Peter Gao

Yo, you gotta hear about Peter Gao. This guy’s the real deal in the tech startup world. So, he’s part of YC S20, which means he crushed it in the summer 2020 batch, right? Already shows he’s got that entrepreneurial fire. But what’s super interesting is his process, it’s like a rollercoaster of working at some of the coolest places and then jumping into building shit himself.

First off, he’s been around some heavy hitters. He was early at Cruise Automation, like employee #18, working on perception and deep learning for self-driving cars. That’s no joke. Cruise is basically the Tesla of self-driving, and being part of that early team means he’s been deep in the trenches of modern tech. Before that, he did some deep learning research at UC Berkeley, so the guy’s got legit academic chops too. Not just a hacker; he’s got serious research creds.

And he didn’t stop there. He’s worked at Pinterest and Khan Academy, both pretty different but equally original spaces. Pinterest is all about visual discovery, and Khan Academy is education tech, so he’s seen a bunch of angles in how tech impacts daily life and learning.

Now, here’s where it gets really interesting. He’s the co-founder and CEO of Aquarium Learning. And this startup? It’s backed by YC and Sequoia. They’re all about improving machine learning models by making training data better. Basically, he saw a problem in AI, training data quality, and decided to build a company to fix it. That’s a classic founder move: find a real problem, and go all-in.

What does this tell us about him? I mean, dude’s not just riding trends. He’s been deep in research, worked on self-driving tech, then pivoted to AI training data quality, so he’s got a real curiosity and killer instinct for what’s next. His process screams passion for tech that actually moves the needle, not just for hype. He’s motivated by solving hard problems and pushing AI forward, which is why he’s now leading Aquarium through a seed round raising $2.6 million.

Bottom line? Peter Gao’s the guy who’s been in the trenches, learning from the best, and now he’s building the future of AI. If you ask me, he’s one to watch, smart, driven, and totally committed to changing the game.