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
Jonathan Avni

The Journey

2012–2015

Yahoo

Product Manager

Founding team member of Yahoo Gemini, powering monetization across Yahoo properties (over 1B MAUs at the time). Grew revenue from launch to $1B+ run-rate.

2015–2018

Pinterest

Product Manager, Monetization

Launched Marketing APIs used by 200+ partners, accounted for 50%+ of 2018 revenue.

2019–2021

Coinbase

Senior Product Manager, Payments Platforms

Built payments and trading infrastructure for Coinbase Retail and Enterprise customer-facing products, powering hundreds of billions of dollars in annual transaction volume.

2022–2024

Paxos

Product Lead, Stablecoins and Banking

Built 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.

2024–Now

Independent

AI Builder

Went 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 screenshot

Deep Research Agent

Live

An 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.

LangGraphLangChainGemma 4OllamaTavily API
KuchiClaw screenshot

KuchiClaw

Live

A 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).

Claude Agent SDKTypeScriptDockerTelegram Bot APISQLite
TinyBrain screenshot

TinyBrain

Live

An 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.

Next.js 15React 19x402 Protocolwagmi/viemUSDC on Base
TinyChat screenshot

TinyChat

Live

A 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.

PyTorchModal (T4 GPU)Next.jsTailwind CSSSSE Streaming
Talk2Docs screenshot

Talk2Docs

Sunset

A 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.

Next.js 15React 19TypeScriptSupabase + pgvectorOpenAI GPT-4.1