Company teardown · Simile
How to simulate a human being?
Simile trains foundation models that behave like people and sells them to enterprises in place of the research panel. Its founders: two Stanford professors and the doctoral student who recruited them. “Company is a machine for depth research.” $300M and fifty-nine hires later, here's who they hired.
0.1 — Simile in one page
A Stanford paper, turned into a company — then sold by the field force of the category it replaces.
Everything here is public — LinkedIn, funding disclosures, three founder appearances with transcripts, and a company film. The reading is ours.
§ 01 — Part one of five · The idea
What if you could ask a thousand people before you asked anyone?
Simile's founders spent five years teaching language models to behave like specific people. The company sells the result to anyone who used to buy a research panel.
1.1 — The problem they're solving
Why every decision about people still waits on a panel.
— The founder's framing
“The only way to find out whether your decision was correct was by living through it.”
— Joon Sung Park, Simile “simulation era” film, 2026.
— Behavioral simulation, translated
A model trained to predict what a specific person — or a population — would decide. Park's analogy: the frontier LLM is “the CPU of intelligence”; Simile builds “the GPU” — many units, each as flawed as the person it stands for.
1.2 — The idea
A survey respondent you can run again.
Interview real people once; give a model the interview as memory; then ask it anything, as often as you need. The test is whether it answers the way the person would.
01 · Capture
02 · Simulate
03 · Check
↺ “the world is our ground truth” — hypotheses graded monthly
1.3 — The lineage
Twenty-five agents, then a thousand people, then the economy.
— What's Smallville?
The 2023 Generative Agents paper: 25 language-model agents in a pixel-art town, each with memory, reflection and plans. Human evaluators rated their behaviour believable; the architecture has been copied across the field since. 8,125 citations — the paper Simile productizes.
— Five years, four steps
The academic bench is inside the company: Michael Bernstein (Stanford HCI) and Percy Liang (Stanford CRFM, who coined “foundation model”) are co-founders; Fei-Fei Li is an angel.
§ 02 — Part two of five · The business
A research lab with a sales floor.
Simile isn't selling a paper. It sells simulated customers to enterprises — through a field force hired from the companies that used to sell them surveys.
2.1 — The product, as described
Synthetic customers for the enterprise — sold one deployment at a time.
Deployments: Simile's title for the forward-deployed role — the Palantir motion, run by consultants. One Deployments hire is a former Palantir forward-deployed engineer.
2.2 — The money
$100M in February, $200M by July.
2.3 — Who else is in the room
The incumbents aren't the rivals — they're the feeder.
For a recruiter this is one market — and Simile hires the people who sold the incumbent product to the same buyers.
Talent brief
Want the full visual breakdown?
Download the PDF version of this teardown — the six-team org chart, ten names to know, the build order month by month, and the six sourcing patterns none of which ran through a job board.
2.4 — The business, in his words · 20VC · Sequoia Training Data
Six things Park says about the business — and what each explains on the roster.
§ 03 — Part three of five · The founders
Two professors, their student — and the student is the CEO.
Four co-founders: three Stanford researchers and one operator. The seniority runs the wrong way, on purpose.
3.1 — Who they are
Four co-founders, one lab and one operator.
— Joon Sung Park · Co-founder & CEO · the student
— Michael Bernstein · Co-founder & Chief Data Officer · the advisor
3.2 — What the CEO says · Latent Space · 20VC · Sequoia Training Data
Six things Park says — and what the roster says back.
3.3 — How he builds a team · 20VC
The team as self-portrait.
— The principle
“Your subject looks like the painter. You should see yourself in the team.”
— Joon Sung Park, a figure painter before he was a researcher. 20VC, August 2026.
— How to read the table
Four principles, each one a thing Park says about building the team — set against what the roster actually shows. The commercial half of this company is designed, not drift.
3.4 — How they hire
“Places where we have personal connections” — tested against the roster.
Told to Latent Space: engineers come from Figma, Notion and Rive; lab mates follow the lab; “we're hiring across all sections.” Yet LinkedIn lists no open roles and the careers page sits behind a login.
