Andrew Feldman

Background

Andrew Feldman is the co-founder and CEO of Cerebras Systems, an AI hardware company that developed the Wafer Scale Engine — the largest chip ever made ¹. He grew up in Palo Alto, California, where his parents were Stanford professors ². He earned a BA in Economics/Political Science from Stanford University in 1991 and an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business in 1997 ³.

Feldman’s career has been defined by building and selling infrastructure companies. He co-founded Riverstone Networks, serving as VP of Marketing and Corporate Development, and took the company through IPO in 2001 ³. He then served as VP of Product Management, Marketing, and Business Development at Force10 Networks, which was later acquired by Dell for $800 million ². In 2007, he co-founded SeaMicro with Gary Lauterbach and Anil Rao, pioneering energy-efficient microservers; AMD acquired SeaMicro in 2012 for approximately $357 million ²³. He spent two years at AMD as Corporate Vice President and General Manager of the Data Center Server Solutions unit before leaving in 2014 ³.

In 2016, Feldman co-founded Cerebras Systems with four colleagues from SeaMicro — Gary Lauterbach, Michael James, Sean Lie, and Jean-Philippe Fricker ¹. As of early 2026, Cerebras has raised over $1 billion in venture funding, reaching a valuation of approximately $23 billion, and is pursuing a Nasdaq IPO expected in 2026 ⁴⁵.

Feldman was named to TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in AI in 2024 ⁶.

Stated Thesis

Andrew Feldman is primarily an operator and company builder, not a professional investor. He does not publicly articulate an investment thesis. His public statements focus on the AI hardware market and building Cerebras rather than on startup investing.

He has described himself as an advisor to startups, reportedly serving on the advisory boards of more than a dozen companies and on the board of directors at Aleveo Energy ². However, he does not publicly present himself as an angel investor or maintain a visible investment portfolio.

Inferred Thesis

Andrew Feldman does not appear to have a meaningful track record as a startup investor. He is fundamentally an operator — a serial founder of infrastructure and semiconductor companies. While some aggregator sites (CB Insights, PitchBook) list him with 1-2 angel investments, these records are sparse and may conflate multiple people named Andrew Feldman ⁷⁸.

His advisory activity (12+ startup advisory boards, board seat at Aleveo Energy) suggests he is engaged in the startup ecosystem as a mentor and advisor rather than as a capital allocator ². His sector expertise is narrow and deep: compute infrastructure, semiconductors, and AI hardware.

Given the lack of verifiable portfolio data, no meaningful investment pattern analysis can be performed. Feldman’s value to founders is likely as a domain expert and operator-advisor in AI/compute infrastructure, not as a source of capital.

Portfolio

No independently verified angel investments could be confirmed for the Andrew Feldman who is CEO of Cerebras Systems. Aggregator sites list 1-2 investments attributed to an “Andrew Feldman” but it is unclear whether these refer to the Cerebras co-founder or to other individuals with the same name ⁷⁸.

No independently verified angel investments could be attributed to this Andrew Feldman. See note above.

In Their Own Words

On founding Cerebras and the motivation to build purpose-built AI hardware:

“If we started with a clean sheet of paper and designed a solution optimized for AI, not for graphics, not for databases, not for web serving, but just for AI, we could build a better solution.” ⁵

On what drives him as an entrepreneur:

“I think the chance to build something is what’s attractive to me.” ⁹

“My greatest fear is to succeed at the ordinary — to do work that isn’t interesting or that isn’t important.” ⁹

On the audacity required to build Cerebras:

“It wasn’t just that [we] made it bigger. It was that nobody had ever built a chip bigger than about 800 square millimeters. And we come along and say ‘yeah, we have this idea, guys… we can build one at 46,000 millimeters’. And people looked at us like we were crazy.” ¹⁰

On work ethic and building something extraordinary:

“But the path to build something new out of nothing, and make it great, isn’t part-time work. It isn’t 30, 40, 50 hours a week. It’s every waking minute. And of course, there are costs.” ¹¹

“It’s not about logging hours. It’s about being passionate and being consumed by the work. It’s about being driven to change the world, to be the best you can be, and to help your team be the best it can be.” ¹¹

On fearless engineering:

“When you do fearless engineering, you’re not afraid of screwing up… you’re afraid of not learning, not getting better.” ¹⁰

On listening to the market:

“You have to be passionate and believe, but at the same time, you have to listen very carefully to what the market is telling you.” ⁹

“It’s not enough to discount them and say, ‘Oh, they’re naysayers.’ You have to really think about and try to learn from their negativity.” ⁹

On AI’s potential:

“AI will be a massive economic block — potentially larger than oil and gas, which is about 14% of U.S. GDP today.” ¹²

On being the underdog:

“I’m a professional David in the battle of Goliath.” ⁶

What Founders Say

No independently sourced founder testimonials found regarding Andrew Feldman as an investor or advisor. His public profile is overwhelmingly that of a founder/operator rather than an investor.

Sources