Rob Williams knows how to pitch Jeff Bezos: You write a press release as if your product has already been built. Bezos reads it and gives a thumbs up or down.
Williams went through this process a lot as an executive on Amazon’s “S-team,” in charge of software products such as Alexa, until his departure last fall. But the pitch he made a few weeks later—in December 2025—was different. Now he was collaborating with Thomas Reardon, a neuroscientist and repeat startup founder, and approaching Bezos as a funder, not a boss.
Here’s what Bezos, sitting on his yacht somewhere, read while Williams anxiously watched on Zoom:
Flourish is a neuro AI company that is solving the two most difficult problems facing AI today: power efficiency and continuous learning. We are building Cortex AI, the first synthetic intelligence system designed to match the computational capacity, learning efficiency, and power budget of the human brain.
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