About
Michael Royzen co-founded Phind, an AI search engine, and trained language models for coding tasks. He has worked as an ML engineer at Lyft, Cloudflare, and Microsoft, and holds a computer science degree from UT Austin.
Michael Royzen @michaelroyzen
It's disappointing to see so many people dunking on someone who just got wiped out. Go touch grass, everyone runs their own race. I'm wishing him the best as he rebuilds.
Jul 30, 2026 · ♥ 1
Michael Royzen @michaelroyzen
Everyone has the right to own their means of AI production. That’s why open weights are so important. Not so much cost, but the ability to customize, tinker, and run on hardware that you own or control.
Jul 29, 2026 · ♥ 2
Michael Royzen @michaelroyzen
This is wild. OpenAI's new model with cyber capabilities gate-kept to a select few HACKS Huggingface during benchmarking. But Huggingface couldn't defend against the attack with an OpenAI model because they weren't in the select few! They kept getting "safety" refusals. So, https://t.co/aIjgJG0zPZ
Jul 21, 2026 · ♥ 5 · ⇄ 1
Founder at PhindYC S22
Intro paths
Michael went through Y Combinator (Summer 2022) — any YC alum in your network can reach them through the YC community.
In turn, Michael can intro founders to Phind's investors below.
Phind's investors · 3
Co-founders at Phind
Founder at Standard SignalYC X26
Intro paths
Michael went through Y Combinator (Spring 2026) — any YC alum in your network can reach them through the YC community.
Their group partner at YC was Pete Koomen, General Partner at Y Combinator — the partner who ran Standard Signal's batch and knows the company first-hand. YC profile ↗
In turn, Michael can intro founders to Standard Signal's investors below.
Standard Signal's investors · 1
Experience
- Standard SignalFounder & CEOcurrent2026 — presentNew York, NY
- phind.comCo-founder & CEO2022 — 2026San Francisco, California, United States
- The University of Texas at AustinNLP Researcher2021 — 2022Austin, Texas, United States
- LyftMachine Learning Software Engineering Intern2021
- SmartLensFounder & CEO2017 — 2020Austin, TX
- Cloudflare, Inc.Systems Engineering Intern2019Austin, Texas Area
- MicrosoftResearch Intern2017Redmond, WA
Education
- Y Combinator2022
- The University of Texas at AustinBachelor of Science - BS, Computer Science Honors2018 — 2022
- The Bush School2014 — 2018
Skills & more
Languages English · Russian · Spanish
From Michael's professional profile.
Same school
Also attended Y Combinator1,463
+ 1,457 more
Also attended The University of Texas at Austin278
+ 272 more
Also attended The Bush School1
Shared employers
Also worked at phind.com1
Also worked at The University of Texas at Austin44
+ 38 more
Also worked at Lyft55
+ 49 more
Also worked at Cloudflare, Inc.18
+ 12 more