David Xie · Founder of Ambees

a solar system in progress

click a planet scroll to begin

5 cities · 49 memories

// Earth

Footprints

5 places that shaped me. Open one for the story and the photos.

// Venus

About

“Building Ambees full-time in Berkeley.”

I was born in Shanghai, grew up outside Boston, and I'm on a leave of absence from Georgetown to build Ambees full-time in Berkeley with my best friend from high school, Yiran. I've been starting things since I was 13. Four companies failed before my music business worked. Most of the doors I've walked through started with an email to someone who had no reason to write back.

In high school I ran our finance club's alumni speaker series, and one alum who signed up was running a Fortune 500 company at the time. He gave our club an hour on Zoom. A speaker series is built for one talk and a thank-you note, so a year later I emailed him again anyway. He wrote back in eight minutes. I kept sending him short updates as I started Ambees, and eighteen months after that Zoom he wrote our first check.

From: Shanghai, China
Based in: Berkeley, California
School: Georgetown University (on leave)
Currently: Building Ambees full-time

// Mercury

Builder

Ambees

Founded Nov 2025

We help small companies hire college students through a 10-minute AI conversation instead of a resume.

Small companies can't tell who's good anymore. AI helped write most applications, so every resume looks the same, and a 30-person firm has no recruiter to sort through them. At Ambees, each student has a 10-minute voice conversation with our AI. It follows up on what they actually say, so it's way harder to fake than a resume, and employers get a short ranked list of people worth meeting. I run the company side: every employer conversation, sales and fundraising. My co-founder Yiran Hu built the product. About 120 students have done our AI interview so far, and we built Ambees in Georgetown's Summer Launch Incubator.

Voice AI
Next.js
PostgreSQL
AI/ML

Visit

TalkStorm

Cal Hacks 2025

Talk, and watch your ideas turn into a live mind map.

Voice AI
Real-time
Next.js

Devpost

bloop.

3rd Overall HoyaHacks 2026

A privacy-first iOS app that tracks your listening and protects your hearing.

Swift
SwiftUI
On-Device Processing
AI/ML

Case study Visit

Side Projects

Aloud

Offline read-aloud for iPhone and Mac with an on-device neural voice. I built it because I hated paying $120 a year for Speechify.

Swift
On-Device AI

GitHub

13F

A research platform for SEC 13F filings that tracks 27 funds, with mirror-portfolio backtests, risk analytics and filing alerts.

Python
Finance Data

GitHub

MapperLab

A trading tool that scores policy and macro news into a sector tailwind/headwind heatmap with Claude, plus a Python ETF backtester.

Python
AI/ML
Data Viz

GitHub

smart-tdl

A to-do app for iPhone and Mac that ranks each day's tasks, locally or with Claude Haiku. I've used TeuxDeux since fifth grade.

Swift
AI/ML

GitHub

cutter

A macOS app that turns Claude Code into a form-driven rough-cut video editor that exports to Final Cut Pro.

Swift
AI/ML

GitHub

TowerCab JFK

A playable iPad air traffic control game set in JFK's tower, with a 10 Hz simulation and a procedurally built 3D airport in SceneKit.

Swift
SceneKit
Simulation

GitHub

Readahead

A Chrome extension that makes YouTube buffer far past its ~2-minute limit and hold one quality for the whole video. It patches the player's experiment flags before the player script loads and pins quality through the player's own API, with live buffer stats in the popup. Vanilla JS, zero dependencies.

JavaScript
Chrome Extension

Clearancein progress

A training sim for the ATSA, the FAA's air-traffic-control entrance exam. The scoring engine is built: a dependency-free C# library that scores gameplay telemetry into the six cognitive dimensions the exam tests (working memory, spatial reasoning, multitasking, decision speed, prioritization, mental math) and tracks each against a personal baseline. The sim around it is in progress.

C#
Simulation

Tooling

Python
TypeScript / React
Swift
Figma
Claude Code
Product Design

Proof

Georgetown Summer Launch Incubator2026: Built Ambees in Georgetown's startup incubator with a $5K non-dilutive stipend. Our mentors, EIRs Brian Cooley (ex-chief business officer, EVERFI) and Margo Spiritus (ex-CEO, Saatchi Art), still advise us.
AI Case Competition, 1st place2026: Won Georgetown McDonough's AI Solutions for Real World Intelligence Case Competition. I designed our team's weighting algorithm and composite score.
HoyaHacks 2026, 3rd Overall2026: Built bloop. with Yiran and Kaien Hung at Georgetown's hackathon and took 3rd place overall.

