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Weida Tan

Weida Tan

Founder & former hardware startup CEO with distributed-systems research background

weida-tan
San Francisco Bay Area
Joined September 2025
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Summary

Entrepreneurial hardware founder: transitioned from university research into founding Fledging, a consumer‑electronics company (Feather SSD, Spruce Charger and related accessories), raising seed capital and building global distribution before winding down in late 2022. The Fledging experience shows hands‑on product design, supply‑chain management with Shenzhen partners, fundraising and retail/distribution execution. fledging+2
Academic research background in distributed systems and graph/mining frameworks: as an MS/RA at UAB contributed to T‑thinker (PPoPP 2019) and related distributed/graph processing work, indicating strengths in systems‑level research and parallel/distributed algorithm engineering. edu+2
Bridge between academia and regional entrepreneurship: participated in UAB's Commercialization Accelerator, won local pitch competitions (Spark Match), moved into Innovation Depot and engaged Birmingham's startup ecosystem — demonstrating ability to translate research/ideas into funded startup activity and community engagement. uab+2

Work

Education

Projects

Writing

T‑thinker: A Task‑Centric Distributed Framework for Compute‑Intensive Divide‑and‑Conquer Algorithms

January 1, 2019

Poster/paper describing T‑thinker, a distributed framework that exposes parallelism in divide‑and‑conquer problems and overlaps computation with communication to improve cluster CPU utilization; co‑authored with Da Yan, Guimu Guo, M. Tamer Özsu, John C. S. Lui and others (PPoPP 2019).

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Hobbies

Hardware product design, consumer‑electronics product development and startup building (hands‑on product & supply‑chain work). fledging+1