A bit about me —
I’m an AI entrepreneur and alumnus of Y Combinator, the Stanford AI Lab, the Google APM program, and UChicago.
Currently, I’m CEO at Autophonix, which offers two B2B voice AI products:
- ThunderPhone, which makes it easy to automate phone calls with AI.
- Flux Interpreting, which translates phone calls between languages.
I’m also the creator of the ReadToMe iOS app.
Until 2023, I served as cofounder and CEO at Mezli (YC W21), where we launched the world’s first fully-autonomous restaurant. I raised $4M and led a team of 20+ through our 2022 launch in San Francisco, during which we sold 10,000 meals at 50% gross margins and earned a 4.5-star rating on Yelp and Google. Unfortunately, we had to shut down when the funding market took a nosedive and I couldn’t raise the $10M+ we needed to keep making progress.
Before Mezli, I was in a PhD program at Stanford, where I did research at the AI Lab and published 3 first-author papers. I dropped out to start Mezli.
In the past, I’ve also worked as an APM at Google, an AI consultant, and a software engineer. I went to college at UChicago, where I earned a BS/MS in computer science with a minor in statistics.
Outside of work, I enjoy climbing, skiing, tennis, sailing, running, reading (check out my list of favorites), and playing music.
Latest Essays
- Announcing TalkToSales, which makes websites voice-native
- The “strategic reserve” exposes crypto as the scam it always was
- I’m looking for a cofounder
- Announcing ReadToMe
- 2023 Reflections
- Founders, Beware Hardware
- The End of the Software Industry
- The End of Knowledge Work
- How to talk to ChatGPT through Siri
- How To: Talk to GPT-3 through Siri
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Publications
- Y. Alex Kolchinski*, Sharon Zhou*, Shengjia Zhao, Mitchell Gordon, Stefano Ermon. Approximating Human Judgment of Generated Image Quality. Shared Visual Representations in Human and Machine Intelligence workshop at NeurIPS 2019.
- Y. Alex Kolchinski, Christopher Potts. Representing Social Media Users for Sarcasm Detection. Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2018.
- Y. Alex Kolchinski*, Sherry Ruan*, Dan Schwartz, Emma Brunskill. Adaptive natural-language targeting for student feedback. WIP Learning at Scale (LAS), 2018.
Alex Kolchinski 