Mikhail Sychev

AI Founder & CTO | YouTube Rebuild Lead | Waymo AI | a16z Speedrun

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Starting at 6:30 PM UTC

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About

I led the complete rebuild of YouTube.com, worked on AI research infrastructure at Waymo, and now lead Fictional.ai as co-founder and CTO, backed by a16z Speedrun. I also created Pony Diffusion, an open-weight image model family used to generate 3B+ images. My experience spans two decades, from building independently to setting technical direction across major product organizations. I coach engineers and founders on building real AI products, preparing for senior and Staff interviews, growing into technical leadership, and deciding what to tackle next. I've interviewed hundreds of engineers, teach AI-driven product development with ByteByteGo, and mentor through MentorCruise and Prepfully. We work on your actual project, design, resume or career decision. You'll get candid feedback, practical next steps and an advocate invested in your progress. I bring humor too, with a background in improv and clowning. I'm based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Mikhail’s AI & ML Engineering Qualifications

Experience level: Associate

60+ AI & ML Engineering clients

I created Pony Diffusion, one of the most popular open-weight image model families, used to generate 3B+ images. I'm now co-founder and CTO of Fictional.ai, backed by a16z Speedrun, where I built the technology from the first prototype and lead engineering, hiring and technical strategy. My work spans LLMs and agents, training data, model development, evaluation and deployment. Before that, I spent 12 years at YouTube/Google and Waymo. I led the complete rebuild of YouTube.com from a laptop demo to a global launch, and worked on AI research infrastructure, ML systems and simulation at Waymo. I've interviewed hundreds of engineers, mentor through MentorCruise and Prepfully, and teach AI-driven product development with ByteByteGo. I can help you build and ship an AI product, make sound architecture and model decisions, or prepare for a senior engineering role. We work on your actual project or career challenge, with direct feedback and concrete next steps. One engineer I mentored landed a Staff role at Google after we sharpened how they presented the experience they already had.

Mikhail can help with:

AI Code Review

AI Fundamentals

AI Research

AI System Design

Behavioral Interview Prep

LLM Fine-Tuning

ML Ops & Deployment

Model Development

Prompt Engineering

Resume Review

Technical Interview Prep

Technical Skills

Why do I coach?

When I started my career in Russia, I didn't have mentors and learned too much the painful way. I struggled with whether to build something of my own or work for others, and getting hired by Google was my first major breakthrough. Over time, I realized that experience could help other people avoid some of the same detours. Often an engineer already has the ability and experience to take a bigger step; what they need is an honest assessment, clearer direction and someone in their corner. Watching people recognize what they can do, then actually get the win, gives me enormous energy. I care about more than the technical question in front of us. Work occupies a large part of our lives, so confidence, motivation and difficult decisions belong in the conversation too. Coaching also pushes me to keep learning: if I'm going to guide someone, I owe them advice I can explain and stand behind.

Work Experience

Co-Founder & CTO

fictional.ai

September 2025 - Present

Hiring Manager

Co-founded Fictional.ai, an AI platform for personalized agents and simulated social interactions, backed by a16z Speedrun. Built the technology from the first prototype and lead engineering, hiring, technical strategy, model development, experimentation and product metrics. Took the company through accelerator selection and a successful seed round, with firsthand experience of hundreds of venture-capital pitches.

Staff Research Software Engineer / Technical Lead

Waymo

March 2020 - June 2024

Interviewer

Worked on core AI research infrastructure, ML systems, simulation models and early Gemini integration at Waymo. Built evaluation infrastructure for the Waymo Open Dataset and was a member of the San Francisco launch team. Conducted technical interviews and supported hiring across Alphabet.

Staff Software Engineer / Technical Lead

YouTube

October 2012 - March 2020