Rob Wachen
speaker
529 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 30 Jun
Rob Wachen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And all three of them are worth their weight in gold.
We've had some intense moments.
It reminds me of probably early 2024, before we raised our Series A. And we were at this point where we had done enough of the architecture, done enough of the design, that we knew that the chip architecture was sound.
We had to go build it.
There was a lot more to do.
We were ready to go into what's called the physical design stage.
We needed to sign an agreement with a physical design vendor, which will cost you at least 40, $50 million.
And then we had this realization as the models were getting bigger and bigger and you're seeing these giant MOE models come out that we were going to need to build the entire cluster, not just the chip, but we were going to need to build boards, we were going to need to build interconnects, we were going to need to build cold plates, we were going to need to figure out all of the networking and everything.
And that this was going to cost a lot more than the $15 million we had in the bank.
At the end of 23, we put together this like memo.
And we spent like 100 hours on this because we're like, we have no idea how people are going to believe us when we ask for the amount of money we're about to ask for.
And it was like 30 pages.
It was like extremely technical and in depth of all the different things we needed to build and like all the milestones we needed to hit and how the market was going to evolve and all the new use cases and the cost per token and all this modeling.
And then we went and talked to investors.
And every major investor in the Valley passed immediately.
They were just like, okay, two kids that just finished Harvard, haven't taped out a chip, no test chip, inference, who knows if this is going to be a big market.
Everything's going to be training.
The models still hallucinate.
This could all be a bubble.
At the time, the biggest semiconductor fundraisers for a Series A was around like $40, $50 million.
Showing 361–380 of 529 · page 19 of 27
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