Laurence: Hedge fund for ads

Hedge fund for ads

Advertising today is like trading in the 1980s pits: archaic, manual, and iterative guesswork. Humans update bids and keywords with noisy, delayed data using simple if-else rules that both break at scale and ignore stochasticity. Laurence advertises like modern hedge funds trade markets, driving a 15-40% improvement in net profit for Amazon brands within a month of onboarding.

Active Founders

Matthew Chen

Founder

Built the Data Science Agent at Google. Grew Facebook new user retention by 18% by tuning Facebook's friending model. Third engineer at health-tech startup. Math+CS & AI research at Cornell. Ex-national team and semi-pro soccer goalie. Washed dishes and waited tables to pay for college. Financially independent at 17. National team & semi-pro soccer goalie. Taught myself to code at 18. Chemistry research at 15. CEO

Matthew Chen

Founder

Built the Data Science Agent at Google. Grew Facebook new user retention by 18% by tuning Facebook's friending model. Third engineer at health-tech startup. Math+CS & AI research at Cornell. Ex-national team and semi-pro soccer goalie. Washed dishes and waited tables to pay for college. Financially independent at 17. National team & semi-pro soccer goalie. Taught myself to code at 18. Chemistry research at 15. CEO

Leo Gierhake

Founder

Researcher at Jump Trading, building quantitative models to execute 50% of all global crypto trades. $250,000 in high-stakes professional poker winnings. Founded a crypto investing platform at 18. ETH Zurich Electrical Engineering Chief Scientist

Leo Gierhake

Founder

Researcher at Jump Trading, building quantitative models to execute 50% of all global crypto trades. $250,000 in high-stakes professional poker winnings. Founded a crypto investing platform at 18. ETH Zurich Electrical Engineering Chief Scientist

Company Launches

Laurence - Automated Amazon Advertising

See original launch post

Hey YC! 👋

We’re Matt and Leo building Laurence: automated Amazon pay-per-click (PPC) performance marketing using reinforcement learning and transformer models.

https://youtu.be/EAiSUSByF6k

TL;DR

Most brands lose money advertising on Amazon after margin
- Agencies outsource simplistic copy-paste playbooks to offshore workers
- Existing software are rudimentary rules engines that break with any bad variance
We drive performance using reinforcement learning and training our own conversion-rate-aware transformer models
Our quant system is automating $10 million in live ad spend, increasing advertising profits by 15-20% while growing total revenue.

Team

Matt

built the Data Science Agent at Google
tuned the Facebook friend suggestion model at Meta
was the third engineer at a health-tech startup

Leo

made $250k as a high-stakes poker pro at 17
founded a crypto investing startup at 18
was a researcher at Jump Trading

We started off building a horizontal data science agent for enterprise, and from our hundreds of conversations with anyone who had a problem with data, we learned how desperately brands on Amazon needed PPC automation that works.

Ask

If you know any CPG brands or SMBs selling on Amazon, we would love an introduction :)

- Matt & Leo W26

matthew@trylaurence.com

trylaurence.com

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