YC rejected Whop in fall 2021 batch, but there was a better program that accepted Whop and that was Z Fellows.
Cory was the first check in Whop, has been by our side through it all, and joined our board when it was formed.
ZF >
looking through my camera roll and realized I have hundreds of photos from the last 5 years with the Whop crew.
different offices, apartments turned offices, and random cities where makeshift offices were found.
funny thing is y'alls Z Fellows acceptance email went to spam. thankfully y’all happened to checked spam 😂. now some Z Fellows founders are building businesses on Whop.
thinking back to our first meeting and everything it took to get here… I don’t think I tell you guys enough how proud I am of you.
best part of all of this is you guys became some of my closest friends.
congrats to the whole team on the raise. love you guys!
Sonith retweeted
We’re hiring for 3 of the most fun jobs I can imagine @crosbylegal:
1. Head of Brand: craft the look and feel of a brand new type of company. Neither software, nor services but a third type of company blending the two. You think all day every day about one of our most enduring assets.
Sonith retweeted
We are growing faster than ever 📈
A year ago we started expanding outside of Texas. Today @basepowerco is in three states, with several more coming soon. Every new market brings a new utility, new permitting rules, and new homeowners to win.
Sonith retweeted
huge milestone!!
thank u Marc for the original intro to Ali. you were totally right. Ali was sooo hungry when we first met. and is even hungrier today.
i'll always remember our first few calls. we first met several years ago in June...and then a few months later he was apart an early (fwiw we are still early) Z Fellows cohort. the business has had its ups and downs but in those down moments... Ali always finds a way.
Ali wrote this about himself to me four years ago when describing himself and the business:
"Hi everyone, I'm Ali! I was born in Iran, moved to the
U.S when I was 10 years old, and sucked at school (didn't even graduate middle school). I decided to turn things around Freshman year of high school: I got straight As, started my 1st company, and got into UC Berkeley for CS. Ever since, I've had two small acquisitions (cashbooksnow & peerlinc), and graduated Berkeley a year early to focus on my company: micro1. Micro1 is a 40 person talent as a service company. We help companies hire the best remote developers easily. We've recently raised a pre-seed round and I'm super excited to have it grow to be my 1st unicorn"
proud to be Ali's first believer and investor in Micro1 and work with him. excited for what's to come!!
about 3 years ago, micro1 lost 60% of its revenue overnight and almost went bankrupt.
today, i'm proud to share we've surpassed $1B annual run rate while remaining historically profitable.
it’s been a special journey. we’re grateful for every struggle, moment, and person who has been part of it.
we've taken a very untraditional path to get here. our core team is only ~180 people, spanning 14+ countries, and fully remote.
many of our decisions sacrifice hundreds of millions of revenue and slow us down short term. but we believe they compound into advantages that are impossible to replicate long term.
the long term is now.
these are the 8 principles that made micro1 a leader in the data industry and will soon make us number one:
1.) human 1st AI: treat the tens of thousands of experts helping train models with absolute best-in-class care. our goal is to make AI training one of the largest, highest paying, and most enjoyable job sectors in the world.
2.) U.S. first: we refuse to work with adversarial nations, or export data that improves models against the interests of Americans.
3.) long-term research over short-term ARR: invest in deep research, products, and infrastructure for years from now, not just the next customer pipeline.
4.) proper incentives for intensely hard work: no arbitrary requirements like 996. inspire people to work extremely hard with outlier incentive structures instead of forcing weekend work. we’ve maintained close to 100% core team retention as a result.
5.) stay lean and global: we’ve reached $1B run rate with ~180 people, and intend to slow team growth significantly from here. exceptional talent is found around the world, and pedigree is the wrong thing to over-index on.
6.) execution alignment: company to retain a streamlined board so we can optimize for the next several decades, remain light-weight and dynamic, and take bold & calculated risks.
7.) abundant intelligence improvement: invest in building data generation models to make high-quality datasets and RL environments dramatically less expensive and more abundant.
8.) scale data on realism and horizon: realism brings the complexity of the real world into training models, while horizon extends how long models can work and how much complexity they can handle. both have enormous room to scale, and we’re pushing the limits of both.
additionally: after surpassing $500M run rate this summer, we priced our Series B at a $4B valuation, alongside a ~$25M tender to give our early employees liquidity as we build for the long term. the round was led by Dream Ventures, a longtime supporter and one of our earliest investors, alongside Microsoft, Javelin, Flybridge, G Squared, Up Partners, and LG.
we’re also grateful to be backed by incredible industry leaders, including Guodong Zhang (co-founder of xAI), Andy Fang (CTO of DoorDash), Igor Babuschkin (co-founder of xAI), Behnam Neyshabur (founder of Mirendil), Jerry Tworek (ex-VP of Research at OpenAI), and many more.
data is on its way to becoming the largest industry humanity has ever seen, and we're certain this is just the beginning.
best,
Ali
Sonith retweeted
Lunch Means Business!
