John Whaley

John launched Inception Studio in 2022 to give experienced founders the focused, zero-equity support he wished had existed when he was building his own companies.

Track record

• Redcoat AI — founder; acquired by Textla
• UnifyID — founder; acquired by Prove
• Moka5 — founder; $45M+ raised
• Multiple startup competition wins across a long entrepreneurial run

Academic

• Stanford PhD; Arthur Samuel Best Doctoral Thesis Award
• MIT B.S. and M.Eng. in EECS (5.0 GPA)
• Adjunct Lecturer at Stanford
• Forbes AI 50 honoree
• Best paper awards at PLDI, ISSTA, OOPSLA
• His compiler work forms Chapter 12 of the "Dragon Book"