Drake Wong left xAI and joined Mirendil. The way he joined xAI was pretty unique—not through recruitment, but because xAI acquired his entire company. In 2023, he co-founded IUDEX AI with Arno Gau, building a developer-first AI observability platform, backed by Pear VC. He served as CTO. 14 months later, xAI acquired the company, and the whole team joined. He started working on Grok. Looking back at his career, it’s a remarkably straight path: Berkeley double major in Applied Mathematics + Data Science, just a bachelor’s degree. During his senior year, he conducted nuclear methods research at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, and casually wrote a library that he published on PyPI. After graduation, he joined the quant fund Voleon, refining production ML pipelines. Then he moved to Scale AI as a product manager, growing the ARR of the visual data platform from $50K to $12M; later, he transitioned back to engineering, leading the backend for the generative AI platform. Then he started his own company, focusing on observability. Six years, all dedicated to one thing—helping researchers move faster. And what Mirendil is working on is: handing over the entire AI research loop to AI itself. On their careers page, there’s a role literally called "Recursive Self-Improvement." a16z and Kleiner Perkins led a $200M seed round, valuing the company at $1B, with NVIDIA as a co-investor. The founding team of 20 people all came from Anthropic, xAI, DeepMind, and OpenAI. When they announced the company, they didn’t even have a product yet. The CEO is Behnam Neyshabur: co-inventor of the SAM optimizer, who led Blueshift and Minerva at Google, and co-led the Discovery team at Anthropic. After six years of building scaffolding for others, this time he’s building scaffolding for research itself. More talent insights: http://analysis.dinq.me.