
Chief Success Officer @finalroundai @worktrialai
San Francisco, CA
Joined August 2015
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Interviews are broken. resumes mislead.
We helped 100k+ people land jobs & scaled to $10M ARR. now we’re rebuilding hiring from scratch.
meet WorkTrial AI — where companies see the real work before they hire.
A bunch of my founder friends lost their soul to Y Combinator.
They entered it passionate about building a company.
Then came the question of what to build.
And then a YC partner tells them something like this:
"You're ex-Google, you should build a devtool. With your background you'll raise easily."
So then the founder, who originally wanted to build a dating app, gets told to build an AI devtool instead.
Or WORSE, they go build some random ai b2b saas because it's on the "request for startups" list, and a year later it's gone nowhere.
Let's be real lil bro, you're not passionate about building a vector database.
OK, maybe a few nerds genuinely are, and I respect them.
But most of the "AI agent for accounting" founders I meet don't care about accounting at all.
The YC partners have a list of categories that are hot and will get funded for sure, and they just mix and match founders to that list. Founder-market fit turns into a matching game. I've watched founders raise $10M and still have no effing clue what they're building. Most of them quit in a few mons and back to openai.
Most young founders would be much better off building in a space they're excited about, because that excitement and curiosity will keep you going when it starts to get really tough.
Disclaimer: I'm not anti-YC, I actually angel in a lot of YC startups. But if you need someone else to tell you what to build, money doesn't fix that problem.
Building @hellyeah_ai with @Doudoujay and team: @lwqconnie @lololalahaoran @anitawu001 @YChahahahaAI @MuvaniaJaya @Antiaefuj @MarcoFerna60597
Michael Guan retweeted
AI is making bad hiring signals look better.
A polished résumé. A fluent interview. A working demo. All easier to produce now.
The expensive question hasn't changed: can this person own the outcome after they join?
I've been rebuilding how we assess engineers at Hellyeah. My bet: the strongest ICs will increasingly need skills we used to associate with managers. Choosing the right work, giving useful context, reviewing delegated output, and knowing when to intervene.
That includes managing agents. It also includes not wasting another human's afternoon cleaning up their work.
9 companies approaching this problem:
@hackerrank / @rvivek — evaluating how candidates plan, build and review with AI. What predicts performance after the hire?
@CodeSignalCom / @TigranSloyan — AI-assisted skills assessments with interaction transcripts and replay. Which behaviors separate verification from lucky prompting?
@karat / Mohit Bhende — human-led interviews in an AI-enabled development environment. How do reviewers distinguish the engineer's judgment from the model's capability?
@MetaviewAI / @smagos — interview evidence and rubric-based screening. What makes a persuasive account of past work trustworthy?
@BrightHireAI / @BenjaminSesser — captured interview evidence plus AI screening. How do we improve the decision, not just speed up the screen?
@micro1_ai / @aliansarinik — AI interviewing and expert vetting, now within a broader human-data business. How do interview signals hold up when someone starts delivering work?
@mercor / @BrendanFoody — AI interviews and expert matching for work advancing frontier AI. What do actual assignments reveal that interviews miss?
@ashbyhq / @benjaminencz — the recruiting workflow and analytics layer. How do we connect the hiring hypothesis to what happens after someone joins?
@worktrialai / @dralaska_, my cofounder — building talent assessment around real work trials.
These aren't interchangeable products. An AI interviewer is not the same thing as assessing how a person works with AI.
My bar starts with a concrete 90-day outcome and the first hard decision someone must own. Domain knowledge can be learned. Fundamentals still have to survive a challenge.
Can they catch a plausible mistake, adapt when a constraint changes, and leave work another person or fresh agent session can continue?
That's the idea behind hellyeah/assessment, which I'm working on with Bharath, Wilson, and Josh.
Our own assessment has to earn its credibility after the hire too.
Which interview signal have you stopped trusting since candidates started using AI—and what replaced it?
Michael Guan retweeted
NEW FEATURE 🎬🧡
New in Hellyeah: video ad support for Performance Max campaigns.
