Thaisan Tonthat
About me
- Based in San Francisco, CA
- I run tpl.vc and teach at Stanford
- I previously did bioinformatics research at Stanford, founded an applicant tracking system startup, and led an engineering team at Dropbox
- I love dogs, building things, and motorcycle and Airstream roadtrips
- I believe that Truth is complicated and it is useful to be open to many perspectives, Freedom is paramount, and Technology should be used to empower people, not control them.
My current interests
- AI, duh. Completely unoriginal, but I believe this is the most important thing of our time.
- How companies get started. In my work as a founder, investor, advisor, and faculty member, I have seen hundreds of founders at the earliest stages. Every story is different and gives us an opportunity to learn something.
- The Vietnam War and resulting diaspora. How this relates to ideas like immigration, national defense, and storytelling in the current world.
- Capitalism. It is a fantastic system that has allowed humans to escape millenia of poverty and live in abundance. At the same time, I fully recognize the current system is not working for everyone. How do we reconcile this?
Why did you make this website look like this?
I miss the way websites looked in the 90s,
which you sometimes still see on professors' personal websites like
this one.
They are old school html and emphasize content over visual fluff.
I do care about readability (Thinking with Type
is a great book for this), so adjusting some visual formatting is important to me while attempting to keep a retro look.