ZiXuan Zhang

Cofounder & CTO of Proximitty (YC W26)

[ZiXuan Zhang @zizixcm]

@sdianahu congrats! ur the best!!!

[Sam Blond @samdblond]

We're announcing our $50M Series B led by Benchmark. Founders Fund and Human Capital are tripling down in the round.

We gave Benchmark a sneak preview of our upcoming GA release. They saw the future of sales. We had a term sheet 2 hours later.

The future of sales is Monaco.

[Sam Blond @samdblond]

“The greatest startup event of all time” is back.

Announcing the $100,000 cash prize, no buy-in Monaco Invitational (Part Deux).

Bigger and better than the first: more founders, more money, more celebrity guests.

This will be the largest founder poker tournament and party of all time.

The best startups in the world run on Monaco.
The best founder poker players in the world compete in The Invitational.

June 4. San Francisco.

[ZiXuan Zhang @zizixcm]

Books are deeply underappreciated. You can ask ChatGPT to summarize a book, but you won’t truly digest it unless you invest at least as much time as it would take to read it, spending that time contemplating it, reflecting on it, and practicing what it teaches.

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

My information consumption is now 1/4 X, 1/4 podcast interviews of the smartest practitioners, 1/4 talking to the leading AI models, and 1/4 reading old books. The opportunity cost of anything else is far too high, and rising daily.

[ZiXuan Zhang @zizixcm]

"Good founders are like steel." I haven't stopped thinking about that line from @paulg . Sheer toughness. Relentless resourcefulness. So formidable that nothing can break them.

How do you get there? Zoom out on the timeline, setbacks are just data points on the path. View success as inevitable.

The world is full of opportunities in every space and vertical. An earnest, relentlessly resourceful founder approaches the world like a scientist: experimenting, learning, improving every single day. Rapid, iterative improvements lead ever closer to success. Not a question of if, but when.

The odds are for those who quit. For the formidable, success is an inevitability.

[ZiXuan Zhang @zizixcm]

@mirandanover love the product! congrats!!

[ZiXuan Zhang @zizixcm]

@ycombinator @_eosai @ary_src congrats on the launch!!

[Y Combinator @ycombinator]

Origami Robotics is building high-DOF robotic hands with in-joint motors and a co-designed data-collection glove to eliminate the embodiment gap by collecting high-quality, real-world data at scale.

Congrats on the launch, @DanielXieee and @QuanliangX!

https://t.co/BkzyfawSrg

[ZiXuan Zhang @zizixcm]

Here's the original 1Password post: https://t.co/RbGyI8mp8N

[ZiXuan Zhang @zizixcm]

Security in AI agents has always lagged behind capability, which is why I really like how 1Password describes running OpenClaw on a work device as a “potential security incident”. It’s a good reminder of the security implications of AI agents: as they gain more capabilities, skills, and tools the attack surface grows with it.

I still hear people dismiss the importance of guardrails and evals, often citing Claude Code's early success without them. But there's an important catch: there wasn't much consequence when Claude Code wrote bad code. A human reviewer catches it and deletes it, totally reversible in a controlled environment.

The same is not true in high-stakes environments such as financial systems or medical systems, where most actions are irreversible by design and carry real-world consequences and legal obligations the moment they happen.

A lot of progress has been made in generalizing agent capabilities to where generic AI agents can now automate 80% of almost any workflow. But there's been very little stride in the generalization and scaling of the evals and guardrails that get agents from 80% to 100%.

This gap determines whether enterprise deployment in regulated industries is viable at all. Capability without evals and guardrails is simply a liability.

We’re exploring a number of approaches in scaling evals and guardrails here at Proximitty and would love to exchange notes if this is top of mind for you too.

The p0 for financial systems has always been and will always be reliability, correctness, and security. Not because they're behind, but because of their outsized real-world impact and the serious consequences of every action. Some systems just have to work 100% of the time.

[ZiXuan Zhang @zizixcm]

@skyler_chan_ LFG!!

[Quanting Xie @DanielXieee]

A few days ago we got in YC W26, and here is we are working on.

Building hardware is hard, but I really like a quote from @yukez: “People who are really serious about robot learning should make their own robot hardware.”

[ZiXuan Zhang @zizixcm]

Don’t ask yourself what do you want to achieve. Ask yourself what price are you willing to pay.

[ZiXuan Zhang @zizixcm]

Our drive to win is so intense that we never pause to question if the game itself is worthwhile.

[Alex Hormozi @AlexHormozi]

If you have someone who loves you, a goal to work towards, and your health, you’ve already won.

[ZiXuan Zhang @zizixcm]

There's no competition, collaboration is all there is.

[ZiXuan Zhang @zizixcm]

@Azikara @svpino Our backend has high availability setup and we try our best to prevent downtime.
Having said that, this is an open source project, you can also check the code if you don't trust it or self-host your own backend.

[ZiXuan Zhang @zizixcm]

@Azikara @svpino Hi Tristan, engineer at https://t.co/i5gF9Efnw9 here. This unified MCP server just connects to our backend service.
If you are worried about the your own MCP server going down or if you just don't want to use MCP. You can use our SDK or HTTP requests to hit our backend directly.

[ZiXuan Zhang @zizixcm]

@rowancheung @readwise save thread