Our new collab with Chef in Residence Molly Baz
Some are saying the most crave-able thing we've done (especially if you love pickles)
Sonith retweeted
Ep 2 talking about how we engineered Base Core.
xitter.cf/basepowerco/status/210…
Base Power@basepowercoOct 1United States!
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Base Core started with one goal: reliable, affordable power at home. Episode 2 goes inside the engineering and design behind Core, and introduces the people who built it.
Sonith retweeted
this is exactly why we love open-source. great to see new work being built on top of of Argus
We spent the weekend experimenting with Argus and pushed it to SOTA on WGO-Bench.
Our optimized version scores 50.2% semantic F1, up from the 29.8% out-of-the-box score, and well ahead of other leading annotation services.
All of the gains came from how the model sees the video. We gave it denser frames, a second look at each action's boundaries, and a final check on every label.
Thanks to @PantheonInc @calixo888 for open-sourcing Argus.
The full repo is coming soon. For now, you can read our tech report here: midcentury.xyz/blog/optimizi…
Sonith retweeted
i first met zain in july 2025. he was living in the tenderloin in sf paying $35 a night for a room. i remember really liking him and thinking the world would know his name soon...
he did z fellows shortly after (and moved out of the tenderloin). he joined two other experiences we hosted as well that fall. every time we spent more time together....i felt like the world still hadn’t caught up.
my favorite thing in the world is helping people before the world knows their names. a year or so later, zain is still the underdog....but i’m excited for people to see what he’s been working on. keep it up zain!!!
Introducing Core, The Personal Al Computer
The most powerful technology humanity has built should belong to you
Order today: ghost.ai
Sonith retweeted
Argus: an open-source robotics data annotation and quality pipeline.
With new frontier VLMs like GPT-6 Astra, we can generate rich, high-quality annotations for robotics data for both training and dataset analysis. Argus delivers detailed, timestamp-level annotations while catching issues like mislabeled instructions, sped-up recordings, swapped camera streams, and unflagged operator mistakes.
To support better data quality for the robotics community, we’re open-sourcing Argus for anyone to use 🧵
Sonith retweeted
congrats to Alfred, Florian and the entire Listen team!!
honored to have been their first check and first believer back in 2022!
Listen Labs is joining @Salesforce!
A year and a half ago we launched Listen, an AI platform for understanding customers, and it’s been a crazy ride ever since.
Today, we work with some of the largest companies in the world, including Microsoft, Anthropic, and Sweetgreen.
What started as an AI interviewer is now a full platform for understanding customers. Listen finds the right people, interviews them, analyzes what they say, and even simulates how they'll behave.
Listen’s growth quickly accelerated and while we were raising our next round, we met @Benioff.
Marc is a hero of mine. I've taken countless ideas from Behind the Cloud and watched him framemog every AI CEO on the planet. We're honored to get framemogged next.
With Salesforce, we can bring Listen to every company in the world, much faster.
To our customers, our mission remains the same.I stay CEO, @Florian stays CTO and the same team will keep building the product you rely on, now inside Salesforce AI Labs. Thank you for believing in us early.
To our team, families, and everyone who believed in us before there was much to believe in, thank you.
These years have been the most fun years of my life, and it’s still only just the beginning for Listen.
Now back to work. 🚀
Sonith retweeted
Today we're announcing $75M to build Solcoa One, our 500-tonne rare earth metallization plant in Nevada.
At Solcoa, we believe rare earths are the foundation of America's next great industrial era. An era we intend to win on the merits, with superior American technology.
Sonith retweeted
Every single result on this search is a @wander powered unit, either the direct booking site, or the marketplace.
The AI moment for travel is here, and we are powering it.
Sonith retweeted
We (@PantheonInc) have been working on a robotics data quality pipeline that uncovered a series of major problems in public robotics datasets, especially for world modeling.
To improve the quality of data available to open-source robotics, we're publishing annotations for four of the most popular datasets. Some examples of issues, and our report 🧵
Sonith retweeted
We started @column with the insane idea to rebuild every component of the financial system from scratch. Today, I think we've finally completed that build.
We're releasing four new products, so any technology company can build at the frontier of financial services.
Sonith retweeted

Cory Levy@cory14 Aug 2024
United States
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"everything around that you call life was made up by people who were no smarter than you" - Steve Jobs
new z fellows cohort starting soon. interviewing now for it.
zfellows.com




