We’re expanding the creative formats you can work with in PMax—and this release brings video into the mix.
Also shipped: a little polish where your team leaves feedback. Author comments now have improved Markdown styling, making formatted notes easier to scan and follow.
Built with the people who keep shipping: @Doudoujay @dralaska_ @anitawu001 @lololalahaoran @YChahahahaAI @lwqconnie @Antiaefuj @MuvaniaJaya @MarcoFerna60597
Go make some ads. 🎬
Perk for Hellyeah employee
Michael Guan retweeted
We’re hiring like crazy at Hellyeah AI.
Our product helps companies generate millions in revenue with efficient, agent-led paid media campaigns. We're backed by top VCs and growing insanely fast.
Come work with us if you are:
1. A problem-solver who can hack any solution
2. Super curious and always on top of the latest in the GTM space
3. Great at context-switching at scale (ruthless at triaging / prioritization)
4. A great people manager who can apply the same mentality to a fleet of agents
5. Believe that B2B marketing shouldn't be boring
A few roles we're actively looking to fill right now:
- AI Engineer, Learn Engine: Intelligence & Optimization (SF): ordnl.link/3rHb5HT
- AI Engineer, Learn Engine: Platform & Simulation (SF): ordnl.link/WXfNJaa
- Senior Tech Product Manager (SF): ordnl.link/qzMKimO
- Founding AE (SF): ordnl.link/JW9F2At
- Senior BD Manager (SF): ordnl.link/IuRIfeQ
- Senior User Acquisition Manager (SF): ordnl.link/dwm2Qk7
- GTM Associate, Events & Partnerships (SF): ordnl.link/XFqVvxW
- Senior Algorithm Engineer, Quantitative AI Systems (Shanghai): ordnl.link/ztVpAbP
- UI/UX Designer (Shanghai): ordnl.link/dmOmiD3
- Performance Creative Designer (Seoul): ordnl.link/HiN24SW
Check out our careers page for more: hellyeahai.com/careers
If you're cracked at what you do, come build with us!
The team you'd be building with: @dralaska_ @lwqconnie @lololalahaoran @anitawu001 @YChahahahaAI @MuvaniaJaya @Antiaefuj @MarcoFerna60597 @Bharath_uwu @joshualocke100 @WilsonTseng8
I grew up in china and am now building companies in the US.
The environment for entrepreneurship in each nation is radically different.
I find the US has a very high tolerance for founder failure.
In the Bay, people don't care if you've failed multiple startups. If anything, it's like a badge of honor.
I angel in a lot of YC companies, and many of them will fail. When that happens in the US, the founder shuts it down, starts a new entity, and raises from a new group of investors. Investors buy this narrative of "I tried, it didn't work, let's move on."
Chinese culture doesn't tolerate this kind of failure.
In China, the mindset is closer to "I have to succeed."
Founders keep a struggling startup alive far longer than a US founder would. And if they do start a new entity, the previous investors usually get taken care of with equity in the new company, so it's never really a clean restart.
As someone who has seen both sides, I believe the Chinese approach drives a lot more competition and creates a culture of extreme persistence. It means your team doesn't even consider "quitting" as a viable option. They will do whatever it takes.
Today, I'm building Hellyeah AI. We're a US company, and I like building here.
But the team I want to build is the one that doesn't even think of quitting as an option.
The team that doesn't think of quitting: @Doudoujay @hellyeah_ai @lwqconnie @lololalahaoran @anitawu001 @YChahahahaAI @MuvaniaJaya @Antiaefuj @MarcoFerna60597
Michael Guan retweeted
My cofounder and I spent 2 years building Final Round AI and scaled it to 8 figures. Then we decided to start all over again.
In 2024 we built an AI powered interview tool to help millions of people land their dream job.
After launch we saw immediate traction. People loved the product.
But 2 years later, we began to see how we could go in a different direction: we could consolidate all our learning from Final Round to empower people with our GTM secret sauce. So we started building Hellyeah AI.
