Uncle Moon is a technology creator and a believer in long horizons. We document the real paths of researchers, founders, and engineers—less hype, better questions.
NEW CONVERSATION
Ran Chen, CTO of Pure Global and VayoMed, traces his path through Tsinghua, CMU, Trulia, and Tubi to two years as a stay-at-home dad. We discuss his free exam-prep site with about $10,000 in monthly revenue, enterprise AI adoption, employee incentives, and choices about wealth, risk, and family.
THE ARCHIVE
Zhibin Xiao traces a career from Zhejiang University and UC Davis to Oracle, Alibaba, and founding ZFlow.AI. We map the global chip supply chain, AI inference bottlenecks, NVIDIA's moat, and the architectural bets behind Groq, Cerebras, and SambaNova.
UIUC professor Tianyin Xu discusses award-winning systems research, mentorship, and how AI agents are reshaping interfaces, SRE, and reliability. We also go deep on formal verification, model checking, specification-driven development, and recovery-oriented computing.
Retell AI co-founder Todd Li traces the path from Google engineer and two YC applications to building an AI voice customer-service company with $80 million in revenue in two years. We discuss repeated pivots, enterprise delivery, five co-founders, competing with OpenAI, disciplined hiring, and execution.
From Tsinghua and MIT to HKUST, and from network systems and cloud gaming research to founding WiCi. We talk about timing, connection, long-term thinking, and the abilities that matter most in the AI era.
A long conversation spanning networked multimedia, open-source infrastructure, and entrepreneurship—the ideas behind LMCache and TensorMesh, and a research path from Tsinghua's Yao Class and CMU to the University of Chicago.
From Tsinghua, Berkeley, LMSYS, and Chatbot Arena to reinforcement learning, SGLang, an NVIDIA acquisition, and a second startup. We also talk about the courage to choose again at pivotal moments.
WHY WE TALK
Technology moves fast. Human choices are still worth understanding slowly. We keep the camera on people who create, decide, fail, and begin again at the frontier.
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