🦄 <- This you bro ??

.

I'm sorry to break it to you, but you probably suffer from Unicorn Dysmorphia.

Symptoms include:
→ An irrational belief that your startup is a "rOcKeTsHiP 2 da mOOOON 🚀"
→ Holding out for a mythical VC to swoop in and save you
→ Wondering why every other startup is successful and you're not

Let me liberate you with a fact: only 0.00006% of startups become unicorns.

You're playing a game where the odds are stacked against you.

But the good news is you don't have to play the game.

You can absolutely:
→ Run your startup without trying to always please others
→ Find investors who actually want to help you and don't just see you as a potential paycheck
→ Fulfill your mission and find success on your own terms


The Anti-VC can get you there.

I've helped 1000+ founders find the best path to capital that worked for them.

And I can do the same for you.


So if you're ready to drop (Uni/Corn) from your pronouns...

If you're ready to undo years of VC brainwashing...

If you're ready to capitalize your startup ridiculously fast... visit my Featured section 👇🏽

Saleem Ahmad 🤎

Optico

My role at Optico Inc, a pioneer in cutting-edge Voice and Audio Analytics company takes me to the forefront of driving transformative change across multiple sectors, including Telecommunications, Gaming, Defense, Corporate e-Commerce, and Logistics. Our technology stands at the cusp of revolutionizing how information and communication are processed, offering benefits to a wide range of industries. 

My primary objective is to steer Optico Inc. towards a future where our innovations not only lead in market advancements but also adhering to the standards of ethics and morality.

Interim Chief Executive Officer

NSL Corporation

I manage 15 of my own Ecommerce & Marketplace Websites for Fun.

Hobbyist

Startup Ipoh

Connected businesses in Ipoh with Investors from across Malaysia, International Media and Distribution Networks. Provided venues for talks regarding Business Development and Growth for local businesses. Also organised Startup Weekend Ipoh & Tedx Ipoh.

Founder

JM Socials 

An Exciting Venture. Worked with Brands from Australia, France, Singapore as well as Local Businesses in the City of Ipoh (Malaysia's 3rd largest city). At JM Socials, i delivered websites, social media, branding and ecommerce strategies and campaigns, and photography services. Sometimes also shooting with the Getty Images Asia team. Events covered : World Laureus Sports Award, Beijing Selection for the 2022 Winter Olympics, Liverpool vs. Malaysia, PGA Tour.

Business Owner

Runnermyrun Sdn Bhd

Built a delivery startup from scratch when all odds pointed to the fact that Ipoh is not a good city for delivery. Made local restaurants an average of RM10,000 - RM50,000 per month in 2018. Numbers increased rampantly from there as our first app launched in December 2018. Partnerships associated to the company have all increased recognition and growth.

Founder & CEO

The Star Online

Through the All Malaysian Blogger Project, (my blog was The Gentle Snail) I was discovered by Senior Editor Tan Ju Eng who gave me the opportunity to be a host at The Star Online. The Star Online was a video platform in correspondence with Youth of Malaysia's RAGE community covering young and insightful current events of Malaysia. I was given the position to interview Music Producers from Universal Music and Warner Music who were flown into the country for shows, gigs, tours and work.

Freelance Host

News Herald Newspaper

I began my journey of Writing & Photography by covering the ongoings of events and occasions of the Catholic Churches in Perak. My education in this line was under the tutelage of Richard Hor. A wise School Principal from SMK Anglo Chinese School in the city who held the Managerial position for the State at this newspaper.

Contributing Writer

Royal College of Music

Enrolled for the examination in June. Prepared and Achieved my Diploma in Music in 2 months.

Graduate

Joanna Gough

After Portland's first Claude Hackathon [8 women and 112 men in a room (yeap)],  I was soooooooSO ready for SheBuilds!

Sponsored by Grant Macdonald of Cafe Rosetta, a small intimate group of women came together from the online sphere of Luma. What started as strangers ended with friends synergizing over spilling tea, blocked Taylor Swift playlists, and proforma spreadsheets while drinking delicious coffee.