Don’t get me wrong - Final Round had growth momentum people were super jealous about. We got lots of questions about our secrets because we were getting traction so fast.
But even as we were scaling it, we knew in the back of our minds that we had a consumer product with limited upside.
The market for interview prep is smaller than the opportunity to build digital workers, and Michael Guan and I wanted to build a $B+ company.
So we took our technical foundation and learnings - including all the training data we had from humans - and decided to transition to something better. We believe that if you can train agents to pass job interviews and assess human beings at scale, you can train them to clone any human behavior out there.
And which use case does every company on earth need help with?
User acquisition.
Every company needs new leads, and many run paid media campaigns to grow. But they usually work with agencies that cost an arm and a leg, or run campaigns in-house with humans. Very few are leveraging AI in the process.
After months of head down building, we've built a product that companies like Truist, Hyperspell, Fish Audio, WPT Global, Eragon, TIMEDOMAIN , and Marvel Snap are using to drive millions in revenue, at a fraction of the cost.
I'll be sharing more about our work here soon.
Building it with @dralaska_ and the team: @lwqconnie @lololalahaoran @anitawu001 @YChahahahaAI @MuvaniaJaya @Antiaefuj @MarcoFerna60597
The first business I built got acquired, but I still consider it one of my biggest failures.
In 2021, I built a carbon credit marketplace.
The idea was that Elon had been profiting off carbon credits for years, so why couldn't ordinary people invest in them as a new asset class?
Everyone was talking about ESG. It felt obvious.
Turns out nobody really cared, or our GTM was terrible. Probably both.
Through an investor connection, a traditional energy group in Europe acqui-hired us, and I became CTO to build an even bigger enterprise carbon marketplace.
It was cool being in a new environment at first, but the bureaucracy got to me. Everything moved slowly. I was in sustainability meetings every day while watching what was happening in AI, and I wanted to be part of it. So I left.
Two things I took with me.
1) Ship fast.
Push it to the market as soon as possible and find out if you're right. Teams that spend years on a beautiful, visionary product without market feedback usually end up nowhere. We spent too much time building and not enough getting products in the hands of users.
2) Work to your strengths
Be careful with big, beautiful missions. Sustainability matters, but it's a better fit for big banks and institutions with deep credibility and networks than for a founder who just left school. Build in a space where you have a genuine edge.
Now I'm building Hellyeah AI and we're applying all of these learnings. Ship early, and stay where we have an edge.
And it's working - we're backed by leading investors and are growing extremely fast.
We started Hellyeah AI as a remote-first company, but now I'm hiring someone to help us go all-in on IRL.
Our philosophy has always been to hire the best people. Doesn't matter where they live.
And being remote helped us get off the ground quickly.
But now, we're going on all-in on events.
I believe one of our moats in the age of AI is our community-first playbook. You cannot automate away human-to-human conversations and trust.
Our team is already working IRL across 4 offices:
- San Francisco
- Shanghai
- Seoul
- Bangalore
And now we need someone to help us scale community and events.
We don't want to approach B2B marketing the traditional, boring way. Our goal is to throw parties, raves, and events people actually want to show up to and talk about the next day.
I'm hiring 3 people to build with us:
- Community Manager
- Event Manager
- Field Marketing
If you or someone you know is cracked at hosting events, my DMs are open.
P.S. We're hiring like crazy across all roles right now, check out all jobs here: hellyeahai.com/careers
ByteDance is secretly a founder factory. Two alumni have built $2B+ AI companies in about three years, and many more have built successful startups that have recently raised millions.
They aren't outliers. At least 30 mid- to senior-level ByteDance people have left to start companies since the 2023 AI wave.
Here are 8 of them, all funded in the last year:
1. Changhu Wang, PixVerse. Ran visual technology at ByteDance. His AI video app has 150M+ users. Series C extended to $439M in July, at a $2B+ valuation.
2. Melvin Chen, Evoken (LiblibAI, Lovart AI). Led commercialization for CapCut. Evoken's AI creation tools are at $300M ARR. $300M Series B+ in June, valued at $2B+.
