Yifan Zhang's Recent LinkedIn Posts

Happy 1st birthday #AIHouse! One year ago today we opened with a clear goal: create a home for AI builders in Seattle. Since then it has been incredible to watch the community take shape. We’ve hosted conversations with leaders like Vinod Khosla, Brad Feld, Ben Gilbert, Sam Wen, Eugenio P., Nathan Lambert, welcomed policymakers and students exploring how AI will shape our city, and filled the space week after week with founders, researchers, and operators comparing notes on what they’re building. Some highlights from the past year: • Pitch Please quickly became one of my favorite traditions. Seven sessions so far, dozens of founders pitching, and we've invested in Suede's Danielle Dantche Shama Keskar and now gatein.ai's Bernardo Mendez-Arista • Our AI2 Incubator Summer BBQ bringing together more than 1,000 founders, researchers, and builders from the community. • Builders have taken over the space with hackathons from bolt.new, Microsoft Research and Cursor, roundtables, and meetups, from female founder happy hours to consumer AI founder discussions. • A growing network of 131 Resident Experts who host sessions, mentor founders, and share their expertise with the community • The community keeps expanding, and recently we welcomed Taylor Soper as Director of AI House to help grow this even further! • Google Cloud and J.P. Morgan joining as official #AIHouse sponsors. Alongside our inaugural and continued support from City of Seattle and State of Washington via Joseph Nguyen Governor Ferguson and more What stands out most are the conversations happening in the room. The people here are actually doing the work. Training models. Shipping agents. Building companies. I'm honored to learn from this community every day. Huge thanks to the team that makes this possible every day, especially Audrey Yun, our Events and Community Manager who organizes many of the events and helps bring the #AIHouse community together, along with Jacob Colker, Vu Ha, Andy Lai, Oren Etzioni, Maya Sukovaty and to the Resident Experts, volunteers, interns, founders, researchers, and organizers who keep showing up and making this community what it is. With the community growing and our team expanding, I’m excited to see what the next year of #AIHouse looks like!

Excited to be a keynote speaker for Seattle Startup Summit on April 1-2, hosted by Yujian Tang! It’s a two-day gathering of founders and builders across Seattle, with hands-on AI workshops on day 1 and startup demos, keynotes, and fireside chats on day 2. I’ll be talking about the Seattle AI scene, what it’s like to build here versus San Francisco, and how we’re thinking about the AI investment landscape from AI2 Incubator’s perspective. Look for the AI2 Incubator founders demo'ing: Ankit Kumar (Emphere), Bill Lennon (Ollie AI), Thiru Bhat (strato-cloud.io), Evan Smith (Ethosphere), Danielle Dantche (Suede) and more! If you’re around, would love to see you there. Registration link in comments.

I’m thrilled to share that Taylor Soper is joining AI2 Incubator as our new Director of #AIHouse! Taylor is leaving his role as editor of GeekWire, where he spent more than 13 years covering the people, companies, and ideas shaping Pacific Northwest tech, to help us take AI House to the next level. If you're a founder or tech leader in Seattle, you probably already know Taylor. He's covered Microsoft and Amazon at the highest levels, broken funding scoops and acquisition news before anyone else, and more recently helped report on the AI boom reshaping Seattle. Taylor brings a unique combination of skills that fits our thesis for today’s AI era: deep relationships across Seattle tech, intense curiosity, and a talent for asking the right questions when the frameworks for building a startup are being rewritten daily. Taylor will work closely with me, our incredible Events and Community Manager Audrey Yun, and the whole AI2 Incubator team. Our goal is to organize a physical space and community that shares these learnings not just with AI2 Incubator founders, but with all of Seattle’s founders. We believe that when people relentlessly pursue new approaches and find what’s successful, we all learn and accelerate together. Welcome to #AIHouse, Taylor! Jacob Colker Vu Ha Oren Etzioni Andy Lai Lindsay Randall, MBA Carly Kiser Naji B. Louis Huynh Anisa Khoshbakhtian, MBA Vin V. Markham McIntyre Brenna McKay City of Seattle Seattle Office of Economic Development JPMorganChase Google Cloud (Full announcement link and Geekwire article in comments!)