The energy in an all-female crowd was different. Primrose flowers sat on the table looking pretty. Laptops opened. Among the non-technical crowd, maybe one or two could code fluently. That didn't matter. Ideas took center stage here. Ideas that had been living rent free in heads that could dream up a storm and worlds untouched.

For a technology sector often associated with credentialism and gatekeeping, the atmosphere was notably open. No one was concerned with signaling expertise. The focus was simply on building and learning. What emerged was a different entry point into the industry. One driven less by résumés and more by experimentation.

If Portland's tech ecosystem is looking for its next generation of builders, they're already visible in rooms like this one.

Gratitude to the partners who made it real: Lovable, Anthropic, Stripe, Cafe Rosetta, The AI Collective, and PDX Hacks. A mix of enterprise sponsors and community organizations splitting the difference between institutional backing and grassroots credibility.

We will be doing this again. The talent has always been there. What was missing was the invitation.

Consider this one.

Special thanks to the dream team that's making the teamwork, work. 
AJ Green Rick Turoczy Melissa Evers Abraham Noya Dinesh Mathew Sam Keen Arsh Haque Shashi Jain Mike Biglan, M.S. Eileen Brewer Jim Slavik Todd Greco Natalie TashchukAJ Bustamante Richard Amerman David Kordsmeier Dinesh Mathew + many more. 

#SheBuilds #InternationalWomensDay #WomenInTech #VibeCoding #PDXHacks #PortlandTech #BuildInPublic

Growth Hacker | Founder | Future of Work | Investing in the Machines that build the future.

Xiaomi just released footage of humanoid robots hitting 90.2% success rates in actual factory production.

What's wild: their VLA model processes real-time vision data to adapt mid-task when things go wrong.

Congratulations to Tritons Philip Chen, Joshua Lin, and Ryan Ni on recently winning OpenAI's Codex Hackathon in San Francisco! 👏

This group of Tritons, along with Stephen Hung of University of California, Berkeley, were finalists out of hundreds of teams at the hackathon, winning $10,000.

"We recently won at OpenAI's Codex Hackathon by building an AI computer vision project for games. We met and pitched to Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and other big names in tech, all within OpenAI's headquarters. Building in the heart of San Francisco, surrounded by engineers and founders from across the world, was a surreal experience." -Philip Chen, second-year student 🔱

#UCSanDiego #UCSD #OpenAI #AI

BREAKING:Anthropic just launched the Claude Marketplace 🎉
Enterprises can now procure AI tools directly through Claude, with existing Anthropic spend counting toward it - https://lnkd.in/ep3ECYEh

First partners: GitLab, Harvey, Lovable, Replit, Rogo, Snowflake

▫️ Legal work automated (Harvey)
▫️ Pitch decks built by AI (Rogo)
▫️ Coding with fewer devs needed (Replit)
▫️ Your Anthropic contract pays for all of it

Apple's App Store made third-party developers rich.

This does the opposite, it replaces what those developers used to charge $500/hr for.

Anthropic isn't building a consumer product. It's becoming the operating system enterprises run on.

Currently in limited preview. 1M views in the first hour 🤯

Which vertical do you think gets disrupted first?

PS: If you want to master Claude, save these:
▫️ Claude Opus 4.6 Explained → https://lnkd.in/eTmftGgr
▫️ How Serious Builders Co-Work With Claude → https://lnkd.in/ei7n7s32
▫️ The Claude Cowork Setup That Actually Works → https://lnkd.in/d6iF42qq
▫️ 10 Claude Cowork Workflows That Actually Work → https://lnkd.in/dipzF2MP
▫️ Every Way to Make Slides with Claude in 2026 → https://lnkd.in/ekKaqTFP
▫️ Claude in Excel: 30 Prompts to Audit Any Financial Model → https://lnkd.in/eXGBd2Sz
▫️ Claude Cowork: The Tool That Triggered a $285B Software Selloff → https://lnkd.in/dWvrqqCc
▫️ Claude Can Now Do SEO Like a $10K/Month Agency (For Free) → https://lnkd.in/eT3qsxgD
▫️ Sonnet 4.6 Breakdown → https://lnkd.in/ef6hWdRz

Have you guys met Abraham Noya yet? He’s the Chapter Lead for the Portland The AI Collective  with Dinesh Mathew. 