3. Luo Yihang, ShengShu (Vidu). Led AI applications at Volcano Engine. Now CEO of one of China's leading video models. RMB 2B Series B led by Alibaba Cloud in April.
4. Hao Cheng, Booster Robotics. Product VP at Feishu. Now building humanoid robots. About RMB 1B raised in April.
5. Lucky Zhang, Sekai. Joined ByteDance through an acquisition and stayed on as an exec. Now building AI mini-apps. $20M Series A in June from Khosla and Connect.
6. Zhijie Chen, Verdent AI. Worked on TikTok's recommendation algorithm. Now building AI coding agents. Series A led by Tencent in November.
7. Pan Yuyang, OdyssLife. PM on Coze, ByteDance's agent platform. Now building an AI necklace that tracks what you eat. About RMB 200M from HongShan and Monolith in March.
8. Yang Jinsong, AutoAgents.ai. Led AI and search products at Feishu. Now building AI agents for enterprises. Series A in February.
Look at the old job titles: product, growth, commercialization, recommendation. Very few of them came out of pure research.
ByteDance trains people to ship, measure against hundreds of millions of users, and cut whatever loses within days. Most AI companies don't have that habit yet, and investors are paying for it.
We see it up close. Marco, our co-CEO, ran growth at ByteDance before Hellyeah.
Who did I miss?
Attending Tech Roast Show made my startup go viral.
A couple of years ago I went to one of their comedy shows wearing a bright orange headband.
Halfway through, one of the hosts called me out.
"Your startup has headband merch? That's crazy."
"Who are you, what are you building?"
So I stood up, pitched Final Round AI, and dropped a 50% off code on the spot.
Everyone in the room started dying from laughter.
The hosts accused me of trying to get called out on purpose with my headband, but none of it was planned. We didn't even sponsor the show.
I figured that if the host picked on us we might go viral, but the conversation in the video clip happened completely off the cuff.
People often ask how we plan our marketing stunts. I think that the best marketing happens when you take an organic moment that has viral potential, and use it to tell people about your product (in a non-salesy way).
A lot of our best moments have come from showing up looking memorable and being ready when something funny happens.
Michael Guan retweeted
I’ve been researching depth-residual routing & delta memory- Kimi K3 proved this holds at 2.8T params. But only for models trained this way
I then asked: can you retrofit this onto existing LLM/world models?
Introducing Retro-DARC: a Delta Attention Residual Compute adapter
that retrofits depth-selective memory onto existing models without retraining:
EA exact no-op at insertion (bitwise 0.0 deviation on 3 public checkpoints - proven exact even through MoE routing and early exit), adapter-only training, exact rollback, and content-level memory audits that weight-touching adapters can't express by construction.
The early results are promising. A ~262K-param adapter beat LoRA on a frozen public checkpoint, inserted at zero behavioral risk. And it's the first memory you can audit: zero the bank and the frozen loss returns to machine precision; shuffle it and 70–107% of the gain vanishes. That's a model measurably using its own computation history.
Retro-DARC is useful for improving K3 too. K3 serves in MXFP4/MXFP8, and layer outputs - exactly what its AttnRes retrieves - collapse under that corruption in my tests (0.04–0.75 top-1) while normalized delta keys hold 0.86–0.99. A Softmax1 null route with proven mass bounds lets the router decline to retrieve instead of forcing the sinks and outliers OASIS documented; typed memory turns "what is depth retrieval doing?" into a runnable audit. And one experiment is free: K3 already computes a per-step KDA update magnitude and throws it away - that's a depth-saliency prior waiting to be read.
For world models, the same contract becomes one typed memory interface: Retro-DARC-X gives world/action planners a single bank - observations, actions, tools, latent causes, traces, physics residuals, failures - the substrates a planner needs to remember in order to act over long horizons in the physical world.
You can experience the thesis yourself. I created lucidre.am/memory which runs the paper's memory contract inside a walkable AI world. Innovation Memory makes your interactions survive looking away or reloading, and Dream Residue turns your movement into an inspectable glowing trace.
