The fastest way to SF for people who want to build a generational company
Joined January 2025
- Tweets662
- Following171
- Followers5.6K
- Likes1K
The Bridge retweeted
One of our new founders landed a multimillion-dollar contract in Japan by growing a beard, printing fake “Growth Director” business cards and throwing his own embassy reception.
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He’s just one of the outliers in The Bridge Fall 26 cohort, which has officially kicked off.
A few other crazy things they pulled off before landing in San Francisco:
> Won four international physics olympiad medals, then helped scale a foundation model at top HFT firm 200x in size as part of a team whose model generated nine-figure annualised revenue.
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> Turned down a €400K quant trading track to teach himself longevity biotech.
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> Built a voting platform at 15, grew it to 30,000 users, and sold it to the Council of Europe at 16.
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> Built an AI tool that turns prompts into working hardware designs and grew it from $0 to $23K MRR in six months. Had already sold an AI tutoring business with 10,000+ paying students.
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> Built a thrust-vector-controlled rocket in high school, then went on to build testbeds at NASA JPL and rocket-engine hardware at Japan’s space agency. Also raised CHF 2M for charities door-to-door alongside his studies.
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> Built an AI product solo to 350,000 users and $30K ARR in eight months, with $0 spent on marketing.
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> Won the highest-scoring gold medal at the International Philosophy Olympiad, then built a quant-finance platform that hit $30K ARR in its first month after launching exclusively to MIT’s Master of Finance cohort.
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At The Bridge, we take chances on crazy outliers who’ve shown an edge that’s impossible to ignore.
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Follow The Bridge to follow their journey.
The Bridge retweeted
love living these stories
unexpected things happen when you walk out of @jointhebridge house in the Mission
The Bridge retweeted
pretty nice first angel @sama
The Bridge retweeted
Day 1 we told our founders getting into rooms is an important skill
So they crashed the OpenAI party and got Sam Altman to sign the Sama Lisa
One of our new founders landed a multimillion-dollar contract in Japan by growing a beard, printing fake “Growth Director” business cards and throwing his own embassy reception.
⠀
He’s just one of the outliers in The Bridge Fall 26 cohort, which has officially kicked off.
A few other crazy things they pulled off before landing in San Francisco:
> Won four international physics olympiad medals, then helped scale a foundation model at top HFT firm 200x in size as part of a team whose model generated nine-figure annualised revenue.
⠀
> Turned down a €400K quant trading track to teach himself longevity biotech.
⠀
> Built a voting platform at 15, grew it to 30,000 users, and sold it to the Council of Europe at 16.
⠀
> Built an AI tool that turns prompts into working hardware designs and grew it from $0 to $23K MRR in six months. Had already sold an AI tutoring business with 10,000+ paying students.
⠀
> Built a thrust-vector-controlled rocket in high school, then went on to build testbeds at NASA JPL and rocket-engine hardware at Japan’s space agency. Also raised CHF 2M for charities door-to-door alongside his studies.
⠀
> Built an AI product solo to 350,000 users and $30K ARR in eight months, with $0 spent on marketing.
⠀
> Won the highest-scoring gold medal at the International Philosophy Olympiad, then built a quant-finance platform that hit $30K ARR in its first month after launching exclusively to MIT’s Master of Finance cohort.
⠀
At The Bridge, we take chances on crazy outliers who’ve shown an edge that’s impossible to ignore.
⠀
Follow The Bridge to follow their journey.
The Bridge retweeted
Non-US founder? This is your shortcut to Silicon Valley.
The Bridge is an 8-week residency in San Francisco.
• 50 non-US founders
• One house
• $250K for the best teams
• Free compute + a hardware lab
• Access to top Bay Area advisors and investors
• Three healthy meals a day
The best part: you can show up pre-idea and pre-team.
Most leave with a co-founder, a vision, first customers and a seed round.
It's part of Entrepreneur First, whose backers include the Collison brothers, Demis Hassabis, Reid Hoffman, Nat Friedman and Eric Schmidt.
You don't need to live in SF to build there.
You need 8 weeks.
Bookmark this + tag a founder outside the US.
The Bridge retweeted
Karol Hausman is the co-founder and CEO of Physical Intelligence.
His company is betting on a future where physical labor is as readily available as electricity. And the plan is to build a single AI model that can power any robot in the world.
PI’s models are already moving beyond robot arms. One partner uses them to power an autonomous wheel loader that loads a dump truck with no operator inside the machine.
The parallels between @physical_int and early OpenAI cannot be ignored: a research-first company, a general-purpose model, and some of the field’s best minds working on it.
@hausman_k managed to get not one but six well-known names in robotics and tech to bet on the company: @svlevine , @chelseabfinn , @lachygroom (an early Stripe employee and prolific investor), @QuanVng , @adnan_esm and @brian_ichter
For a team like this to work, everyone has to be willing to question their own ideas.
And as CEO, Karol sets the example. He’s intellectually honest enough to reconsider the path ahead, even when it means walking away from work he’s spent years building.
During his PhD, a visiting researcher told him to scrap two years of work and change methods. Karol thought the visitor was wrong. Then he attended his lecture, changed his mind, and rebuilt his PhD around deep learning.
The visitor was Sergey Levine. Today, they’re co-founders. They deliberately hire for that same intellectual honesty at Physical Intelligence to maintain the cultural DNA.
@Anastasia_ELW and I traced how Karol thinks, hires, and gets some of robotics’ best minds to build together.
Sidedoors Presents: Karol Hausman, The Founder Who Bets Everything on Chaos.
sidedoors.co/p/physical-inte…
probably better than anything we could write about The Bridge ourselves
if you’re thinking about joining, read @cryptobuilder_ honest account of her first two months: finding a cofounder, living with 60 founders, and figuring things out along the way
My Journey at @jointhebridge by @joinef
I wrote this at the SF airport, heading home after two months at The Bridge by Entrepreneurs First. It feels like the perfect moment to share a bit about my journey.
When I boarded the plane to SF, I didn’t really know what I was applying for or what I was heading into. I had never been to the US and was ready to build solo.
Two months later, I am leaving with an absolutely fantastic cofounder, a much higher bar for what is possible, and the muscle of knowing: “We’ll figure things out no matter what.”
I wrote about working with the EF team, living with 60 young founders in one house, and the ups and downs of our first two months building a company together.
For those considering joining and wanting a glimpse, those curious about what it feels like, and those who have been side by side with me all this time, here is my story: paragraph.com/@lisaakselrod/…
The Bridge retweeted
My Journey at @jointhebridge by @joinef
I wrote this at the SF airport, heading home after two months at The Bridge by Entrepreneurs First. It feels like the perfect moment to share a bit about my journey.
When I boarded the plane to SF, I didn’t really know what I was applying for or what I was heading into. I had never been to the US and was ready to build solo.
Two months later, I am leaving with an absolutely fantastic cofounder, a much higher bar for what is possible, and the muscle of knowing: “We’ll figure things out no matter what.”
I wrote about working with the EF team, living with 60 young founders in one house, and the ups and downs of our first two months building a company together.
For those considering joining and wanting a glimpse, those curious about what it feels like, and those who have been side by side with me all this time, here is my story: paragraph.com/@lisaakselrod/…
The Bridge retweeted
my advice: @jointhebridge
go to sf
meet you peers irl
get 250k$
