Kanjun Qiu is a founder, researcher, and investor. She studied EECS at MIT before joining Dropbox as Chief of Staff, where she helped scale the company from 200 to 1,200 people. She went on to found Sourceress (YC S17), applying machine learning to recruiting, and today is the cofounder and CEO of Imbue, an AI research company building coding agents that has raised $200M in venture capital. She also serves as a GP at Outset Capital, where she works closely with early-stage founders. She also helped create the Archive, a co-living house in SF.

• Deep focus on building and refining AI-native developer tools. She frequently shares updates on her company's product, highlighting specific technical workflows such as running multiple coding agents in parallel containers or forking conversations to test different implementation paths without losing context.
• Advocacy for keeping humans at the center of the creative process. She often discusses the importance of ensuring AI tools enhance human agency rather than replacing it, suggesting that software development should feel like shaping a living craft where the user maintains control over the final output.
• Exploration of evolving coding workflows and the future of software engineering. She shares personal insights on how her own habits have changed, such as using large language models to overcome writer's block for blog posts or treating coding agents as collaborative partners to speed up development cycles.
• Interest in the ethical philosophy of technology and decentralized control. She expresses concern about a future where AI encourages passivity and instead promotes a vision where users have the power to mold their digital environments, often linking this to broader discussions about freedom and policy.
• Appreciation for analog experiences to balance a high-tech lifestyle. She contrasts her digital work with tactile activities like creating typewriter poetry and emphasizes the importance of physical movement and health over purely static ergonomic setups.