Technology founder, researcher, and early adopter
I work on tools that help researchers and builders find what's worth building. I focus on surfacing signal from AI research, making sense of what matters.
Startup.
- Co-founder of FiveW, a focused Twitter for AI research
- Living at Mission Control, the oldest continous hacker house in SF, founded by Thiel Fellows in 2013. Launchpad for companies like Scale, Hightouch, Pylon.
AI, blockchain, and research.
- Built zKnowledge Base, a semantic search engine for research papers (won Best Decentralized App at TreeHacks 2024, raised six figures and placed 3rd at Codebase Demo Day as the sole collegiate team)
- Built Reliablocks, a trustworthiness model for Ethereum L2 blocks (won Architecture Prize at EigenLayer Infinite Hackathon, DevCon Bangkok)
- Software engineer at Bittensor building a unified API and routing layer for subnets, inspired by OpenRouter
- Product intern at Affogato AI (YC S21) researching stablecoin payment solutions
- Campus ambassador at Perplexity leading early growth initiatives
- Research with Blockchain at Berkeley
How I operate.
Technical founder shipping full-stack systems. Multidisciplinary by default, comfortable moving between systems design, product, research, and distribution.
Interested in incentive design, network effects, and the future of AI.
Background.
Studied Industrial Engineering with a minor in EECS at UC Berkeley. Grounded in optimization, simulation, databases, and large-scale system design.
Outside of work.
Food, poker, running, concerts, and reading.
Recent reading.
- Apple in China by Patrick McGee
- Paul Graham Essays by PG
- High Growth Handbook by Elad Gil
- Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned by Kenneth O. Stanley and Joel Lehman
- Range by David Epstein
- More Money Than God by Sebastian Mallaby
Get in touch.
My best ideas come from talking with people who think differently.
Always down to chat: ethanmlam@berkeley.edu