Alex Lavaee

Alex Lavaee

Building agentic dev tools
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About

Hi, I’m Alex Lavaee, a research engineer at Microsoft Research working on coding agents and an open source builder on Atomic, a TypeScript SDK for building reliable coding agent workflows. Before MSR, I worked at Microsoft building coding agents for internal Windows developers, and prior to that across applied AI teams at Edwards Lifesciences, Themis AI, an MIT CSAIL startup, and Boeing. My research background is in 3D computer vision and world models.

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Nika•

2mo ago

Build your brand before your product, or launch first and reveal yourself later?

  1. I've always been on the personal brand side. More and more founders are building it now (sometimes even before the product is ready while it's still in development, before seed fundraising). The CEO builds their position so the product sells more easily at the official launch.

  2. But I have experience with people who built the product, scaled it, and only then did we discover who was behind it.

Honestly, with the first approach, I'd be concerned that people invest more in me as a person than in the product. People would idealise the founder and overlook the product's flaws (which could hurt development and constructive feedback).

+ I noticed the most common mistake that many people who started building a personal brand first, connected their product to their personal accounts (emails, social media, etc.) and started having a problem selling these things, because they cannot "give someone keys" to their personal profiles.

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