Michael Gao

Michael Gao is a serial deep tech entrepreneur. In 2018, he founded Luminous Computing, a photonic AI supercomputing startup backed by Bill Gates, with 100+ employees and >$130M in funding. Prior to that, he studied Applied Mathematics at MIT and dropped out to found AlphaSheets, an early pioneer in the low code/no code space. He has multiple patents in photonics and designed a number of physical design innovations in the Fabric Bitcoin mining system. Michael discovered Bitcoin in 2011 when he was 15 years old. Scaling up from 1 BTC mined on his own GPU, he founded and ran a multi-million dollar Bitcoin mining operation, which involved learning electrical engineering and managing a hardware supply chain from his high school dorm room. Prior to Bitcoin, he was a USA Math Olympiad winner and USA Computing Olympiad finalist.