Aidan Olazabal

Updated August 12, 2026

I am studying economics at Yale and working toward a career in finance. I have spent years taking apart how the great companies actually got built, one founder at a time, and that is the lens I bring to everything else here.

Outside class I am a YAIA Fellow with Yale AI Alignment, and a member of Yale Blockchain and the Yale AI Association. The rest of my time goes into what I build.

  • Archetypesa founder-taxonomy platform I built to study how world-class operators are made: 144 founder profiles, 17 founder archetypes, and 547 cross-linked concepts drawn from 453 sources. It is structured on the Karpathy LLM-wiki pattern, where every founder, archetype, and concept is an addressable page wired to the others, so patterns compound across the corpus rather than sitting in isolated biographies. Built on Next.js, Tailwind, MDX, and shadcn components.
  • Harbormastera finalist at the Ledger N3XT hackathon: hardware-enforced agent authority for autonomous stablecoin settlement, picked from 50-plus submissions across 38 universities and 8 countries. The agent only proposes. A deterministic, LLM-free policy engine screens every transfer against allowlists and caps, then a Ledger clear-signs recipient and amount on its own screen. The key never leaves the device.
  • Zom Technologiesbuilt zom-ai, their internal AI operating system, in the mold of Ramp’s Glass and Spotify’s Honk: synchronized skills and MCP servers over an Obsidian knowledge layer (the Karpathy LLM-wiki pattern, gbrain-ready) replicated peer-to-peer over Syncthing, privacy at the path layer. Token management spans OpenRouter and the Anthropic console, routing routine work to cheaper open models like Kimi K3 and GLM 5.2 rather than the frontier tier. Deployed from the c-suite to the entire engineering org.
  • Kiokua digital-asset education company I founded, teaching hundreds of retail and corporate clients across the US, Korea, and Japan how to actually use crypto: stablecoin infrastructure, smart contracts, on-chain settlement, DeFi primitives, and the mechanics of public blockchains.
  • Manaa decentralized ticketing platform on Polygon: ERC-721 tickets written in Solidity, routed against Aave v3 liquidity pools, with a fiat-to-USDC on and off ramp built on Stripe and Circle.
  • Spirala provably-fair giveaway protocol on Base: each draw commits a Merkle root of the weighted entry set before the VRF seed exists, then derives the winning leaf deterministically from seed and root, so anyone can prove inclusion, recompute exact odds from leaf weights, and replay the draw hash by hash.
  • Unmanned Industriesbuilt out their tech stack end to end: outbound sales agents driven by autonomous daemons on cron schedules, and live production dashboards that orchestrate the drone build from first part to finished aircraft. Now building a computer-vision SOP system that reads the operator's FPV goggle feed and hand signals to author the assembly playbook automatically.

  • Guggenheim Securities

    Fall 2026

    Incoming Investment Banking Fall Fellow

    Valuation fundamentals and transaction casework.

  • UBS

    Summer 2026

    Investment Banking Summer Fellow

    Sell-side M&A for a consumer technology company marketed to US private equity buyers. Built the valuation range from DCF, trading comparables, and precedent transactions, then a leveraged buyout model with sources and uses, a debt schedule, and IRR sensitivities.

  • Climate Equity Foundation

    Summer 2026

    Fixed Income Summer Analyst

    Research in sustainable fixed income across green bonds, sustainability-linked debt, and private credit. Authored The Enforcement Gap, a capital-markets report on covenant structure and enforceability in green bond indentures, anchored by the $6 billion Mexico City airport financing.

  • IOSG Ventures

    Spring 2026

    Venture Capital Investment Analyst

    Early stage and growth equity across digital assets, fintech, and AI. Sourcing, first-pass diligence, and investment memos.

  • Yale University

    2025-2029

    Economics

  • Phillips Exeter Academy

    2020-2024

    Cum Laude and Highest Honors

I train MMA, fish, hike, and golf; on the keyboard, I’m usually deep in David Senra’s Founders Podcast or TBPN, and bullish on American sovereignty.Late nights, I’m fine-tuning my Obsidian Vault wiki, obsessing over the skills and plugins that get the most out of my Hermes agent (Firecrawl and Exa especially), or hunting funding-rate spreads across on-chain perpetuals. All of it runs on jazz house: Miro by Berlioz, Révelier by Shaolin Cowboy and manon, and Talk to me. by Bolden.

I’m obsessed with how great things get made.

A running record of what I read, watch, and live by