lisayan

ceo at | perception @waymo, ece + robotics @carnegiemellon

[lisayan @lisayan1010]

Last night @pearvc hosted the coolest 100-person poker tournament with founder of Doordash @stanleytang and founder of Instacart @Max

I’m also incredibly excited to share that I won the tournament, along with two VIP world cup tickets!!

Glad those days playing poker during COVID were somewhat useful :)

[Bessemer @BessemerVP]

"We are nowhere near 'solving' the data problem in robotics. My experience at @Waymo taught me that real-world deployment uncovers harder, more specialized data curation and labeling problems over time.

Closing the gap between 99% and 99.9% reliability is a steep hill climb that takes longer than most people realize."

— Lisa Yan, Founder, Argus Systems

[lisayan @lisayan1010]

Proud to represent Argus Systems in this lineup of great robotics founders. This is only the beginning of a blossoming industry, and I haven’t been this excited about an innovation since self-driving 10 years ago!

[Bessemer @BessemerVP]

𝐁𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐫 𝐏𝐫𝐞𝐝𝐢𝐜𝐭𝐬: 𝐑𝐨𝐛𝐨𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐩𝐡𝐲𝐬𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐀𝐈 🤖

1. We're in the GPT-2.5 moment for robotics. Capabilities are real, but the gap between lab performance and field deployment remains wide.

2. Scaling laws are emerging. Data is expensive, capital is the moat. World models may be the shortcut.

3. Talent concentration will crown winners quickly. This is not a market where 50 companies win.

4. Near-term value will accrue to full-stack, vertically integrated players, not pure-play foundation model companies.

5. Defense robotics will produce the first $50B+ IPOs in the category.

6. There will be no robotics bubble. In fact, not enough capital is flowing into the industry.

Dive in 🦾 https://t.co/TQXEJtrOrd

[lisayan @lisayan1010]

sharing code for an interactive valentine's day card that i built in 3min flat with @cursor_ai. no excuses for being a bad boyfriend this weekend!

https://t.co/8yXCbMA2oB

[lisayan @lisayan1010]

there's a mountain lion on my street!!!!!

[SAN FRANCISCO FIRE DEPARTMENT MEDIA @SFFDPIO]

Mountain Lion contained to Lafayette Park area near California St. SFPD, SFFD, Fish & Wildlife, SF Animal Care & Control, SF Zoo on scene.

[lisayan @lisayan1010]

@chrisbarber @_kelsey_pool argus systems as well!

[lisayan @lisayan1010]

the sf progression
20-25: mission
25-30: soma
30-35: pac heights

[khushi suri @khushkhushkhush]

one week visiting sf and staying in pac heights has made me realize my hatred for sf was solely because i lived in the mission

[lisayan @lisayan1010]

basically same thing when oracle wanted a cut of android because google used java

[Wall Street Rollup @WallStRollup]

OpenAI is planning to take a cut of Customers’ discoveries.

OpenAI’s CFO says they will take a cut of the IP it helps create.

Per The Information:

[lisayan @lisayan1010]

@zeroxjackson pay for the gym walking distance from your house and hit it either before work or immediately after coming home.

also don’t get lazy and walk to get coffee and lunch during the day to get 10k steps in!

[lisayan @lisayan1010]

called an uber on saturday night after the texas football game in downtown austin, and had the option for a @Waymo to pick me up (how could i say no!)

so cool seeing it adapt to driving in different cities and meet demand during peak hours!

[lisayan @lisayan1010]

in 2012 apcs teacher showed a video of the 2007 darpa grand challenge, thought self-driving cars were sick. stanford is good at it, but what’s this school called cmu that’s also good? applied on a whim and moved to pittsburgh.

did robotics research under prof. drew bagnell during soph year, got ghosted when i asked if i could continue next semester. saw the news he got poached to lead uber atg and later founded aurora.

interned at google a couple of times and found mobile and ads boring. joined full-time to work on exploratory projects with different sensors like lidar, cameras, bluetooth, etc.

google team’s projects halted during covid, joined waymo in 2020 when cars started driving in arizona.

our data infra is REALLY good and waymo makes great progress, start thinking about data problems in other ai spaces and working on a startup one day

physical ai explodes in 2025 and i feel like im watching the early days of self-driving and fall in love all over again.

raised funding in 2025 and started working on argus systems. couldn’t be happier to work on this every single day!

[Afolabi Sokeye 🧱 @SokeyeA]

What’s the lore behind choosing your career path ?

[lisayan @lisayan1010]

in 2025 we got more groundbreaking robotics model updates than iphone or chatgpt releases :0

[lisayan @lisayan1010]

5 years ago i was already working on highway traffic breaks (do many people even know what that is?), so this is the result of a lotttt of engineering and evaluation for a confident rollout. so proud of the team!

[Dmitri Dolgov @dmitri_dolgov]

Big day — we’re starting to rollout freeway driving for public riders in Phoenix, LA, and the Bay Area. We’re also connecting SF to San Jose, and adding curbside access to SJC Airport. A true testament to the generalizability of the @Waymo Driver. Excited to bring its proven safety record to freeways and unlock new opportunities for our riders! https://t.co/AJGs3euDa0

[lisayan @lisayan1010]

the real AGI benchmark

[Nikita Bier @nikitabier]

If you get upgraded on a flight but your girlfriend/wife doesn’t, do you downgrade and both suffer or do you take the upgrade? I need an answer in 5 minutes.

[lisayan @lisayan1010]

solution: date a vc

[Jeson Lee @thejesonlee]

the hardest part about being a male founder..

in my experience is finding a girlfriend / partner that understands the short term gains that we are forgoing and the long-term optimization game that we are playing.

most women expect to have most dates paid for, their vacations covered and their partner to have the time and emotional bandwidth to support them. somebody they see as a reliable provider. this is completely understandable.

but as founders, every dollar saved is additional runway for the company. we budget down to the cent because our life’s work depends on it. every 100-hour work week slightly increases the odds of success. at this stage of life, we’re both cash-poor and time-poor — betting everything on the hope that one day, it all works out. that one day, we’ll be sitting on generational wealth — the kind most men only dream about.

even for women who understand that they might be investing in their man long-term , it’s hard not to compare. their friends are dating guys with high-paying tech jobs, who work from 10 to 3 and can afford to give them a luxury experience now, not later. optimizing for the short term is human nature — it’s hard to fight against.

to all the girlfriends out there dating early-stage founders — you’re the real ones.

and to all my fellow founders: may you find your person while you still have nothing. Because that’s the only time you’ll know she’s with you for who you are, not what you have.