naval-ravikant

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Legend
Michael LaFramboise
Founder · Engineer · Executive

Michael LaFramboise

Michael LaFramboise is the CEO and co-founder of Aurelius Systems, a San Francisco defense startup building autonomous, AI-guided laser turrets that detect and destroy drones at the speed of light for roughly pennies per shot. A Case Western engineer, Navy veteran, and ex-Coherent and Amazon Devices operator, he dropped out of a Columbia PhD in nano optical systems to build Archimedes, a low-cost directed-energy weapon. Aurelius raised a $10 million seed co-led by General Catalyst and Draper Associates in September 2025 and opened a U.S. manufacturing line for high-power fiber lasers in 2026, aiming to become America's domestic one-stop laser shop.

laser-defense · directed-energyRead →
Legend
Sandeep Panda
Founder · Engineer · Creator

Sandeep Panda

Sandeep Panda is the Co-Founder and CTO of Hashnode, a developer-first blogging and community platform that lets software engineers own their content and publish on custom domains. Founded in 2016 alongside Syed Fazle Rahman, Hashnode has grown to serve 3M+ monthly readers and 10M+ monthly views, backed by Sequoia Capital India's Surge, Salesforce Ventures, and angel investors including Naval Ravikant and Guillermo Rauch (Vercel). A graduate of IIIT Bhubaneswar with a background in web development and technical writing, Sandeep has authored books on AngularJS and HTML5, and is now building Bug0, an AI-native end-to-end testing platform.

hashnode · developer-communityRead →
Legend
Ankur Nagpal
Founder · Investor · Operator

Ankur Nagpal

Ankur Nagpal is an Indian-American entrepreneur, investor, and capital-efficient founder who built Teachable from a dorm-room frustration into a $250M exit, then reinvented himself as a solo-GP venture investor (Vibe Capital, $70M+ raised), fintech builder (Carry, acquired by AngelList in 2026), and prolific financial educator (Silly Money newsletter, 86K+ subscribers). In April 2026 he joined AngelList full-time as GP of USVC, a public venture fund co-chaired by Naval Ravikant with stakes in xAI, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Vercel.

entrepreneur · teachableRead →