I’ve partnered them from PDX Hacks  to do Lovable | Anthropic SheBuilds in conjunction with International Woman’s Day. 

Shoutout to Grant Macdonald  who is sponsoring the venue and coffee for the evening at Cafe Rosetta, Portland. 

Follow Ab for more updates soon! :)

Leading AI-driven transformation at Nebula | Portland Chapter - The AI Collective | Founder, Team Nebula

Oops did I say free Anthropic credits? 👀Yeah.... I said it.

March 8th at 5PM, we're throwing down for International Women's Day with something a little different SheBuilds PDX in Portland!

Lovable is going free for 24 hours, powered by Anthropic.

$100 in FREE ANTHROPIC API credits and $250 in STRIPE CREDITS. 

This is the build-your-own-business starter kit and its FREE! 

Real community. Real builders. Real vibes.

Bring the idea, we bring the tools and the people.

This one is for the women founders, designers, devs, product thinkers, and the curious ones who've been waiting for the right moment to just build the thing. 

​Who should attend?

​- Women founders
- Women in tech and AI
- Designers and product builders
- Developers and engineers
- Anyone curious about building apps with AI

Oh and the venue? We're doing this at one of Portland's most slept-on cafes and trust me, the space alone is worth showing up for

We put this together with the homies at @PDX Hacks, powered by Lovable + Anthropic, and celebrating with Stripe.

AI Collective x PDX Hacks.

Drop a comment below and I'll send you the invite link. Let's build something. This is very limited space compared to our last event and we WILL be at capacity.

#SheBuilds #InternationalWomensDay #PDX #AICollective #WomenInTech #PortlandStartups #BuildWithAI #theAICollective

Most amount of hackathon winners in a day —— Mistral AI

I’m a Growth Hacker - Ex-VC | Founder | AI & Impact-Driven Venture Builder | Future of Work

I’m stealing the idea to Bring Your Own Cake

I've been noticing a lot of offline ideas lately. Apart from voice. is this also a part of the next frontier of retail or gadgets?

This past weekend I attended Hack for Humanity at Santa Clara University and won 2nd place out of 79 participating teams and 429 hackers!

My team built a device that can snap photos of injuries and uses an AI VLM to classify them by severity. Recorded patients are then automatically added to a triage log to help first-aid responders quickly determine who needs medical care most urgently.

Unfortunately, disaster scenarios usually don’t offer reliable internet access for luxuries like accessing advanced AI models for wound classification.

So we made our device run completely offline. 

We fitted a Raspberry Pi 5 with a camera module, a touchscreen interface, and an AI Hat+ 2 extension to allow us to load a lightweight visual language model on-device. After snapping a photo, the Pi sends the image to the model for processing, which then produces an entry on our SQLite database of recorded patients. If you’re interested in learning more about the project, there’s more information on our devpost, which includes a live demo: https://lnkd.in/guABCZHD

I want to thank my teammates Luca Verweyen and Anthony Dang for building this out with me. 

I also want to thank Santa Clara University ACM and all of the hackathon sponsors, judges, staff, and volunteers for putting this event together. 

Several redbulls were harmed in the making of this project.

Founder and CEO at stealth AI / Agents startup

New post: **Value of Hackathons: What I Learned from a Dozen+ Hackathons in 2025**

Hackathons are one of the best ways to innovate. But after doing over a dozen in 2025, I've come to see them as something else entirely: accidental research labs.

You don't just build things at hackathons—you learn how other people build things. What tools they reach for. What strategies work under pressure. What shortcuts break. If you're paying attention, that observational data is as valuable as anything you code.

