talent eng @spacexai | 👼 forward deployed angels | 2x founder | @uwaterloo
San Francisco, CA
Joined August 2015
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Umesh Khanna 🇨🇦🇺🇸 retweeted
@JensenHuang at GTC:
"Here's Trajectory and Harvey using Nemotron, post-trained it and created their own frontier-level capability."
"With customization and with partners in the ecosystem that we work with, you could turn these models into the frontier.
And a result, turn your proprietary data into sovereign intelligence"
It's great to be doing work with such amazing companies like @harvey and @nvidia over here at @trajectorylabs!
Umesh Khanna 🇨🇦🇺🇸 retweeted
I couldn't be more excited to announce Supernova by @KnotAPIs.
For years, we've poured our hearts and souls into building the technology behind Knot.
Today, it powers more than 1 million actions every day for some of the largest financial institutions in the world.
Now, we're putting that same technology in your hands: Supernova turns virtually any action on any website into an API.
Tell Supernova what you want to do and Supernova, if needed, uses a VM to learn the action once, then turns it into a reusable API. Frictionless authentication, persistent connections, health checks, self-healing, and ongoing maintenance? All handled by Supernova.
The result: An API you can call over and over, without spinning up a browser every time.
Think about what this unlocks:
🛒 Commerce: Build APIs to search, shop, and purchase across retailers.
🏦 Financial services: Connect accounts, retrieve transactions, and manage payments.
🚀 Entrepreneurs: Build the next Finicity/Plaid/MX for procurement, Stripe for returns, or an entirely new API business.
Everything we've built at Knot is proof of what's possible. But our products are just a handful of ideas from one team.
Our ambition isn't just to build the next great Knot product. It's to help you build tens of thousands of your own, including things we never would have imagined.
We're opening the Supernova waitlist to developers, and we can't wait to see what you build.
Sign up for the waitlist below👇
knotapi.com/supernova/
Umesh Khanna 🇨🇦🇺🇸 retweeted
We are releasing Ultramarine 1 Flash, a frontier-class model built for knowledge work. It is open-source and achieves similar performance to Fable 5, while being 60x cheaper.
It was post-trained by a team of 5 for ~$300k all-in. Available on API now, with weights releasing in 2 weeks.
Umesh Khanna 🇨🇦🇺🇸 retweeted
At our first @money2020, @KnotAPIs had one product and a pitch most people hadn’t heard before: let consumers move their card to a merchant in a few taps.
This year we arrive with record quarter-over-quarter growth, millions of connected merchant accounts, and our most exciting partnership opportunities yet.
The conversation has changed. We’re no longer explaining why Knot should exist. Prospects experience Knot for the first time in the apps they already use, everyone understands the revenue opportunity, and financial institutions want Knot live before they’re the only ones without it.
What started with CardSwitcher has become something much bigger: infrastructure that connects users to their merchant accounts, automates actions, and keeps those connections working securely at scale. CardSwitcher has become the perfect wedge into selling additional products, and new Knot cross-sells have surpassed even my own expectations.
In the past few months, the market has moved entirely in our favor too. Merchant connectivity is the layer the whole industry decided it needed. Issuers want top of wallet, networks want their token in the merchant file, and nobody wants a third party disintermediating the relationship between them and the consumer. It’s now clear that whoever owns the connectivity layer owns the consumer relationship.
We’re heading into Vegas with more excitement and a fuller calendar than ever: issuers, partners we couldn’t have dreamed of, and everyone wanting a piece of the merchant connectivity layer.
The question is no longer why Knot, or whether Knot works: It’s who will own the connection between users and merchants.
Umesh Khanna 🇨🇦🇺🇸 retweeted
Flattered to be on the list!
If you want to chat about data and xAI, feel free to reach out.
I asked people: "who have you met in the AI data and post-training space that you find most insightful?"
5 votes: Daniel Chang (@dnnssl2)
3 votes each:
- Abhijay Rana (@abhijaymrana)
- Ryan Wexler (@RyanMWexler)
- Sean Cai (@SeanZCai)
- Will Brown (@willcb)
2 votes each:
- Amy Tam (@amytam01)
- Jesse Hu (@huyouare)
- Nikhil Namburi (@nikhilvnamburi)
- Thomas Liao (@distributionat)
91 people were picked. The other 82 got 1 vote each and are in the next two posts.
People couldn't pick themselves. I didn't vote.
Umesh Khanna 🇨🇦🇺🇸 retweeted
I visited Starbase recently with some of the Grok team and haven’t stopped thinking about it since. It’s such an inspiring city, company, and mission!
Honored to be at SpaceXAI, and grateful for the opportunity to help accelerate the mission through Grok 🚀
Umesh Khanna 🇨🇦🇺🇸 retweeted
I asked people: "who have you met in the AI data and post-training space that you find most insightful?"
5 votes: Daniel Chang (@dnnssl2)
3 votes each:
- Abhijay Rana (@abhijaymrana)
- Ryan Wexler (@RyanMWexler)
- Sean Cai (@SeanZCai)
- Will Brown (@willcb)
2 votes each:
- Amy Tam (@amytam01)
- Jesse Hu (@huyouare)
- Nikhil Namburi (@nikhilvnamburi)
- Thomas Liao (@distributionat)
91 people were picked. The other 82 got 1 vote each and are in the next two posts.