Join the main Lucidre.am co-creation exhibition - the contest opens Wednesday. One of the six memory applications of the paper - saliency-weighted curation, will rank worlds by genuine novelty rather than recency and pick each world's most surprising viewpoint. And we're bringing live shows to SF + LA next month: screens showcasing worlds that remember, so you can literally play hide-and-seek with a dream that knows where you hide. Hide-and-seek is the exact test every 2026 world-model benchmark says the field fails, something leaves the frame, keeps changing, and has to come back right.
This has been a fun little one-person research project so far! I’d love feedback and keep working on it. I’ve had over 100 references- thanks for all the prior work from teams that inspired me!
I'd also love to intern at a GPU-rich lab (lol) and keep making beautiful worlds - if you let me keep running my remaining tests :)
2MB adapter kit, demo, prior iterations:adacyb0rg.github.io/retro-da…
Paper: adacyb0rg.github.io/retro-da…
aws x
insforge yes
We’re building the agent-native alternative to AWS, but it's actually good.
- 33,000+ projects created (10% WoW growth)
- 2x weekly active projects (2000 → 4000+)
- 11,000+ GitHub stars (5x in the last 3 months) - faster than React, Supabase, and Linux
Introducing InsForge ↓
Introducing InsForge: The agent-native AWS alternative
Introducing InsForge Compute.
Deploy long-running backend services as Docker containers via your coding agent.
It writes the Dockerfile, builds the image, injects env vars, runs the container, and returns a live URL.
All in under 60 seconds.
Introducing InsForge Compute
Michael Guan retweeted
emo video: how to use @hellyeah_ai in WhatsApp
Zero setup to launch the whole ad campaigns
incredible team and product. it is going to be the most secured way of vibe coding and building software in the future. now here comes the question - do you really need a backend engineer? or just npm insforge?
.@InsForge turns your coding agent into a principal backend engineer. Backend servers, database, LLM gateway, frontend deployment, and more. Every primitive built for how coding agents actually work, so they can run your entire infrastructure.
Congrats on the launch, @hanghuang_ & @tonychang430!
ycombinator.com/launches/QP6…
Incredible team and product
We just raised $30M at a $500M valuation, bringing our total funding to $47M.
Led by @craft_ventures , with @PaceCap , @chemistry , TruArrow, and others.
But before anything else: this belongs to the community.
ComfyUI started as one developer and one open-source repo. No roadmap. No company. Just creators who wanted real control over how they built with AI.
That community is now:
→ 4 million users
→ 60,000+ community-built nodes
→ 150,000+ daily downloads
Every number traces back to people who built in the open, for anyone to use.
Here's where the funding goes:
→ Comfy Cloud: for teams and studios that need security and scale
→ Collaborative workflows: versioning and iteration built for how studios actually work
→ A better local experience: more seamless, more stable
→ Ecosystem reliability: making 60,000+ community nodes more dependable
→ Day-one model support: every major release, compatible at launch
We are not building a walled garden.
We are building open infrastructure, built to last.
Thank you genuinely,
The ComfyUI Team
We just raised $30M at a $500M valuation, bringing our total funding to $47M.
Led by @craft_ventures , with @PaceCap , @chemistry , TruArrow, and others.
But before anything else: this belongs to the community.
ComfyUI started as one developer and one open-source repo. No roadmap. No company. Just creators who wanted real control over how they built with AI.
That community is now:
→ 4 million users
→ 60,000+ community-built nodes
→ 150,000+ daily downloads
Every number traces back to people who built in the open, for anyone to use.
Here's where the funding goes:
→ Comfy Cloud: for teams and studios that need security and scale
→ Collaborative workflows: versioning and iteration built for how studios actually work
→ A better local experience: more seamless, more stable
→ Ecosystem reliability: making 60,000+ community nodes more dependable
→ Day-one model support: every major release, compatible at launch
We are not building a walled garden.
We are building open infrastructure, built to last.
Thank you genuinely,
The ComfyUI Team
