// Jupiter

Finance

I've traded my own account since I was 11, mostly commodities futures, on a system I built for myself. My finance jobs came from cold emails, not portals. At the end of my freshman year a Chicago futures firm offered me a trading internship; I turned it down to build Ambees.

Jan 2026 to Apr 2026
The Clockwork Group
Algo Trader
Built gold and platinum futures algorithms in Python and PineScript for the firm's trading system, and helped its owner sell that system to a hedge fund in Europe in a seven-figure deal. I got in with one cold email.
Helped sell the firm's trading system in a seven-figure deal
- Python
- PineScript
- Futures
Sep 2025 to Jan 2026
Tungsten Partners
Investment Intern
Underwrote hotel deals in Los Angeles and New York. I got the role through a cold email.
Hotel underwriting in LA and New York
- Real Estate
- Underwriting
Jun 2025 to Sep 2025
Sterling Business Capital
Investment Banking Intern
Worked on two live sell-side deals at a business brokerage, including diligence on a ~$4M consumer fragrance company. Ran the firm's Apollo cold-email campaigns and CRM.
Two live sell-side deals
- M&A
- Diligence
- Outbound
Apr 2025 to Jun 2025
Cedar Oak Capital
Private Equity Intern
Researched consumer product companies for private equity investments.
Consumer products research
- Private Equity
- Consumer

What the work runs on

Financial Modeling: DCFs, LBOs and comps
Quantitative Trading: Futures strategies in Python and PineScript
Due Diligence: M&A diligence and deal sourcing

PineScript

Clockwork system sale2026
Helped the owner of The Clockwork Group sell his trading system, including the gold and platinum algorithms I built, to a hedge fund in Europe in a seven-figure deal.

// Saturn

Creator

Music Production2025

2,000,000+

No label, no manager. Two of my trap instrumental beats landed on a Spotify editorial playlist, and music I've produced has passed 2M streams. I release my own music as Eternity X.

It started in seventh grade. I had opinions about every EDM track I heard, so I opened GarageBand on my mom's old MacBook and never stopped, then moved to Ableton. At 15 I sold my first beat online for $49.99. That turned into DX Media: I produced 300+ beats for rappers in Brazil, Puerto Rico and Chicago, then started matching other indie artists with playlist curators. I ran it profitably for four years and shut it down at the end of 2025 to go all in on Ambees. It taught me more about selling than any class.

Multi-Instrumentalist

The original dream was to play every instrument in a band by myself, and I kind of got there. I can play a lot of instruments, but drums is the one I play exceptionally. Hours behind a kit are how I decompress. Rhythm is the foundation of everything: music, trading rhythms, conversation pace. I just think in beats.

Channels

I vlog and post building-in-public content on YouTube and RedNote as itzdavezwrld.

YouTube · @itzdavezwrld

Ableton Live · Final Cut Pro · CapCut · Photoshop · Adobe Creative Suite

// Uranus

Off the Clock

Squash2025

Varsity captain at St. Mark's

I played varsity squash at St. Mark's all four years and captained the team my senior year. We won the Division IV national championship at the 2023 U.S. High School Team Squash Championships, and the New England Class C title in 2025, beating Dexter Southfield 4-3 in the final with Yiran, now my co-founder, on the team. I played club squash at Georgetown before taking leave.

Matt Levine & YC

Reading

Money Stuff by Matt Levine is the best thing written about finance. If you want to understand how markets actually work, read it every day. I also go through a lot of Y Combinator content, founders talking about the worst days of building. Recently I've been very into investing and startup books. Always open to recommendations.

Jayson Tatum Fan

Basketball

I play, and I'm a big Jayson Tatum fan.

Kawasaki or Yamaha

Motorbiking

Recently getting into it. Getting a Kawasaki or Yamaha soon.

5 cities on the globe

// Neptune

Open Channel

Always interested in new ideas, collaborations, and good conversations. Drop a line.

Founder of Ambees. Builder. Trader. Producer.

end of journey

revisit any planet

made with curiosity

David Xie: Founder and CEO of Ambees, helping small companies hire college students through a 10-minute AI conversation. I build software, trade markets and make music. Berkeley, CA.

Footprints

About

Builder

Ambees

TalkStorm

bloop.

Side Projects

Aloud

13F

MapperLab

smart-tdl

cutter

TowerCab JFK

Readahead

Clearancein progress

Tooling

Proof

Finance

The Clockwork Group

Tungsten Partners

Sterling Business Capital

Cedar Oak Capital

What the work runs on

Clockwork system sale2026

Creator

Off the Clock

Open Channel

revisit any planet