People couldn't pick themselves. I didn't vote.
Umesh Khanna 🇨🇦🇺🇸 retweeted
I'm hiring for our Talent Engineering team at @spacexai!
Looking for people who love working with exceptional humans as much as (or more than) building product. A few things that we look for:
1) You’re an engineer who can build things to get the job done, being able to 80/20 most things.
2) You care about people and you've been making intros, supporting founders, and bringing great people together for years, without calling it a job. Your skillset aligns with that of a VC (and you might be one someday!)
3) You’re naturally magnetic in communities. People take your calls because you genuinely love to help and care about them!
4) You don’t wait to be told what to do, you've been a go-getter and can get shit done.
If any of these resonate and you want to be a critical part to the inner workings of a frontier lab, then I'd love to meet!
👋 Warm intros through a mutual otherwise feel free to email me at [email protected]!
🤖 Made with AI
Umesh Khanna 🇨🇦🇺🇸 retweeted
Seeing @shaunmmaguire go to war like that for a port co and be ride or die for his founders restores my faith in honor among VCs
Umesh Khanna 🇨🇦🇺🇸 retweeted
hopped on the @a16z pod with @eriktorenberg, @omooretweets, @joshelman to chat about @cosign
but, what is a Cosign?
It’s a small slice of your reputation- your personal credibility- attached to a person you want to vouch for.
A Cosign aims to capture what a résumé or a generic connection cannot: the strength and meaning of a relationship.
We have three core endorsement prompts:
- who shaped your career?
- who is someone you would work with anywhere?
- who is a person to watch - someone you think is going to be a star, and the world doesn't know it yet.
We want to make belief in someone more specific and useful.
Let's see if it works 😅
Would love any early feedback
Who believed in you first? Silicon Valley runs on that question.
a16z's Erik Torenberg, David Booth, Josh Elman, and Olivia Moore on Cosign:
Cosign is a curated professional network for the startup community. Profiles are built from endorsements, fundraises, and talent moves, with a private layer to signal who you'd fund or hire.
Erik ran a small version of this seven years ago, emailing a few hundred people and asking each for one person to watch. One of the answers was Russell Kaplan, then a 22-year-old engineer at Tesla, now president of Cognition.
Olivia on why this matters: "The most valuable data in all of Silicon Valley is who has conviction in who." Investors chase it every day and still struggle to find it. An engineer choosing between five offers has almost no way to get it at all.
Paul Graham cosigned Sam Altman in 2009, six years before OpenAI was founded. Ryan Hoover cosigned Erik early at Product Hunt. Silicon Valley has always run on cosigns from people whose word carries weight, and until now nobody kept the record.
The conversation closes on the question of why anyone would share their alpha. David's answer is that the person you cosign today is the one raising a round in two years, and when they do, they remember who believed in them first.
0:55 Twitter as a credential
3:05 Silicon Valley is a race to discover talent
4:10 The 3 questions on every Cosign profile
5:45 The email that found Russell Kaplan at 22
6:15 Conviction is the scarcest data
9:50 Why Cosign is free and strictly positive
11:05 Seeing things before the market does
13:00 Sending private "I'd fund them" signals
18:35 Endorsements that don't vanish
23:05 Recognition for the unsung engineer
29:40 Building LinkedIn Jobs in 2004
34:25 AI made human endorsement scarce
36:45 Why nobody has disrupted LinkedIn
42:10 Your Cosign profile may already exist
46:25 Silicon Valley always ran on cosigns
48:10 "Why would I give away my alpha?"
YouTube: youtu.be/-ywZlfznTa4
@eriktorenberg @david__booth @joshelman @omooretweets
Umesh Khanna 🇨🇦🇺🇸 retweeted
Through the VOICE trial, Terry is using his Neuralink implant to help fine-tune a brain-to-voice interface for himself and others who can’t speak. He trained the algorithm first by miming speech as best he could, then by simply thinking the words and hearing them come out in his own natural voice.
Powered by Grok Voice from @spacexai
Umesh Khanna 🇨🇦🇺🇸 retweeted
Meet SPECS Intelligence.
It knows what’s important to you: your people, priorities, and what you’re working toward, so it can anticipate your needs before you have to ask.
Get Early Access on Mac + iPhone. No glasses required.
specs.com/intelligence
Umesh Khanna 🇨🇦🇺🇸 retweeted
Happy to share I'm 3 weeks in & designing at @spacexai
SpaceXAI felt like a rare opportunity to work at the intersection of tech and design, and I'm grateful to be a part of it. Excited to build Grok, X, and more, with the best team.
Looking forward to more!
Umesh Khanna 🇨🇦🇺🇸 retweeted
we're hosting an event at berkeley tomorrow!!
luma.com/wyvf6hgu
Umesh Khanna 🇨🇦🇺🇸 retweeted
I’ve been giving Grok Bot a new job every day this week.
Friday at 10 AM PT, I’m doing Grok Bot 101.
I’ll show you the Bots I’ve built this week and what I learned from them. I’ll also share how I decide which jobs are worth turning into Bots.
hiten.com/grok-bot-101
