David Mao

I left traditional high school at 16 to move from Philly to SF to build Symbal, a reinforcement learning company backed by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund.

All my life, I have been thinking in frameworks and underlying mental models. However, I only realized this around a year ago. I started this project on May 4th, 2026, to write down these mental models so I can reference them later. My most recent one is about bets. You can read it here.

What I'm doing now

1. Building and scaling Symbal.
2. Building a new project with Eric Schmidt and Sebastian Thrun.
3. Conducting ML research at Stanford University.

Links

• @davidm1564 on X
• davidmao1 on LinkedIn
• david@symbal.ai