Chang Xu.
Partner at Basis Set, investing in and building AI agents.
Bio
Chang focuses on AI infrastructure and applications. She enjoys diving into ML papers and learning new technologies to envision what markets can be transformed. She cofounded Onion Academy, an edtech startup in China that has since raised $90m, and was the first Product Manager at the Minerva Project — cementing her passion for startups and the creation of innovative products.
A natural builder of mental models, Chang grew up loving math competitions, placing #5 nationally for American Mathematics Competitions (AMC). She built intuition with brute-force methods to uncover patterns, ultimately crafting the most elegant solution. This approach mirrors the startup journey: start with what doesn't scale, iterate, automate, and dominate. At Harvard, she studied applied math, economics, and computer science. Her thesis on game theory and mechanism design explored multi-agent behavior in meeting scheduling.
In her downtime, Chang enjoys strategy games and once completed a 266-piece, all-white puzzle with her husband during the COVID lockdown — an exercise in persistence and strategy that reflects her view of what it takes to build enduring companies.
On the Radar
I run agents that continuously track AI research. On the Radar is the
running map of leading AI researchers by field —
world models,
robotics & physical AI, and
deepfake detection.
Elsewhere
Writing & talks
- Notes from the first ACM AI Systems conference (Note, May 29, 2026)
- Investing in the open-source agent stack (Essay, Apr 23, 2026)
- The future of agents is open source (Essay, Apr 20, 2026)
- Basis Set founder dinner (Event, Mar 3, 2026)
- AI Platform for Cybersecurity (DeFUD) (Podcast, Feb 10, 2026)
- Infrastructure for the agentic era (Essay, Jan 25, 2026)
- Building with agents, not code (Essay, Jan 15, 2026)
- AI-First Security Design Reviews (DeFUD) (Podcast, Jan 12, 2026)
- NeurIPS 2025 kickoff dinner (Event, Dec 11, 2025)
- NeurIPS 2025 podcast (Podcast, Dec 10, 2025)
- NeurIPS demo night (Event, Dec 10, 2025)
- AI-First Security Operations (DeFUD) (Podcast, Dec 10, 2025)
- Field notes from the agent frontier (Note, Nov 5, 2025)
- On the economics of Claude (Note, Oct 15, 2025)
- Hacker Summer Camp: a security thesis (Note, Aug 14, 2025)
- A good breakfast (Event, Aug 8, 2025)
- How to build a financial model for your data room (Essay, Jul 8, 2025)
- Bad ideas are good again (Essay, Aug 15, 2024)
- All that glitters like stars is not gold: metrics that matter when commercializing open source (Essay, Apr 10, 2024)
- The power of community (Event, Sep 22, 2023)
- How to commercialize open source (Essay, Sep 17, 2020)
- The Future of College — TEDxLASalon (Talk, Dec 12, 2018)
- Cameras and Cats: Why Computer Vision Is Changing the Way You See the World (Talk, Sep 25, 2018)