WhoBuilt

Ian Fisher

co-founder and co-CEO at Poetic

Co-founder and co-CEO of Poetic; previously a researcher at Google DeepMind.

Key facts

Founded
Roles
Poetic, co-founder and co-CEO
Previously
Google DeepMind, researcher for a decade
Uses

Career

  1. Poeticcurrentas of Feb 2026
    co-founder and co-CEO
  2. researcher for a decade
  3. Founder

Timeline 3

Dated events, newest first. Open the sources under any item.

How we verify
Founded1Career2
20263 events
  1. reported 2026-02Founded
    Ian Fisher founded Portable
    “you arrived at Google over a decade ago when they acquired your first YC startup, Portable” 16:18
    Unverified1 source· Talk
  2. as of Feb 2026Career
    Ian Fisher previously at Google DeepMind
    researcher for a decade
    “Previously, he spent a decade as a researcher at Google DeepMind” 0:40
    Unverified1 source· Talk
  3. as of Feb 2026Career
    Ian Fisher is co-founder and co-CEO at Poetic
    “Ian Fisher is the co-founder and co-CEO of Poetic” 0:40
    Unverified1 source· Talk

Talks 1

19:46
The Powerful Alternative To Fine-Tuning

Ian Fisher explains how Poetic uses a recursively self-improving meta-system to build or optimize reasoning harnesses on top of language models. These harnesses combine code, prompts, data, and model calls to improve performance on hard tasks, and can be adapted as newer models become available. He contrasts this approach with fine-tuning, which can be costly and quickly overtaken by newer models, and describes benchmark results and optimization costs as examples. He also discusses Poetic’s early-access program and advises engineers to experiment with AI and build things themselves.

Feb 27, 2026· 20 min 0:00