Sam Siavoshian

I grew up in Iran. At ten I was competing for the national robotics team; at 13 I had my first engineering job, writing Python for a local company. I speak Farsi and English, and I’m teaching myself Russian.

• 2026Won the YC × Google DeepMind hackathon with a browser agent that improves itself through RL.
• 2026First author of ChronoState, on whether a frozen LLM can track time it never sees in the prompt. With Johns Hopkins.
• 2026Built Agent Notch, an agent that lives in the Mac notch and works through your cursor. Most Innovative at TritonHacks.
• 2025Joined Reacher (YC S25) as GTM engineer, at 16. The job was a hackathon prize.
• 2025Built Noora, an AI companion for elderly users with long-term memory and voice calls.
• —Reached USACO Gold Division. Picked twice for YC’s AI Startup School (30,000 applied this year). Met the creator of Gmail, and watched Sam Altman and Garry Tan up close.
• 2019Placed 4th in Asia with Iran’s national robotics team. I was ten.

and more.

These days it’s all Arena. Everyone tells founders to talk to their customers; Arena finds the people already talking about your product on Reddit, X, Hacker News, LinkedIn, and Product Hunt, then drafts the reply. I incorporated at 16, raised a $10K angel SAFE, and shipped every part of it myself.

I learn by shipping: build the thing, put it in front of people, be wrong in public. Every job I’ve had started that way. Once it meant a 14-hour train and bus from San Diego to a San Francisco hackathon.

If you’re building something, say hi.