— The claims, in the founder's words
— How the channel is run
Three claims confirmed, one partial; the retention claim (“nobody left in six years”) waits for 2027. His account is accurate — and the “part of the game” he handed to Yallen is now the larger half of the company.
§ 04 — Part four of five · The team
Fifty-nine people: twelve before the money, forty-seven after.
The founders' claims, turned into an org chart — and where the research story and the roster part ways.
4.1 — The org chart, from the bets
Six teams — each one a founder's claim, staffed.
4.2 — Ten names to know
The hires that set the bar.
MTS = Member of Technical Staff.
4.3 — The shape of the team
A mid-career commercial crew, titled like a lab.
Engineers carry one title — Member of Technical Staff — and the rest of the company mirrors it: Member of Product Staff, Member of Design Staff, Member of Recruiting Staff. Underneath: 29 joined senior, 18 mid-career, eight veterans, four early-career. Eight MBAs to five PhDs, at a company founded to build foundation models.
Schools underneath: Stanford ×22 degree mentions, Harvard ×9, UC Berkeley ×8, Cornell ×3 — one dominant feeder school, unusual for the cohort. The company page's own facets over all 67 members agree on the shape: Stanford 15, Harvard 5, HBS 5.
4.4 — The build order · 2025 = the nucleus · 2026 = the organization
Twelve in 2025. Forty-seven in 2026.
Park had planned to “go aggressive toward the end of 2026”; buyers “closed deals within 3 months,” so the floor opened in February. Through May, sellers and deployers out-hired builders nearly three to one.
4.5 — Where they came from
Two networks, one anchor apart.
The first ring is the lab: nine people carry a working Stanford affiliation. The second is Figma: a Head of Product in November 2025, six more alumni by July. Neither ring runs through a job board.
Nov 2025
Below the rings, two more groups that never touched a job board: Jensen · Wymer · Brown · Hittson and four more, lifted from Cresta and Medallia — eight sellers in all; and Zhen · Chen · Haarmann · Lauer, the quants, from Citadel, DRW, PIMCO, D. E. Shaw, ADIA and J.P. Morgan. Seven people carry a quant past in total.
4.6 — Who sells the model
The sales floor is real, large — and lifted from the incumbents.
Twenty-six of 59 sell or deploy. Against it: six people with a publication record, two of them founders — the bench that advances the model is a tenth of the company.
4.7 — The story and the roster
A research company on the tin. A sales organization on the roster.
— The roster · 59 people, by our read · Sep 2026
— The story · “founded by Stanford researchers to build foundation models” · who publishes
The company's description — foundation models, a Stanford lab — is true of a tenth of the roster. The other nine-tenths sell, deploy, design and staff a product the tenth invented. The enterprise organization is the company — by design: “I was not an enterprise seller,” Park says. He hired one.
§ 05 — Part five of five · What transfers
What the rest of us can steal.
You can't copy the advisors or the $2B. The direction of the recruiting, the anchor-then-cohort mechanic and the incumbent channel transfer.
5.1 — Sourcing patterns
Six patterns — none of them ran through a job board.
5.2 — The lessons
Five moves worth stealing.
— The takeaway
They turned a paper into a company.
Then they hired the sales floor
of the category it replaces.
Methodology & limitations
Wide coverage — honestly counted.
— Sources
- The LinkedIn company page (67 associated members), with full profile and education histories for 59 of ~60 identifiable staff, collected 12 September 2026.
- Google Scholar profiles for the six members with publication records, fetched 14 September.
- Three founder appearances with transcripts — Latent Space, 20VC, Sequoia Training Data — and a company film.
- Funding disclosures and press.
— Limitations
- Eight non-staff excluded from team statistics — three VC partners, two advisors, one angel, two name collisions.
- Percy Liang is absent from the company page, and so from every roster ratio here — which undercounts the research bench by one. Karpathy's angel listing was only partially visible.
- A 30-day public-signal scan (X · Reddit · Hacker News · GitHub) produced no usable result, and is recorded as such.
- The 26 : 23 sell-and-deploy to build split is our classification of public titles, not the company's own. Teardowns like this are how our searches begin — this one's on us.