Hey, I'm Jan Carbonell 👋

Got my first Lego set as a kid and never really stopped tinkering. Taught myself how to code by going to hackathons and stumbled into AI back in 2017, before it was fashionable. Got lucky enough to work alongside talented folks that are going to leave a mark. Got inspired to leave my own mark. Previously started two companies.

Originally from Barcelona. Currently in SF. Always keen to meet interesting people IRL.

What am I doing now?

Co-Founder & CTO at Secondly. Stay tuned for more updates soon!

My life story

• I got my first computer when I was 6 and fell in love with building. First doing websites with Dreamweaver, then playing strategy games such as AoE2, Praetorians and Magic the Gathering.
• Built my first script for Ogame so I could sleep while my fleets stayed safe.
• I wanted to build iPhone games at 13 but couldn't afford a Mac, so I learned how to jailbreak iPods and helped others do the same.
• Living in Canada and the US as a teenager broadened my view of opportunity and community. I'm grateful to the Roberts family in Conyers for hosting and helping me channel my energy with sports, math, and unlimited Dr Pepper.
• I worked many jobs as a teenager (babysitter, lifeguard, waiter). Many things can be learned quickly, even if you don't have experience, and accidentally helped outlaw serving food and drinks on a hammock in Barcelona.
• I chose Industrial Engineering because it was interdisciplinary, and I wanted to learn about everything. It trained me to think in systems and break down hard problems into smaller, more manageable components.
• Fun fact: I made $2k in a day by wholesaling roses. Basically, a crash course on sales, positioning, and zestines -given that everyone else is selling the same.
• My first “serious” job was an internship at Accenture Strategy. I learned a lot, but could not see myself selling decks to customers and charging them for impact.
• I started learning in AI via Fast.ai and deeplearning.ai in 2017 before it was cool. Started a non-profit (saturdays.ai) to help others learn AI while building projects.
• Also boostrapped akademy.ai, which got acquired by Strive School. I then worked as an ML Engineer at The Motley Fool. It was really exciting to implement BERT and other ML systems like a knowledge search DB (what we used to call this before RAG) at scale before GPT-3 and ChatGPT were a thing.
• Got a full-ride scholarship to pursue a dual degree at Cornell Tech in NYC, where I did research on long-context RAG with Sasha Rush, and organized several LLM hackathons.
• Moved to SF after graduation, and started building in the AI space. The rest of my story is yet to be written.
• At my deathbed, I want to be able to look back at everything that I've done with pride. Pride what I worked on, how I went about it and who I worked with, and most importantly, the scale and depth in which others have benefited from the outputs of my work.

Projects

• Open Ventilator: Low-cost Emergency ventilator initiative that we built during COVID (approved for human trials)
• Tunerkit: Developer tools for fine-tuning LLMs
• Omniguide: Haptic wearable for visually impaired navigation
• A New Sense: Ultrasound obstacle detection for the visually impaired.
• ASL Texter: A real-time sign-language interpreter with CNNs and OpenCV.
• Splitbot: A Telegram bot that auto-settles group expenses
• Organized several hackathons: IvyHacks, OSSHack, LlamaHack, HackGPT, HackUPC, Social Impact, Maritime & Blue Logistics