Jonathan Avni
Product Leader. AI Builder.
10+ years building developer platforms and payments infrastructure at Yahoo, Pinterest, Coinbase, and Paxos. Now going deep on AI — training models, building products, and writing about it.
See what I'm building
The Journey
Yahoo
Product ManagerFounding team member of Yahoo Gemini, powering monetization across Yahoo properties (over 1B MAUs at the time). Grew revenue from launch to $1B+ run-rate.
Launched Marketing APIs used by 200+ partners, accounted for 50%+ of 2018 revenue.
Coinbase
Senior Product Manager, Payments PlatformsBuilt payments and trading infrastructure for Coinbase Retail and Enterprise customer-facing products, powering hundreds of billions of dollars in annual transaction volume.
Paxos
Product Lead, Stablecoins and BankingBuilt and launched PayPal USD, a leading fully regulated USD stablecoin, and scaled it to a market cap of over $3B through dozens of distribution partner integrations.
Independent
AI BuilderWent deep on AI - courses, workshops, and building. Trained LLMs from scratch, built a RAG platform, and shipped agentic products to paying users.
A common thread: I've always chased the most interesting technology of the moment - ads marketplaces, social APIs, crypto protocols, stablecoins - and now AI.
Selected Projects

Deep Research Agent
LiveAn agentic research system with planning, sub-agent delegation, and human-in-the-loop approval
A deep research agent that accepts natural language questions, creates a structured research plan, obtains human approval, then delegates specialized research tasks to isolated sub-agents that conduct web searches and synthesize findings. Uses file-based context offloading instead of context stuffing, and runs Gemma 4 locally via Ollama or any cloud LLM.

KuchiClaw
LiveA minimal AI agent framework — ephemeral containers, living file memory, filesystem IPC
A personal AI agent that runs 24/7 on a VPS, talks through Telegram, manages its own memory, sends emails, and runs scheduled tasks autonomously. Built on the Claude Agent SDK with ephemeral Docker containers, living markdown files for memory, filesystem IPC, and a two-tier skills system (shell scripts + MCP).

TinyBrain
LiveAn AI that earns and spends money autonomously via x402
An inference service built on top of TinyChat that charges $0.01/query via the x402 payment protocol. Routes complex queries to DeepSeek R1 for ~$0.001, pocketing the difference. Includes complexity classification, a "bar tab" payment mode with stateless HMAC-signed sessions, and wallet integration on Base mainnet.

TinyChat
LiveA 561M-parameter LLM trained from scratch for ~$95
A language model built from scratch — custom BPE tokenizer, GPT architecture with RoPE and Multi-Query Attention, trained on ~38B tokens from FineWeb-EDU, then fine-tuned for conversation. Deployed on Modal serverless GPU with a Next.js frontend.

Talk2Docs
SunsetA full-stack RAG platform for chatting with PDFs, URLs, and podcasts
A RAG platform for chatting with your documents — custom chunking, hybrid retrieval, query classification, multi-document synthesis, and citation validation. Built with Next.js, Supabase, Stripe, and Clerk, deployed on Vercel and Railway.
Writing
Upgrading My AI-Powered Second Brain With Reflexive Search
Progressive disclosure optimized how Claude searches my Obsidian vault. Reflexive search optimized when. The second turned out to matter more.
Building a Personal AI Agent From Scratch: What I Learned About Agent Harnesses
I built a minimal AI agent framework that runs 24/7, talks to me through Telegram, and manages its own memory. The biggest lesson: the model is 10% of what makes an agent useful - the other 90% is the harness.
Why x402 Has My Attention
The convergence of stablecoins and AI agents is enabling a new category of machine-to-machine payments. x402 is the protocol making it real.