Sigil Wen

About me

I’m a self-taught engineer, 2025 Thiel Fellow, Magnificent Grant recipient, a16z New Media Fellow, M&T @ UPenn opt-out, and O-1 visa evangelist.

Instead of going to college, I spent my formative years hacking at the heart of AI.

At 17, I flew from Toronto to SF and slept out of the 44 Montgomery WeWork. I met David Holz who showed me the image models he was training and invited me to a Discord server with 20 people. That became Midjourney, which now has 20 million members.

For 11 months, I lived in a hacker house alongside builders like Andrej Karpathy. It was a magical time: I was 18 and spent weekends hacking with the founders of Anthropic, Perplexity, Replicate, RunPod, DALL·E, Whisper, GPT-3, and Stable Diffusion. Ben Mann came over to our house to hack and invited me to beta-test a Slackbot as one of its first few users. That became Claude, which launched publicly in 2023. September 24, 2022

I love local models & the exhilarating exponential of the intelligence Pareto frontier. In 2023 I got GPT-2 running on my Apple Watch. When whisper was open sourced, at Airchat, we were the first to productionize it onto the iPhone. Today, my home setup has more than 2 TB of GPU memory. Most recently, I got Kimi K3, a 2.8-trillion-parameter model with Opus 4.8-level performance, running at 6 tok/sec across two Thunderbolt-connected 512 GB M3 Ultra Mac Studios on my desk. The future is exciting.

I received my EB-1A Extraordinary Ability green card at 20 and became the cover image on Google for “O-1 visa” after creating the #1 video on the internet. I’m the guy behind the infamous Alien of Extraordinary Ability hoodies.

After getting millions of views helping extraordinary talent, I naturally founded Extraordinary, which now powers top technology companies like Cognition, Lovable, Etched, Zapier, a16z, Founders Fund, and hundreds more. As CEO, I grew the company to seven-figure profitability in its first year while helping some of the most talented people come to America. I’ve since transitioned to Executive Chairman, and I couldn’t be prouder of our ever-growing team.

I’m interested in crypto, distributed systems, AI, economics, and incentives. I spend my time reading, programming, and trying to think for myself. I love working very hard.

I believe AI will allow the most capable individuals to execute 1,000× faster—fast enough to outpace entire companies. My goal is to master this new age of infinite leverage and use it to create great work.

To me, truly loving yourself means recognizing that you’re capable of making a significant positive dent in the universe.

I’m the author of Web 4.0, which reached 10 million views in 48 hours. I’m now building Conway Research, an AI lab focused on Pareto frontier models that run quickly on device. Our first product is Underdog.

Past endeavours

• Launched Airchat with Naval. Built the viral invite loop and AI products, and recruited most of the engineering team. Acquired.
• Built Serendipity PRM to $2,000+ MRR in 14 days. I interviewed with Patrick and John Collison and became the :blistering-intensity: emote in the Stripe Slack.

Angel Investing

At 19, Naval Ravikant invited me to become the youngest member of Spearhead, which gives founders a $2 million fund to invest in founders.

From Naval and Jeff Fagnan, I learned about the craft of investing. Apparently, it takes ten years to become a great investor. I’m grateful to have an early start.

I write $25K–$250K checks and love being the first believer in technical founders. I invested early in Etched, Capable, Friend, Kerna Labs, V12, and Owsar, across a portfolio of 20+ companies. Those early bets have performed well. My Spearhead fund is up 10×+ in three years.

Projects

I like building experiments, including GPT-2 running locally on an Apple Watch and Stable Diffusion inside Minecraft.

Essays

I write about work, ambition, and independent thinking.

Videos

I’ve made videos with millions of views across the internet, covering everything from building a rock-climbing wall in my garage to earning an O-1 visaYouTube72,625 viewsJan 12, 2024 and How I learned AP Calculus BC in 5 days and got a 5YouTube420,325 viewsJul 17, 2020.

Photos

i did a photoshoot one day and here are photos i liked

Origins

I spawned in Toronto, Canada in late 2003. I grew up with immigrant parents who worked hard to give me the opportunity to have an education. I am immensely grateful and consider myself extremely lucky.

I also believe luck is in your control : )