About
I'm Michael Quoc. I live in Santa Monica, California and have four children. I'm the founder and CEO of Axioms.ai, the company behind Product.ai and SimplyCodes, which I started in 2009 and have been building ever since.
How I Got Here
I studied computer science and business at UC Berkeley. After school I spent time in tech M&A at Jefferies, venture capital at Pequot Ventures, and product management at a KKR/Accel/Sequoia-backed startup called Desktop.com.
I ended up at Yahoo for six years. I ran Brick House, Yahoo's innovation lab in San Francisco, and held the title Director of Product Innovation. I built Yahoo Live - one of the first live video social networking products, years before Twitch or Periscope. I built Mixed - an early mobile social platform on SMS, before the iPhone existed. Both generated significant press. I hold 9 US patents from that era.
In 2009, I left Yahoo to start my own company. I didn't have funding. I didn't have an engineering partner. So I taught myself to code and built the first product alone. Six months of monk mode - disconnected socially, coding around the clock. Self-sustaining within two years. Profitable every year since.
The company has evolved through Social Commerce Labs, ZipfWorks, Demand.io, Product.ai, and now Axioms.ai. Each name was a closer attempt to describe something I could feel but couldn't fully build yet. The vision never changed. The technology finally caught up.
What I'm Building
I've always been fascinated by the gap between what the internet tells you and what's actually true. That gap is the problem I've spent my career on.
Today Axioms.ai builds the verification layer of the internet (61,604 premise-traced axioms across 220 product categories) and operates two consumer products on top of it. Product.ai is our consumer shopping intelligence and claim-checking product that verifies product claims, specs, and recommendations against primary-source evidence. SimplyCodes is our community-verified coupon and checkout savings platform across 400K+ stores, verifying in real time which promo codes actually work.
Together they drive $1B+ in annual e-commerce. $20M+ in revenue, 20 people, zero outside capital. I own 100% of the company.
The short version of what we do: we verify what AI guesses. Read the methodology at axioms.ai/methods, our empirical grounding studies at axioms.ai/research and product.ai/research, or the original essay here.
How I Think
I'm a first-principles thinker. I don't trust reasoning by analogy. I'd rather spend the time to understand the actual physics of a problem - the forces that will operate regardless of what anyone believes - than import assumptions from a case study that may not apply.
That instinct runs through everything I do. I built my company without VC because the incentive structure of outside capital didn't align with serving customers honestly. I write long-form research that deconstructs domains into their irreducible laws. I train in environments where physics is non-negotiable - because software has no consequences and I need to stay honest.
Outside of Work
I play competitive tennis at the NTRP 5.0 level, training twice a week with a former ATP professional. I train Muay Thai. I'm a former Ironman triathlete and still ride seriously - S-Works, power meters, the whole protocol.
I drive vintage Ferraris and Porsches. Hydraulic steering, no stability control. The feedback loop between driver and machine is unfiltered, and that's the point.
I play guitar in the SRV and Hendrix tradition through an all-analog signal chain. I'm a certified scuba diver drawn to technical diving in places like the Maldives, where oxygen limits and depth physics are absolute.
I'm a student of architecture and interior design. I believe space is software - that the environments you inhabit shape the quality of your thinking. I design my home and office with the same rigor I apply to product.
Connect
LinkedIn / X / The Codex (Substack) / Axioms.ai / Product.ai / SimplyCodes