Palantir x Arnav Chauhan

TL;DR

→17 y/o from NC, moved to SF 3 months ago
→employee #13 at Vitalize — Series A startup building AI scheduling & workforce tools for hospitals
→i regularly explain the difference between Vitalize and Timpani to nurses
→YC Fellow this summer — personally invited by Jared Friedman, $110k in funding
→given up on the educational institutions of this country
→yes, i will be graduating high school in june

i'm arnav chauhan, and here's why i think i'd be a great fit for the Meritocracy Fellowship and the hospitals team.

• 17 year old high schooler from North Carolina, currently living in San Francisco
• started my first company when I was 15 building AI video analysis tools for tennis players, scaled to $40k ARR. shut down because of school :(
• last summer, I made my own position as employee #13 at vitalize — we build AI scheduling and workforce management tools for hospitals. turned down a full-time offer last August to finish my senior year of high school▾
- i visited the poker night they hosted after YC Startup School for the free pizza, ended up hanging out with the CTO until 4am, and then spent the rest of the summer with them
• ended up trying to fix schools my first semester, got tired of beauracracy and realized there was no hope, and decided SF was the place to be if i actually wanted to learn anything
• for the past 3 months now, I've been doing Engineering + Deployments work at Vitalize
• this summer, I'm a Y Combinator Fellow, personally invited by Jared Friedman to work on an interesting technical project of my choice with $110k in funding + compute

• after spending the summer in SF, I came back to school determined to change the system and get more students involved with building things + introducing AI to schools, recognized by the NC Governor and State Superintendent
• dealt with the beauracracy and lost faith in these systems changing, at least for K-12. i am still in touch with the State Board of Education and give them feedback all the time, but don't expect much
• worked on the innovation ecosystem at UNC-Chapel Hill, which is also extremely unprepared for growth and lacks the culture needed for building cool things. even though I don't plan on attending, they want me to work as a part-time "innovation consultant"▾
- funny story: the dean of the Kenan-Flagler Buisness School is telling me not to go to school. if that doesn't confirm to me that school is broken idk what will
• as time passes, these institutions that have been around for centuries just can't switch directions on a dime to adapt. this opens a gap for things that are more applicable to the real world (especially as the barrier to entry for creation is lowered), which will require new, meritorious systems to be developed.

• at vitalize, we're also building labor optimization and scheduling tools for hospital systems. i regularly tell customers how we're different from Timpani
• i've done the deployments — i've been present for 4 hospital deployments and played a role in 3 of them
• i've sat in the rooms talking to nurses, charge nurses, and dealing with angry central staffing office managers
• i already do the FDE job, visiting customer sites, gathering feedback, and fixing things on the ground▾
- one of my favorite moments: i was doing morning rounds at a new hospital, making sure all the managers were up to speed on the system. one (very vocal) manager missed a few keybinds that she had in UKG but not Vitalize. i got to come back in the afternoon with the keybinds working and the smile on her face was incredibly large.

• Vitalis — central AI command center for nurses. IoT sensors on ESP32 hardware piping real-time patient data to a unified dashboard. won 1st place at HackNYU. devpost and linkedin
• NexHacks — organized one of the largest hackathons on the East Coast, with 1000+ hackers, $150k raised, and talent recruited from A16Z, General Catalyst, Menlo Ventures, Polymarket, Lovable, JP Morgan.
• Poker? I hardly know her! — hijacked the Meta Ray-Ban's video feed (before they released an SDK) to determine the probability of you winning the poker hand based off of the cards in play and emotions of players around you.
• OneFootGo — build AI video analysis tools for tennis players and runners using YOLOv8, OpenCV, and Python. Scaled to $40k ARR and turned down larger contracts becuase of school.

i'd love to chat about the hospitals team and the Meritocracy Fellowship. i'll respond fast.