Fo founder Shivani Poddar's path and the Fo MCP launch
A career thread on Fo founder Shivani Poddar, from GNOME intern to DeepMind, plus claims that Fo completes 71% of real-world tasks and now ships MCP.
> be Shivani Poddar > undergrad at IIIT Hyderabad > get picked as a GNOME open-source intern > build a context-gathering app on the side > Microsoft acquires it > head to Carnegie Mellon > research natural language generation, RL for chatbots and multimodal AI > build one of the first social chatbots for the Amazon Alexa Prize > it ends up talking to tens of thousands of real people through Alexa > years before "AI assistant" was a buzzword > join Facebook > help build the first Facebook assistant > build the core ML and AI infrastructure behind Facebook Portal > become ML tech lead for Workplace's Meeting Assistant > move to Google DeepMind > become an engineering lead shipping frontier models > help bring Gemini to market and work on its safety > launch products at Google Labs > look at AI agents and realize they all have the same problem > they can plan your whole life but can't make a single phone call > leave Google to fix it > start Wajo in San Francisco > build Fo: an AI agent with its own phone number, email and single-use virtual cards > it calls businesses, books things, and brings in a real human when it gets stuck > Khosla Ventures backs it from day one > Jeff Dean and Gokul Rajaram get in > Vinod Khosla says Wajo will win the agent market on trust > bids for a single Fo invite code hit $10K on eBay > Fo finishes 71% of real-world tasks on its own vs 42% for OpenClaw > used in 107 countries, 10x growth since launch > today she ships Fo MCP > every agent in the world can now do something in the real world > people are about to build entire businesses on this
This post quotes another post: “Fo MCP lets AI agents control physical devices”