Ryan Wang, cofounder of Eigen AI, is coming to campus for a fireside chat with E14 Fund managing partners, Calvin and Habib. He finished his PhD in the MIT HAN Lab in 2025, working under Professor Song Han on sparse attention and efficient transformers. That same year, he co-founded Eigen AI to make frontier open models like Llama, Qwen, Gemma, and DeepSeek fast and cheap enough to run in production. Less than a year later, Nebius acquired the company for roughly $643 million. We'll talk about what it took to go from a lab project to an acquired company that fast: how the team decided what to build, how they found their first customers, and what he'd tell an MIT student sitting on a research idea right now, wondering if it's a company.