Sam Siavoshian
I’m a founder and software engineer in San Diego. I co-founded Lanes, and I do machine-learning research with Johns Hopkins.
I grew up in Iran. At ten, I placed 4th in Asia with the national robotics team. At 13, I took my first engineering job. I speak Farsi and English, and I’m teaching myself Russian and French.
What I’m working on now
Most of my time goes into Lanes. You give it a goal, such as forty booked calls. Its AI agents work in a real browser. They find the right people, write to them in your voice, and book the calls. Active users are growing.
With a team of Johns Hopkins researchers, I study whether frozen language models can use time and persistent state that never appear in the prompt. I am first author of ChronoState and Chronometric Injection, and I co-authored Constrained Diffusion for Orbital Monte Carlo.
What I worked on before
- 2026I built Arena, an AI tool that found leads for startups. It reached 120 active users. I incorporated it at 16 and raised a $10K angel SAFE.
- 2026I won the Overshoot (YC W26) track at the YC × Google DeepMind hackathon with a browser agent that improves itself through reinforcement learning.
- 2026I placed top 8 of 80 at the Browser Use × YC hackathon and top 12 at the YC × MCP Use hackathon.
- 2026We placed top 10 at YC’s Bio/AI hackathon.
- 2026I co-hosted the Nozomio hackathon in San Francisco.
- 2026I built Agent Notch, an agent that lives in the Mac’s notch and drives the mouse and keyboard for you. It won Best Innovation at TritonHacks, UC San Diego’s hackathon. I won the same award there in 2025 with CoverAI.
- 2026YC selected me (again) for Startup School 2026. Of 30,000 applicants, 2,500 were chosen.
- 2025I joined Reacher (YC S25) at 16. I won the internship at a hackathon and then passed the technical interviews.
- 2025I won CipherHacks with Eliot, an AI bug-bounty assistant.
- 2025YC selected me for AI Startup School in San Francisco. I was one of the only high schoolers there. I met Paul Buchheit (creator of Gmail) and watched Sam Altman and Garry Tan up close.
- I reached the Gold Division of the USA Computing Olympiad.
The rest is on my résumé.
How I work
I build something, put it in front of people, and watch what they do. People either use what I built and pay for it, or I have more work to do. Once, putting it in front of people meant a 14-hour train and bus ride from San Diego to a hackathon in San Francisco.
If you’re building something, say hi.
