I'm stoked to announce I've joined Venice.ai as CTO.
Erik Voorhees and I met as undergraduates at the University of Puget Sound. I went on to build Blue Box, a cloud computing company that IBM acquired in 2015. Then Strix Leviathan, a quantitative crypto hedge fund that spun out Makara, the first SEC-registered crypto robo-advisor, which Betterment acquired in 2022. Erik went on to found ShapeShift and spent a decade arguing that money should be separated from the state.
Twenty years of building things separately, parallel lives, always circling the same idea: technology should serve the people who use it, not the institutions that control it.
Last year Erik wrote "The Separation of Mind and State," laying out the thesis for Venice. If Bitcoin was about pulling money out of the hands of governments and corporations, Venice is the same fight for a new frontier. Every prompt you type into ChatGPT is logged. Every response is stored, analyzed, tied to your identity, and handed to anyone with a subpoena. The AI layer is becoming the most personal thing a person has, and the companies building it treat your thoughts as their data.
That pulled me in. I started building Venice with Erik during nights, weekends, whatever hours I could scrape together. He was writing the manifesto. I was helping write the code.
People showed up. 850,000 registered users. 50,000 daily active users. All before I'd officially joined. The codebase was growing, the team was growing, and I was still building Venice on the side. At some point you're either in or you're out.
I'm in.
Venice doesn't log your prompts. Doesn't store your conversations. Doesn't censor what you can ask. The architecture is simple: your data lives in your browser, inference requests go through an encrypted proxy to decentralized compute, and nothing persists anywhere except on your device. Open source models. No account required for basic use. No permanent record.
Privacy isn't a feature we bolted on. It's the foundation. Either you have it or you don't, and the only way to actually have it is to never collect the data in the first place.
Working alongside Erik and Teana Baker-Taylor, both of whom I've known for years, to build this. If you believe intelligence should be unrestricted, come build it with us.