Pinned
After three years at CRV, I am stepping onto Striker Venture Partners' founding team, leading the firm's AI investments. Thanks to @BusinessInsider for covering the move.
Brian Zhan
@brianzhan1
Partner @strikervp. Seed @ElorianAI, @SkildAI, @PeriodicLabs, @Reflection_AI, @DynaRobotics, @RicursiveAI, @humansand (angel), @LeptonAI (acq), @VoyageAI (acq)
SF
Joined April 2016
- Very prescient for Forbes Next Billion-Dollar Startups list to feature @ElorianAI as the cover page pick. Multimodal reasoning is a large use cases for all of the frontier models, but reasoning across modalities is ignored by the large labs in favor of coding. Elorian is solving
- Seeing a major narrative violation on "semis sold off on "cheap Chinese open models kill compute demand." Kimi K3 API costs $3 input / $15 output per million tokens. Claude Opus 4.8 costs $5 / $25. K3 is a 2.8T param model that reasons at max effort, burning 13k+ thinking
- After Putnam perfect score, Axiom just got a perfect score at IMO 2026. Consistent performance.
- It was an honor to give one of the invited workshop talks at ICML. The thesis: whoever turns messy real-world outcomes into reliable, scalable reward signals trains models where foundation models alone are stuck. It's also how we pick startups. Talk built with @HenryYin_ CodingExcited to co-organize the 1st "RL from World Feedback" workshop at ICML on July 10, featuring: - @MillionInt : ex VP of RL @ OpenAI - @chelseabfinn : Stanford/PI - Ben Eysenbach: Princeton - @brianzhan1 : Partner @ striker.vc - @robertarail : GDM - Jesse Zhang: UW