The post covers:

- Why hackathons are uniquely useful research environments (time compression, diverse participants, real motivation, low-stakes experimentation)
- What companies actually get out of sponsoring hackathons (hint: it's product research, not generosity)
- My full playbook—before, during, and at presentation time
- Perspectives from Dave Nielsen (PayPal's first Developer Advocate, 1000+ events), Adam Chan (hackersquad.io), and Allie Jones (multi-hackathon winner)
- Lessons learned the hard way from a year of hacking

One insight from Allie that stuck with me: "The entry point moved from 'can you code fast enough' to 'do you care enough to try.'"

AI tools have fundamentally changed what's possible in 24 hours. What used to require a team of five now takes one or two people with the right tools. The barrier to building something real has never been lower.

My advice: find a hackathon this month and just show up. You'll learn more in a weekend than in a month of tutorials.

Read the full post: https://lnkd.in/gAUDfiAa 

Thanks to Dave Nielsen, Adam Chan, and Allie Jones for sharing their perspectives.

#Hackathons #AIAgents #SoftwareEngineering #AI #Innovation #BuildersCollective #TechCommunity

Open article: Value of Hackathons: What I Learned from a Dozen+ Hackathons in 2025 by maximilien.substack.com

Value of Hackathons: What I Learned from a Dozen+ Hackathons in 2025

Awesome party! Thanks for the invite Spencer Lindsay . NextNW

To whoever thinks AI is not at a film level yet. 
It's time for ya'll to wake up.

AI video just crossed a new threshold.

With Kling 3.0, we created a nature sequence, for an 8-minute video about Lucifer, that honestly looks like it belongs in a Planet Earth documentary.

And the crazy part:

We made it in just a couple of days.

The sequence moves through three environments in one continuous cinematic flow:

Ocean → Air → Land

It starts underwater with whales and dolphins gliding through sunlit blue water.
Then transitions to the sky with an eagle soaring over a massive mountain valley.

Finally it lands on the African plains with a herd of enormous elephants walking through golden grass at sunrise.

The realism is pretty wild.

You start with a single start frame, enable multi shot, and then define the action for each shot.

My prompt for the sequence was intentionally simple:

"cinematic nature documentary sequence: underwater shot of a massive blue whale swimming slowly through deep ocean with dolphins gliding beside it, sun rays piercing the water, schools of fish moving around coral reef. transition to aerial shot: a giant eagle soaring over a vast mountain valley with a winding river below, dramatic clouds and golden sunset lighting. transition to land shot: herd of enormous African elephants walking through tall grass on an open savanna at sunrise, dust in the air, epic wildlife documentary style, ultra realistic, cinematic lighting"

The result feels shockingly close to real wildlife footage.

And it’s a reminder of where this is all going.

What happens when creators start making entire films this way?

Shout out to the heavy hitters on Linkedin, for even more epic multi-shot examples check these guys out: PJ Accetturo Kavan Cardoza and Jan-Willem Blom

We won a hackathon by making 800 million people's lives easier.

In 8 hours.

Screen readers are broken. They choke on dynamic content, skip half the web, and force blind users to memorize hundreds of keyboard shortcuts just to do basic tasks.

So we (Nalin Atmakur, Denis Romain and I) built Thea. Hold a key and speak. An AI agent takes over your entire computer. It browses the web, manages files, runs terminal commands, installs software, fills out forms. And it narrates every action out loud so you always know what's happening.

"Book me a flight to London next Tuesday." It opens the browser, searches, navigates the booking flow, and talks you through every step.

"Find that PDF I downloaded yesterday." It searches your file system and reads back what it found.

No mouse. No screen reader. Just your voice.

The stack: Electron app with React and TypeScript on the frontend. OpenClaw gives the AI agent full computer access including browser automation via Playwright, terminal, and file system. Whisper V3 Turbo handles speech-to-text. ElevenLabs narrates every action back to the user in real time. Claude Sonnet does the reasoning.

We also built in layered audio feedback so users always know what's happening. Start chimes when recording begins, tick sounds as the agent works through each step, and spoken summaries of long outputs condensed into clear sentences.

