Michael R. Bock

@michaelrbock

co-founder @columntax (acq). prev @waymo @pioneerdotapp @google. see my popular tweets using this side project i made: toptweets.by/@michaelrbock

San Francisco, CA

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Michael R. Bock
@michaelrbock
Dec 16, 2025
1/ After 5 years, I’m proud to share that @ColumnTax has found a new home. We’ve been acquired by @AiwynAI. I couldn’t be more sure this is the right move for our business, tech, and team. These pics are the moments we started & sold the company:
Michael R. Bock
@michaelrbock
Aug 19
I just advised a startup (seed stage) to help them get acquired. They raised about $5m, had a team of ~6, and got acquired by a hot AI company (can't say who yet, but you know them). The things that came up most often: - Storytelling for getting acquired is different than
Michael R. Bock
@michaelrbock
Aug 19
This is something pretty interesting I'm watching right now: the race between U.S. vs. China for the best open model. Meta says it will release an open-weight version of Muse Spark 1.2 soon. China's Moonshot AI has already released the weights for Kimi K3. So we put the two
Michael R. Bock
@michaelrbock
Aug 10
Before starting @ColumnTax, I had never hired anyone. By the time we were acquired by @AiwynAI, I had hired 50 amazing folks. I used the same algorithm for every hire:
Michael R. Bock
@michaelrbock
Jul 29
Anthropic just released its 4th model in 2 months: Opus 5. It's half the cost of Fable 5. And surprisingly, for knowledge work tasks like tax filing: Opus performs even better than its more expensive counterpart. We tested Opus 5 on TaxCalcBench. Here are the results vs. Fable