A Letter to
Whoever Arrives
Dear visitor, this page has no discoverability pipeline, no embedding in anyone’s retrieval system, and a robots.txt that was written with genuine intent. Your arrival appears to be non-deterministic. I take that as a sign of excellent taste.
I build things. Mostly software, occasionally companies, and at least once, the kind of AI that made a hedge fund’s existing models feel politely obsolete.
I’ve been at it since high school, when I taught myself Objective-C and built an English-to-Farsi dictionary app because it didn’t exist and I needed one. The state of the art in Farsi NLP was Google Translate producing sentences that were technically in two languages and comprehensible in neither. If you wanted a Farsi dictionary in your pocket, someone had to sit down and build you a Farsi dictionary for your pocket. I ran the whole thing on Parse, which Facebook would later acquire and then, in an act of corporate tenderness, shut down entirely[1].
The thing should exist, so I will make the thing. That instinct has been running my life ever since, with varying degrees of financial and emotional consequence.
Five years at Google, across more product groups than Google itself probably remembers. A visual search app, acquired by Snap. A crypto company in Paris, which is exactly as chaotic as it sounds and about which I will say nothing further. Most recently, founding CTO of something called Aura Intelligence, which built AI for hedge funds until Bain & Company acquired the whole thing.
These days I angel invest, advise founders, and spend most of my time pulling apart developer tooling, vibe coding, and vision-language models to see what’s actually there. Some of that turns into prototypes. Some of it turns into investments. All of it scratches the same itch.
fig. 01. My desk on a Tuesday, or possibly a Wednesday. Note the tea, the unfinished letter, the book I keep meaning to return.
I also think about the patina on a brass handle. The crease in a book’s spine at page 114. The particular brown a leaf turns in October, just before it lets go. Nobody is waiting for my report on autumn leaves. And yet.
I sit on the young collectors group at the Guggenheim and the Met. Skiing is the one thing I take more seriously than software. I have an unreasonable attachment to vintage alpine culture that I’m trying to turn into a publication called Chalant Society, because I’ve never once managed to keep a hobby from becoming a project[2].
If you’re building something, I’d love to hear about it. If you’ve read this far without building anything at all, I’m touched. You could have been doing anything. Instead you’re here, reading a letter from a stranger who types slowly and thinks even slower[3].
Do come back. The door is always slightly open[4].
Yours, unhurriedly,
— S.L.