The insight is simple: stop trying to make every app accessible. Just give users an AI that can operate the entire computer for them.

Accessibility shouldn't depend on whether a developer remembered to add alt text.

Website: https://lnkd.in/efzam-er
Github: https://lnkd.in/ey4HYG35

Just timed myself writing 5 emails (detailed discussions). I'm currently at an average of 10 minutes per email. Any specific tools used to drop that average to 3-5 minutes?

Before the day ends. I would like to wish everyone, Happy Pi Day. 
https://lnkd.in/gKgQjEJb

Open video: Pie in the Face Compilation on youtube.com

Director of Identity Standards at Okta / OAuth @ IETF / Co-chair of IPSIE @ OpenID

🌲 Portland hackers: What are you building tomorrow? 🛠️

I'm thrilled to be on the judging panel for the Claude Code Hackathon tomorrow! I've spent much of the last year working with Anthropic and a bunch of other smart people on MCP, so it’s a treat to step out from the "specs and standards" side of things to see what developers are actually building with it.

If you haven't already signed up, you can find the link in the comments below! And if you’re going to be there, come say hi!

Founder AlteredCraft | AI Research & Advisement | ex: AWS, Lululemon, Nike

Is this Bible the way to winning Hackathons?

Building & Teaching AI Agents to Devs | CS @IIIT

This guy won the Anthropic hackathon and dropped the BIBLE of Claude Code.

Everything you need. Nothing you don't.

P.S. I share such resources with 200K+ AI/ML Engineers everyday here: https://lnkd.in/dcibJhzQ

What's inside:

Agents (13 total)
→ Plan features
→ Review code
→ Fix build errors
→ Security audits

Skills (56 total)
→ TDD workflows
→ Token optimization
→ Memory persistence
→ Continuous learning

Commands (32 total)
→ /plan your feature
→ /tdd enforce tests
→ /security-scan everything
→ /refactor-clean dead code

Works on every tool
→ Claude Code (native)
→ Cursor IDE
→ OpenCode
→ Codex CLI

Battle tested facts
→ 10 months daily use
→ Real products shipped
→ 992 internal tests
→ 60% cost reduction

New in latest drop
→ PM2 orchestration
→ 6 multi-agent commands
→ AgentShield security scanner
→ Cross platform support

Repo: https://lnkd.in/dS5BcKpB

Unpopular opinion has a $1B Valuation sticker.

CEO & Founder at Symbol Zero // Microsoft Regional Director

Yan LeCun and Fei Fei Li have each raised $1 Billion in 2026 for their Not gen AI Startups that consciously have nothing to do with generative AI. Both have spoken about their disinterest with generative AI. Their view is that gen AI has reached its limits, will never reach AGI, will never reach ASI. And that statistical (transformer) models are maxed out. And thus they push to world models and spatial intelligence. 

They have tossed the generative AI playbook of AI training out the window, which must terrify Nvidia. They want realtime cumulative learning. That would reduce Nvidia chipset needs to 1/100th of what it is now. Jensen Huang must be rolling over in his metaphorical grave as he watches Yan LeCun ad Fei Fei Li sidestep the waste of generative Ai. 

Back at CES 2026, Nvidia rolled out a robotics platform laughably based around generative AI. What Fei Fei Li, Yan LeCun, (and also John Carmack) are each building, flies in the face of the horribly inefficient, inaccurate, bug ridden, hallucinatory, security flawed approach of putting generative AI into robotics.

It is time for a return to real AI principles, studying cognition, while we move to drop the stochastic parrots of generative Ai. And remember, generative Ai is large 'A', small 'i'. Very ARTFICIAL, not very intelligent.

Meanwhile for the game industry folks in the audience, why are world models interesting? Because world models and spatial intelligence are realtime learning (not training) in virtual worlds. We do all know something about that, don't we?

