What does it take to build a venture-backed AI hardware company in one of the world's most research-intensive cities?
Join us for an intimate fireside chat with Bill Jiao, founder of General Instinct (YC P26).
Bill is building the infrastructure that enables frontier AI models to run efficiently on robots and edge devices, bringing powerful intelligence out of the cloud and into the physical world. Before launching General Instinct, he contributed to Siemens' first multimodal foundation model and has been recognized for his technical innovation from an early age.
As one of Boston's emerging founders, Bill represents a new generation of entrepreneurs transforming cutting-edge research into venture-backed companies. In this conversation, we'll explore his journey from engineer to founder, what it took to build and scale a deep-tech startup, and how Boston's innovation ecosystem compares with Silicon Valley's startup culture.
What We'll Explore
Bill's journey from Boston to Y Combinator
Building an AI hardware company from the ground up
Boston vs. Silicon Valley: different startup ecosystems
The future of robotics and physical AI
Lessons for founders navigating the early stages of company building
Audience Q&A and open networking
After the fireside chat, stay for refreshments and networking with founders, researchers, engineers, investors, and members of Boston's entrepreneurial community.
A note from General Instinct: Bill and his team are actively looking to connect with researchers, engineers, and builders with hands-on experience in:
Diffusion & latent-based world models (e.g., JEPA, WAM architectures, predictive representation learning)
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) & embodied AI models
Robotics & edge model optimization (model compression, hardware-specific kernels, NPU/Jetson deployments)
If that's you, come ready to talk shop during networking — General Instinct is hiring and actively building relationships in exactly this space.
To make networking more impactfu