Catching Up with Ben Spector, CEO and Co-Founder of Flapping Airplanes

Flapping Airplanes is a foundational AI research lab working to make AI orders of magnitude more efficient. Their small, San Francisco-based team is developing new primitives for GPUs, from megakernels that can run entire training runs in a single kernel to models designed to learn more from far less data. In October 2026, the company announced their $1 billion Series A, led by Index, with our partner Mark Xu joining the board.

Mark recently caught up with Flapping Airplanes CEO and co-founder Ben Spector. They discussed everything from Ben’s reasons for starting Prod, a student-run incubator where he could see dozens of companies up close, to what he believes separates founders from everyone else. Ben also talked about the values he’s bringing to Flappy, from staying focused on fundamentals in an ecosystem full of distractions to holding the team’s research to the strongest baselines they can come up with.