$ whoami
Lara Avedissian
ecosystem builder · vibe coder · event host
# about
I studied at UCLA (Stats & Econ) and Columbia (MS Analytics). I started my career founding a computer vision company using AI to improve people's exercise form.
I've since spent six years building ecosystems and partnerships in AI and crypto. Most recently I was Ecosystem Lead at Sahara AI (Sequoia-backed AI agent developer platform), and before that Ecosystem Lead at Stability AI, creators of Stable Diffusion and the leading open-source gen AI company (330M+ downloads, 36K GitHub stars).
At Stability I built Stable Founders, a community and program of 50+ AI startups I sourced and supported through their early stages.
I left Sahara to take a year off with my newborn daughter. In the past six months I've launched Lara Valentina, a DTC jewelry brand I vibe-coded end-to-end on Lovable + Supabase, and I've kept vibe-coding other projects since.
# vibe-coded
# events-hosted
// sahara_ai
- NeurIPS Holiday Mixer ↗
dec 2024·vancouver—Co-hosted with Lightning AI and Akash during NeurIPS 2024
- Latent Lounge at NeurIPS ↗
dec 2024·vancouver—NeurIPS happy hour co-hosted with Akash for AI/ML researchers
- AI/ALL Unplugged: Thanksgiving Edition ↗
nov 2024·san francisco—Builder night with project demos and a compute credits raffle
- AI After Hours SF ↗
dec 2024·san francisco—Recurring SF meetup with Hyperbolic for decentralized AI builders
- AI/ALL Summit Singapore at Token 2049 ↗
sep 2024·singapore—Co-hosted with Pantera and Polychain during TOKEN2049 — decentralization, equity, inclusivity
- Sahara Connect Party at KBW ↗
sep 2024·seoul—KBW headline party with Aegis, Pantera, Samsung Next — Kwon Eunbi + Dynamic Duo
- AI/ALL Summit at ACL ↗
aug 2024·bangkok—Co-located with ACL 2024, co-hosted with SCB 10X and SambaNova
- Introducing Sahara AI Workshop ↗
jul 2024·online—Backdrop Build workshop on Sahara's decentralized AI provenance platform
// stability_ai
- CogX Stability AI ↗
sep 2023·london—Co-organized Stability's presence at CogX Festival; organized session talks at booth
- CogX Researcher Meetup ↗
sep 2023·london—Organized the AI researchers evening meetup during CogX
- NYC Open Source AI Meetup ↗
jul 2023·new york—Co-hosted with Betaworks, Nomic, and Hugging Face — "not your weights, not your brain"
- Keep AI Open Source ↗
may 2023·new york—Co-hosted with Lightning AI to rally the open source AI community
- Pear VC: Hardware + Software Breakthroughs in Gen AI ↗
aug 2023·menlo park—Fireside with Pear VC's Aparna Sinha and Stability's Kamil Rocki
- Builder Talk: Open Tech in AI + Crypto ↗
aug 2023·online—Backdrop session with Base's Jesse Pollak and Stability's Conner Ruhl
- Stability x Backdrop Build Workshops ↗
nov 2023·online—Two Backdrop Build workshops — Stable Code for LLMs and ComfyUI for SDXL