Last, let's be real. There is no AGI, there is no ASI, for not years, but decades or more, maybe hundreds of years. We do not know how to make consciousness or sentience. We don't even how to define it in us. We will not stumble onto it. There is no magic path to science fiction: to Star Wars Droids, Star Trek Androids, Alien Synths, Bladerunner Replicants, BattleStar Galactica Cylons. Sorry. Nope.
----
Substack: "From Words to Worlds: Spatial Intelligence is AI’s Next Frontier"
(Fei-Fei Li) (Nov 10, 2025)
Substack: https://lnkd.in/gZ8KrArb
----
Reuters: "Ex-Meta AI chief Yann LeCun's AMI raises $1.03 billion for alternative AI approach" (Katie Paul, Anhata Rooprai) (March 9, 2026)
Reuters: https://lnkd.in/ga89yUtf
----
Reuters: "AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li's World Labs raises $1 billion in funding"  (Feb 18, 2026)
Reuters: https://lnkd.in/g6bm44k8
----
Wired: "Yann LeCun Raises $1 Billion to Build AI That Understands the Physical World. Meta’s former chief AI scientist has long argued that human-level AI will come from mastering the physical world, not language. His new startup, AMI, aims to prove it." (Mar 10, 2026)
Wired: https://lnkd.in/gEiMW_ya
----
Wired: "The Godmother of AI Wants Everyone to Be a World Builder. Stanford computer scientist Fei-Fei Li is unveiling a startup that aims to teach AI systems deep knowledge of physical reality. Investors are throwing money at it." (Sep 13, 2024)
Wired: https://lnkd.in/guDcbNG6
----

Full Stack Engineer | Backend-Oriented | Node.js & Golang & Python | Problem Solver | AI-Driven & Scalable Systems

AI 3D Character (Runs Fully Locally)

I’ve just finished a side project: an AI-powered 3D character that can listen and talk.
The entire system runs fully locally on my PC.

From a #high-level perspective:
1. It can take a text question and respond with voice.
2. It can also take voice input and respond with voice.

#Tools used in this project:
1. I created the 3D character using Ready Player Me
https://readyplayer.me/

2. I generated animations using Mixamo
https://www.mixamo.com/

3. Speech-to-text was handled using OpenAI Whisper (open-source STT model)
https://lnkd.in/drE8DZeJ

4. For the LLM, I used Llama 3.2 via Ollama
https://lnkd.in/da_i2Cd2

5. Text-to-speech was generated using edge-tts
https://lnkd.in/dmfWQFva

6. Lip sync was created using Rhubarb Lip Sync
https://lnkd.in/dtDN-vhq

System #workflow:
1. I built a minimal Node.js server with two endpoints:
/tts → converts text to speech
/stt → converts speech to text

2. I built a React.js + React Three Fiber frontend application.

3.1 If the user input is text, it is sent to Llama, which processes the prompt, generates a response, and sends it to edge-tts.

3.2 If the user input is voice, it is sent to Whisper, which converts it to text. The text is then sent to Llama, and the response is forwarded to edge-tts.

4. The generated text is sent to edge-tts to convert it into speech.

5. The audio is processed by Rhubarb to generate lip-sync data.
Finally, the 3D avatar is rendered with synchronized voice and facial animation.

The full architecture diagram, I’ll share in the comments. 👇

Register here : https://lnkd.in/gaUJUn8w
If you've been wondering how to get into a Claude Portland Hackathon, this is how : You need to start with Claude Code on the Claude Developers Platform. #notthechatside . 

Join us this Saturday to kickstart your, possibly new career for the future. If you've seen Linkedin posts of Hackathon Winners in the Bay Area, NYC, London, Dubai, Tokyo and SG with their amazing creations. This workshop is going to get you started on your journey. 

For more information, head over to our Luma page for registration. This event is open to all. : https://lnkd.in/gaUJUn8w

taplio

The Battle

Saleem Ahmad 🤎

Joanna Gough

Followers

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taplio

The Battle

Saleem Ahmad 🤎

Joanna Gough

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Joanna Gough's LinkedIn Performance

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Performance ScoreJoanna Gough's LinkedIn Performance