“Americans really believe in the possibility of the impossible and they're ambitious enough to get there.”
Anton Troynikov is the co-founder and head of technology at Chroma. “While I was born in Ukraine, I grew up in Australia and I lived several years in Germany, so I’m from here and there,” he says. Traditional software handles structured data in SQL tables. What AI adds is the ability to work with unstructured data through plain language, addressing it by meaning. “That’s what Chroma does. Chroma is the AI application database.”
The pull toward this work started early. As a kid he watched space shuttle launches on TV and felt a draw to be there, before he even knew where there was. He went to grad school at the Technical University of Munich for robotics, which he describes as applied math and computer science, because he could see it was what came next on the frontier of technology.
His case for the United States is about the people. “If you want to do anything really ambitious or serious in the world, you need to be around people who are also ambitious, who really believe that almost impossible things can happen,” he says. He points to heavier-than-air flight and the moon landing, things called impossible until Americans did them. “Americans really believe in the possibility of the impossible and they’re ambitious enough to get there.” For him the American dream is pursuing big ambitions and building something greater than himself, and he feels he can do that here better than anywhere else.