Happyverse, Stanford & Building AI Avatars in SF — The Bay Signal #1
The Bay Signal, episode one: Happyverse, Stanford, and what it actually takes to build AI avatars in San Francisco.
Siberia → Moscow → Stanford → San Francisco
Hi, I’m Max. I sell supercomputers by day.By night I rap, chase California sunsets, and build things that make people happier.
Senior PM on Google Cloud TPU, founder of Happyverse.AI — and the guy who answered Harvard Business School’s video essay with a rap. I ended up at Stanford. Draw your own conclusions.
- Stanford GSB
- CFA charterholder
- Etched
- Happyverse — backed by Village Global & Jeff Dean
4generations of Google TPU taken to market
$355MIPO led at Sistema — Detsky Mir, 2017
30+tracks as Delamax — on SoundCloud. Grammy pending.4things founded: Happyverse, Power Couple Club, finetuned.me, MLHappy
The whole picture
Four dials, not one.
Love, health, work, wealth — the four dials I actually run my life on. Click one and poke around.
01Love
Ambition is easier in pairs.
Romance, family, friends, and Power Couple Club.
Enter →02Health
You cannot out-think a body you are wrecking.
Body, emotions, energy — and finetuned.me.
Enter →03Work
The silicon, the face on top, and back to the silicon.
Google TPU, Etched, Happyverse. The full record.
Enter →04Wealth
I did finance properly before I did tech.
Earnings, freedom, legacy — and a $355M IPO.
Enter →Honest mirror
The 60-second life check.
Four sliders, zero judgment. The wheel just shows where the life is leaking.
Work with me
I coach the four dials.
Everything on this site — the frameworks, the career, the music — feeds one practice: helping ambitious people build a life that actually feels good. The first conversation is free.
- A free 45-minute call: we map your love, health, work, and wealth dials and find the loudest one.
- Built on the Four Dials — love, health, work, wealth. Simple enough to remember on a bad day. That is the point.
- No slide decks, no upsell script. If I can help, I say how. If I can’t, I say who can.
Too formal? Just DM me —@delamax
- Two promotions and 70+ peer bonuses at Google, including from Chief AI Scientist Jeff Dean.
- The Four Dials distill years of happiness-framework work at Happyverse — the company I founded, pre-seed backed by Village Global and Jeff Dean.
- CFA charterholder. I treat a life like a portfolio: diversified, rebalanced, reviewed on a schedule.
Are you a certified coach or therapist?
No, and I won’t pretend to be. I’m an operator with a framework. If what you actually need is therapy, I’ll say so on the first call and point you to a professional.
What does it cost after the free call?
Nothing, unless we both want to continue. If we do, we design the cadence and the price together, out loud, on that call. No packages, no funnels, no surprise upsell.
Why does a Google PM coach people at all?
Because I spent years building happiness frameworks at an AI company — and noticed that the only version that survives daily life is a simple one: love, health, work, wealth. Coaching is where those four dials meet a real life. Mine included.
Off duty
Mostly outside.
The other name
Delamax
I have been writing and recording since 2003. Self-taught guitar, self-taught production, self-shot videos. Winner of my college Rap Music Award in 2007. When Harvard Business School asked for a video essay, I sent them a rap — the one below. It is not a hobby I keep quiet about; it is the reason I am any good at pitching.
2003first track
30+recorded
2007college Rap Music Award
On camera
Talks & conversations
AGI Interface Summit
The summit I built and hosted in San Francisco, November 2025 — one question all day: if intelligence gets cheap, what does the interface look like?
Happyverse — Digital Human Demo
The product itself: a real-time digital human you can interrupt.
VIPERFLOW Coach — Conversation with Alek Chakroff
Sitting down with Alek Chakroff on the coach we built and what a machine understands about a person.
Happy-Happy-Happyverse Rap
Yes, I wrote a rap about my own company. No, I do not regret it.
Writing
Things I wrote that shipped.
Official Google posts I authored or co-authored, and the blog where I think out loud.
Google unveils world’s largest publicly available ML cluster
The Cloud TPU v4 Pods launch — up to 9 exaflops of aggregate compute, and the machines I ran go-to-market for.
Cloud TPU VMs are generally available
The architecture launch that let researchers run their own code on the TPU host machines.
Systems engineering playbook: optimizing Qwen 3.5-397B MoE on Ironwood (TPU7x)
How we squeeze a 397B-parameter mixture-of-experts model onto seventh-generation TPUs.
Delamax on Substack
Essays between the launches — life systems, AI, and everything the four dials touch.
Read on Substack →Live feeds
Where the unpolished version lives.
Reels, experiments, and hot takes — straight from the source.
Now
What I am actually doing this season.
A now page, in the Derek Sivers sense: what has my attention right now, not a highlight reel. Last reviewed August 2026.
Back on Cloud TPU at Google
I rejoined in May 2026. Two years away from the inside of AI infrastructure turned out to be the best possible preparation for coming back to it — I have now been a customer, a competitor, and a builder of the layer on top.
Happyverse, from the founder seat
Real-time video agents that hold a conversation as you. I am not running it day to day any more, but the thesis has not changed: the hard part was never the model — it is trust, latency, and knowing when the agent should shut up and hand back to the human.
Filling finetuned.me
Sixteen seats, October 1–5, 2026, forty acres of California desert. Four days built to reset people who cannot sit still.
Growing Power Couple Club
San Francisco and Los Angeles. Dinners, introductions, and a membership bar that stays high.
Recording again
New Delamax material. Slower than I would like.
Say hello
I answer email.
Building something at the interface of AI and people? Want to speak at the next summit, take a finetuned.me seat, or argue with me about whether TPUs win? Write.