micro1

Legal judgement is one of the most important forms of human expertise. Proud to serve on the Board of Directors of micro1 and co-author this research on contextual evaluations for law, with my friends @aliansarinik and Isabel Yishu Yang.

@Joshuabrowder @aliansarinik incredible

the micro1 robotics lab: real world data for intelligent models that co-exist in the physical world. we’re in-the-wild across 75 countries in 6,000+ unique environments collecting data. diverse movements, objects, and settings. the future of AI is as human as you can imagine. join us to start training robots today (link in comments).

should be fun tonight with @DynaRobotics

This Wednesday at 11am PT, Stanford Professor, Omer Reingold, and member of our technical staff, Nima Yazdani, will be on the micro1 forum to discuss bias and fairness in AI systems as they move from research into real-world deployment. Register here: micro1.ai/forum/building…

In our latest leadership session, @aliansarinik and @JeromeJosz discussed how AI is increasing the value of human expertise rather than reducing it. As AI expands across the economy, training these systems is continuing to emerge as a massive new job market that relies on structured human judgment.

@henrythe9ths 🙌🙌

He grew a company 35x in one year to $250M+ at 25. He’s the same kid who came to the US from Tehran at 10 without knowing a word of English. This is the untold story of Ali Ansari and micro1, which just cracked the top 10 on the Lean AI Leaderboard with $250M+ revenue and 80 employees. If you are building a lean AI company or want to sell to the top AI labs, read on for the full playbook. Ali built 2 companies before college. At Berkeley, he launched a software dev agency and started hiring international engineers. The interviews alone were eating 30–40 hours/week, so he built a tool to automate them, using GPT (one of the first AI recruiters in 2022). That insight eventually became micro1. For 2 years, it grew steadily with two business lines (an AI interviewer SaaS and an engineering marketplace) with happy customers. Then a data vendor approached Ali with an unusual request: hire 700 engineers to train AI models. That one conversation changed micro1’s trajectory. Ali realized they had accidentally built what every major AI lab desperately needed: a system to find, vet, and manage domain experts at scale across industries, at volume and fast. He then made a decision most founders would never have the nerve to make: He killed both working businesses and bet the entire company on going direct to the labs, with no safety net or guarantee that it would work. But the bet paid off, resulting in 35x growth, as they went from $7M ARR to ~$250M in one year. None of it came easy, and this level of growth became possible only after Ali solved the hardest problem in this space: How to sell to AI labs where buyers are deeply technical and part of tight communities where reputation travels fast. So I spent 10+ hours going deep into the decisions behind how micro1 built, sold, and scaled within the AI ecosystem and turned it into an actionable playbook for founders who want to sell to researchers. Inside, you'll get: • The 3-stage sales sequence Ali uses to close research deals like OpenAI and xAI • How he got into Stanford research circles with zero connections (and how that helped him close deals) • The proof of concept strategy: The dos and don’ts when researchers are evaluating you • How Elon Musk accidentally handed micro1 their biggest sales breakthrough • The net expansion playbook for enterprises and Fortune 500 companies (and what is converting fastest) • The full AI stack that powers micro1's recruiting engine • The incentive philosophy Ali rebuilds individually for every core team member every quarter Originally, I put this together as a resource for founders I work with directly. But the ideas and insights are too valuable not to share, so I'm giving it away publicly. Founders who crack AI sales at this hyperscale usually keep it close, but Ali shared every piece of it. So if you are building a business around frontier AI and research, grab this right away. It will save you months of costly relationship mistakes (Link in the first comment). Ali and team, welcome to the Leaderboard!

On our next micro1 Forum on March 6 at 11:30am PST, micro1 founder and CEO, @aliansarinik and micro1's VP of AI, @AndrewLeeMaas, will chat about why human judgment is becoming the most important layer in modern AI systems. From training models to evaluating agents, the future of AI is ultimately shaped by the people who guide it. Register here: lnkd.in/gCSbNd_f

when I was in Andrew's class I messaged him on Ed to consider joining us :) very grateful that today that became a reality. the work we do happens to be the perfect intersection of Andrew's areas of interest: conversational audio systems (Zara), RL training (Realm), and enterprise data (Cortex). looking forward to learn & work with Andrew to build the world's best data engine to train frontier models.

"Automation does not remove humans from the system. It reshapes the economic architecture of human contribution" Very well said, Mark. Learn more ⬇️

@Box Learn more: micro1.ai/case-study/box

The hardest part of scaling enterprise AI is no longer building agents. It's effectively deploying & trusting them in production. We partnered with @Box to build a human-grounded evaluation layer as they expanded AI into real workflows, validating agent behavior on sensitive content and live documents so performance holds up in real enterprise conditions. If you're deploying agentic AI in production, learn more at the link in comments.

.@APompliano is exactly right. while the scope of work of some jobs may suffer in the mid-term, entirely new categories of work are continuing to emerge. AI will ultimately create a lot more jobs than it displaces. and those displaced, in almost every case, will be evolutions of the same job.

As enterprise AI agents spread throughout organizations worldwide, better infrastructure is needed for testing and improving agentic behavior. That's why we built Cortex, micro1's home for AI agent reliability and development.

Full interview: youtube.com/watch?v=Z2OWqz…

Robyn Myers, former JP Morgan Investment Banking Analyst, shares how she’s continuing to build on her finance expertise while pursuing her MBA at Wharton. In the conversation, she talks about transitioning from traditional finance roles to high-impact AI work, and why flexibility became non-negotiable during business school. Link in the comments to the full interview on YouTube.

micro1 x @FireworksAI_HQ on the execution gap in enterprise AI ⬇️