At Median he co-founded Density, building purpose-built compute for AI: a "datacenter in a box" that integrates compute, networking, and power.
JX (Jingxiang) Mo
JX (Jingxiang) Mo
As a core tech lead at K-Scale Labs, JX ran early product and hiring, before leaving to start Gradient Robotics at Median. Gradient is building American humanoid robots, with an early wedge in data-center and factory automation.
Wei Ding
Wei Ding
Robotics decision-making and software architect and Apple Special Projects Group alum, Wei joined Median and is building Noble Machines, developing general-purpose humanoid robots designed to operate in dangerous industrial environments.
Helena de Puig
Helena de Puig
A mechanical engineer turned synthetic biologist (MIT PhD, Harvard postdoc), Helena came to Median and co-founded Externa, where she's working to expand the genetic code, engineering proteins with entirely new building blocks to give them capabilities nature never evolved.
Stephen Fairclough
Stephen Fairclough
A UC Berkeley PhD and former professor turned genomics leader, Stephen spent seven years at Guardant Health and most recently led technical work at cancer-diagnostics company Personalis. He joined Median and is exploring his next company at the intersection of AI and biology.
Creative Technologists
Zain Shah
Zain Shah
Engineer, AI researcher, & designer, Zain came to Median and built Dig, an AI app that generates short explainer videos on demand, a never-ending rabbit hole of curiosity-satisfying content, tuned to whatever you want to learn next. He's currently working on new ways to visualize digital content.
Jonathan Arena
Jonathan Arena
A 15-year design veteran who led design at Facebook, Cruise, and Patreon (and co-founded Harvard's design conference), Jonathan joined Median and founded New Generation, which instantly turns a brand's website into an AI storefront that adapts intelligently to every customer.
Priyaa Kalyanaraman
Priyaa Kalyanaraman
Previously, Priyaa built design-AI products at Microsoft, Snap, and Waymo. She came to Median to explore AI agents for video creation, and is now the founder of Lica, building the substrate that will let AI become a creative partner to designers.
Jeff Shaw
Jeff Shaw
After spending years in 3D and infrastructure at Cruise and Snowflake, Jeff is building Weave Technologies, reimagining online apparel shopping by bringing 3D simulation to the way people discover and try on clothes.
Michael (Ridd) Riddering
Michael (Ridd) Riddering
Founding designer at Maven and the creator of Dive Club and Figma Academy, where thousands of designers have sharpened their craft, Ridd joined Median and co-founded InFlight, the first AI-native feedback platform for designers.
Wendi Yan
Wendi Yan
An MIT graduate, artist, writer, and inaugural Steve Jobs Archive Fellow, Wendi joined Median and is building Pond, a spatial canvas for deep creative work that lets people gather sources, explore ideas, and share their webs of curiosity.
Domain Experts
Kushal Chakrabarti
Kushal Chakrabarti
Former Chief Research & Data Officer at Opendoor with a deep applied-AI research background, Kushal helps lead the Median frontier research group, running paper-readings, demo sessions, speaker sessions, and field trips to places like Anthropic and PI.
Adam Judelson
Adam Judelson
Former CIA analyst and the former Head of Product at Palantir, at Median Adam founded Common Sense, building AI teammates that handle the critical back office of municipal governments including public records, permitting, and agenda management, aiming for 100x efficiency gains for cities.
Ashton Eaton
Ashton Eaton
Decathlete who won Olympic gold for Team USA at both London 2012 and Rio 2016, Ashton joined Median's Member Residency in 2018 and is now an Innovation Engineer at Nike, working on the next generation of athletic performance technology.
Jaclyn Nelson
Jaclyn Nelson
After seven years at Alphabet in operational roles, including launching Google Helpouts, Jaclyn co-founded Tribe AI, the AI services and software firm helping enterprises adopt AI.
Thariq Shihipar
Thariq Shihipar
A serial hacker with a master's from the MIT Media Lab, Thariq founded the gaming platform Multiverse, to let anyone create, play, and share tabletop RPGs online. He came to Median to explore AI-native productivity tools and is now a member of technical staff at Anthropic.
Jason Liu
Jason Liu
A machine learning engineer who built large-scale recommendation systems at Meta and Stitch Fix, Jason came to Median and created an open-source library for getting structured outputs from LLMs. He's become one of the most sought-after teachers and advisors on RAG and applied AI, and is now working on the technical staff at OpenAI.
Life at Median
Builder Culture
Talent Density
Social Scaffolding
About Member Residency
-1 to 0 isn't a side project. It's a full time endeavor. Member residents spend 6 months at Median ideating, validating new areas, finding collaborators, and building conviction in what they want to work on. Most are pursuing founding endeavors, but 30% are doing independent research or building outside the startup track entirely. We've had high-agency individuals of all kinds, from academic researchers to Olympians, join Median to work alongside one another on new projects. Like any hard thing, it's better done together.
Programming
Day to day programming includes peer accountability groups, learning forums, and workshops on the latest technological frontiers. We also facilitate roundtables and conversations with industry heavyweights such as Satya Nadella, Vinod Khosla, Fei-Fei Li, and more. The greatest value of the member residency is the community of talented peers it embeds you in. Figuring out where to dedicate the next stage of your life is best done in the most talent-dense environment possible. Our primary product is talent curation.
Residency vs. Fellowship
Member Residency and the Founder Fellowship are both paths to joining Median. The Founder Fellowship supports technologists who know they want to start a company and are ready for funding to help. Member Residency is open to technologists who may or may not know they want to start a company and are not yet ready for funding. If you're planning to fundraise soon, we may instead ask you to apply for our Founder Fellowship.
Next Steps
We accept new members on a rolling basis and will start processing your application whenever you apply. We go through every application and you'll generally hear from us within 1-3 weeks. If we're moving forward, we'll invite you to an interview to learn more about you.