Michael Gao Email & Phone Number

California, United States

San Francisco, Ca, Us

Fabric creates next-generation cryptography technology that reimagines trust and privacy. We're a fast-growing deep tech startup (full-stack silicon, hardware and cloud) founded to unlock the next generation of cryptography by building new class of processor for the rapidly emerging verifiable compute market. Fabric’s flagship product - the Verifiable Processing Unit (VPU) - is a general-purpose, fully programmable chip built from the ground up to accelerate cryptography such as zero-knowledge proofs and fully homomorphic encryption. Want to learn more? Check out f16y.com

Co-founded Katena to capitalize on a unique opportunity in the Bitcoin hardware space. Advised and later led the development of a highly efficient 12nm Bitcoin mining chip that outperformed the industry leading chip on 7nm. Developed novel architectural concepts, including an approximate adder topology. Many of these ideas were tested on silicon down to 4nm. Katena rebranded to Fabric Systems when I stepped in as CEO in 2022. During my tenure, resolved a customer dispute with a total victory and final award for Katena of $14m+ in contractual damages. For more information, see this Coindesk article: https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2024/03/27/crypto-chip-company-katena-wins-lawsuit-filed-by-bitcoin-miner-coinmint/

Mountain View, California, Us

Luminous Computing is a photonic AI hardware startup backed by Bill Gates, 8090 Partners, Neo, and Dara Khosrowshahi among others. We’ve raised >$130M to date and our mission is to create the most powerful, scalable AI supercomputer on Earth. - Assembled the original founding team in 2018- Created vision for a world with Luminous hardware and led the workload research to substantiate it- Defined product strategy and high-level architecture (which we aggregated into a single role, the CSO), taking a suite of AI workloads down to microarchitecture tradeoffs, chip layout tradeoffs, and all the way down to packaging tradeoffs, photonic devices, and the analog noise budget- Helped recruit an all-star team, including some of the founders of the field of silicon photonics (we were the fastest growing AI hardware company in Silicon Valley in 2021)- Multiple patents issued in photonics

San Francisco, Ca, Us

Early pioneer in the low-code/no-code space, AlphaSheets was a collaborative online spreadsheet (competitor to Microsoft Excel) with a full-on no-coding-required visual interface for ETL and data science, along with an Apache Spark backend, AI-generated charts, live data plug-ins for Salesforce/Mixpanel/Hubspot, full Excel hotkey, formula parsing and execution, ribbon interface, and XLSX file format compatibility, and Python/R/SQL functionality in the cells (with full numpy/scipy/pandas integration built-in). - Raised $5M from Redpoint Ventures, Avalon Ventures, YC Fellowship- Acq Google - Best part of Alphasheets? Writing the entire backend in Haskell :)

Chicago, Illinois, Us

I found Bitcoin at the age of 15. When I first got into it, it was the only way for me to open anything like a bank account online without my parents' permission. I mined 1 BTC on my parents' computer, and then invested in GPU mining farms and later, the very first ASIC Bitcoin hardware company in the world, eventually growing my investments to over 12000 BTC by 2013. I then bought a bunch of Bitcoin mining systems from a startup in Silicon Valley and then, when their boards didn't work, I was left with a bunch of working chips that I had to figure out how to assemble into boards and systems. This was my first exposure to hardware.

Applied Mathematics

Fellow W3

Education record

Education record