In this episode, we sit down with Tony Siu, who came to Philadelphia as an exchange student from Taiwan and never quite left. Tony graduated from Temple with a B.S. in Computational Data Science, having previously led a Google University Research project on computer vision at National Taiwan University. After graduating, he joined an AI startup accepted into the Speedrun Accelerator — backed by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) — before returning to Philadelphia to found Code & Coffee (codephilly.com), a developer community of over 3,500 members.
Multimodal AI & The Startup World
Tony’s interest in multimodal AI grew from his Google research, where he combined visual and text data to automate hardware testing — replacing an entire team of engineers. His startup journey followed a similarly unconventional path: rather than traditional job applications, an a16z-backed founder discovered him through posts he was sharing online, leading to a collaboration that landed them in one of the most competitive accelerators in the country (~0.05% acceptance rate).
Advice for CS Students
- Solve the real problem first — don’t over-engineer.
- Explore Developer Relations or technical sales for early career growth and business exposure.
- Take ownership — build your own path rather than waiting for opportunities to come to you.
- Network authentically by sharing what excites you; opportunities will follow.
- For freshmen especially: maximize every university resource available to you — office hours, faculty, events like Philly Tech Week, and campus facilities. Most students underutilize them, and these resources simply don’t exist in the real world.
Reference:
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/pysolver/
- https://www.linkedin.com/company/code-coffee-philadelphia/
- https://www.codephilly.com/
