Mikhail Markine

Founder & CTO @talktolumin, building the future of work without screens. 4x world champion athlete.

[Aditya Agarwal @adityaag]

Every founder I meet worries about missing this moment.

The best worry about wasting it. There’s a difference.

It’s a waste to ignore how much the world has changed. It’s a waste to think you can capture value with pure software the same as 5 years ago.

It’s a waste to build something small.

We have seen the shift slowly and then very quickly at @southpkcommons.

Here’s who we want in the Founder Fellowship now: hardware tinkerers, mad scientists, obsessives, biohackers, people who build nuclear reactors in their basements.

People who want to get their hands dirty and touch grass and atoms.

If you are only building software, then please (for your own sake!) have a thesis that all your friends laugh at you about. Heresy is the price of ambition.

Then put yourself in the right environment to maximize your ambition.

(Apply by August 2nd)

[Lumin @TalkToLumin]

A new interview with @sriramganesh is out now on the eleVIVO podcast!

Listen to hear about Sriram’s story, including his experience with vision loss, plus all things Lumin! 😎

https://t.co/i6vaBkTP2k

[Mikhail Markine @mikhail_m]

Excited to craft a product with very tight design constraints: screen-free input *and* output.

[Lumin @TalkToLumin]

How much easier would email be if you could just talk to it?

Manage your inbox entirely by voice with Lumin, the most accessible AI voice assistant ever built.

Live on the App Store now for iPhone users with Gmail. https://t.co/ErSn6fUTgW

[Mikhail Markine @mikhail_m]

We are finding ourselves at the app layer of these issues. Once you let an assistant learn and improve, how do you ensure it actually serves its user instead of hurting them as a “yes-man”? And who is to decide what is “good”? https://t.co/bGfgt96tjK

[Mikhail Markine @mikhail_m]

Claude + GCP + Kubernetes is delightful. All the power without the manual hassle.

[LaurieWired @lauriewired]

@kayleecodez hate to say it, but everyone that rejects kubernetes inevitably ends up recreating it from first principles lol

[Mikhail Markine @mikhail_m]

“Just slap a voice layer on it,” right? No. Voice-native apps demand instant responses, high intelligence and high capacity to handle lots of data. Wildly conflicting demands. Lots of work to do.

[Mikhail Markine @mikhail_m]

Amazing.

[Amazon News @amazonnews]

https://t.co/Orzt0HyzQK

[Mikhail Markine @mikhail_m]

Who is nerding out over Figma-to-SwiftUI pipelines and implementing VoiceOver to be just perfect? I’ve got some puzzles for you.

[Mikhail Markine @mikhail_m]

I’m curious: how will the tension play out between the race for technical leadership and developer adoption (“scorching the earth” around the profit engine with open source), and business partnerships like Siri+Gemini?

[Mikhail Markine @mikhail_m]

The Gemma 4 on iPhone demo gets us one step closer to nirvana: offline, fast, private, intelligent, and available.

[South Park Commons @southpkcommons]

3/ Reading and typing shouldn’t be a barrier to productivity. The team of @sriramganesh & @mikhail_m showed us how @TalkToLumin works.

https://t.co/G84Rb3rOQk

[Mikhail Markine @mikhail_m]

Join us!

[Sriram Ganesh @sriramganesh]

I started losing my vision a few years ago.

Text-based work—emails, documents, everything—became a nightmare.

So I built Lumin. Voice-first productivity, starting with email.

For people with vision loss, ADHD, dyslexia, or anyone tired of staring at screens.

Join our waitlist.

https://t.co/ewivhVFFzU

[Aditya Agarwal @adityaag]

The goal @southpkcommons is to build maximally ambitious companies.

Take some time to find the right mountain. Don't confuse motion for progress.

Our first 10 years have been strong. Now we get to to go build the next decade.

This article captures us well:

[Mikhail Markine @mikhail_m]

@adityaag Let’s go!

[Mikhail Markine @mikhail_m]

Amazing team and vision!

[Naman Jain @theBhulawat]

Introducing Bunny - world's first curiosity device for kids

It’s screenfree..it’s portable..

We raised $1M from @southpkcommons to reimagine how kids thrive in the age of AI, safely.

Comment 'Bunny'. Our nephew will pick 50 families that get it for free this holiday season…

[Mikhail Markine @mikhail_m]

Clever paper re: Piezo & Calyx: https://t.co/wC6m7zwJ0I

[Mikhail Markine @mikhail_m]

LLMs are modern day choose your own adventure books.

[Mikhail Markine @mikhail_m]

"The process by which the model learns to give explanations [...] and the process by which it learns to directly do something [...] are different."

Super fun read. https://t.co/y6gjeTEJ0p

[Mikhail Markine @mikhail_m]

There is no moat in your prompt.

[Mikhail Markine @mikhail_m]

@simonw 's post on LLM prompt injection inspired me to draw parallels to how the CPU+OS+runtime+compiler stack fights similar problems with remote execution vulnerabilities.
https://t.co/u2MmVnIr4L