👋🏼 Hey! I'm Wesley Tian.

AI will be the biggest achievement of humankind. It's going to be bigger than the internet and we're living through it right now.

I've been passionate about AI since I was 17.

• I did applied AI research under Prof. Jenna Wiens at the University of Michigan
• I wrote From Human-Level AI to Superintelligent AI under Prof. Rich Thomason
• I did some competitive machine learning (see below)

I had the opportunity to pursue research, but I was jaded by academia, so I pursued the next impactful and challenging thing, startups.

• Founded a stock market for sports tickets (pre-seed)
• Helped found Virtually (YC S20) as employee #1, went through Y Combinator with the founder, and became their tech lead (now acquired)
• Scaled Fractional (YC W21) to ~100M valuation as engineer #3

My company, Aragon, is an AI platform that generates photorealistic images of individuals. Our first product offers professional headshots. In months, we’ve exponentially grown to hundreds of thousands of users, mostly organically. We’ve also onboarded dozens of businesses–with thousands more in the pipeline. Our vision: unlock an era of hyper-personalization, where individuals become the models in marketing campaigns, online shopping experiences, and more.

We're a lean but mighty team and are backed by Neo, Z Fellows, Erik Goldman, and other angels from OpenAI, Vanta, Scale, Niantic, and many more. We also received an offer from Y Combinator, which we turned down. Read my viral LinkedIn post (1M+ impressions) describing my decision-making process. I was also interviewed for Business Insider.

My Projects/Awards

• Remote Thermostat Background
  GitHub
  
• Final Project Competition @ EECS 445: Machine Learning (🏆 #1/205 students)
• White Cane @ MHacks 11 Devpost
• Fashion Filtr @ HampHack 2017 (🏆 #1) Devpost
• Digital Interview Experience @ Fidelity Investments Hackathon 2017 (🏆 #1/12 teams)
• ASSISTments Data Mining Competition (🏆 #3/74 teams) Report
  Publication
• Google Analytics Customer Revenue Prediction Kaggle Competition (#123/1084 teams) Details
• UN Millenium Development Goals DrivenData Competition (#17/2000+ teams)

My Writing

Over 30,000 total reads.

• The Hardest Thing I've Ever Done: Completing a 140.6-mile Ironman Triathlon
• We Climbed the Tallest Mountain in the US and Drank Piss to Survive
• How I Nearly Failed High School

My Influences

• I've moved around a lot growing up. Places where I've lived:

  • Born in Mountain View, CA
  • Milpitas, CA (5 years)
  • Oregon (1 year)
  • Taiwan (2 years)
  • Oregon (1 year)
  • Shanghai (8 years)
  • Massachusetts (2 years)
  • Michigan (3 years)
  • Nevada (1 year)
  • Milpitas, CA (1 year)
  • I currently live in San Francisco, CA (1 year)

  These moves taught me adaptability, resilience, and open-mindedness.

• One of my biggest inspirations is my father, who was forced to spend his teenage years manually farming due to China's Cultural Revolution. He carried buckets of water on his shoulders to his family everyday and has multiple scars on his hands from using farming scythes. He never got the chance to finish middle or high school. Through extreme grit, he eventually made it to the USA, studied electrical engineering, dropped out of his PhD, and moved to Silicon Valley to contribute to the semiconductor and computing industry. Against all odds, he's now the CEO of a public semiconductor company.

  He's been an inspiration for my interest in deep tech, my ambition for advancing humanity, and the belief that anything is possible.

• Elon Musk
• The many other people I've met in my life.