I have capital to prototype and left the job, looking for cofounder/team.
Before this I started a company in data infrastructure for robotics. A friend who was running data collection at Optimus told me about training from human videos and how it would be critical for training robots. I spoke with labs and robotics companies, and ended up selling quality trajectories and 3D full-body human motion data to DeepMind and Qwen.
I'm originally from Kazakhstan but moved to Berlin at 18. Studied business at Mannheim but skipped uni completely, taught myself ML and worked at Tesla as a data engineer.
Later joined Snowflake in enterprise sales, closing 8 figure deals. This is where my interest in infrastructure and data companies comes from. During my first week I shook hands with the CEO of Europe's largest asset manager at a political event and told him he'd need to migrate from Google to Snowflake. He laughed. 12 months later that was an 8 figure contract and the largest European migration at the company.
I don't care where you studied or where you worked. I care about why you want to build this and whether you have that dog in you.
Outside of work I try to read what I bookmarked during the week on X, follow a lot of private and public markets, swimming/running or play poker.
Contact me: Feel free to email me at hello_at_shmalen.dev or text me on Twitter if you want to chat or grab a coffee in Berlin/London/SF. I'm exploring a few areas, check Interests.