Michael Chao-Largent Jr.
Founder & CEO, The Spades Company
I started The Spades Company because I kept building tools I needed and couldn't find. Not because they were impossible to build — because no one had built them the way they should exist. Phi came out of that. So did the design system it runs on. I am 16, based in Marysville, California, and I have been writing software seriously since 2023. This company is how I keep myself consistent and shipping.
WHAT I'VE BUILT
Phi is an AI-augmented learning app that transforms how you study and retain information. Upload documents, textbooks, or notes — Phi builds personalized learning sessions around your material, adapts to what you already know, and surfaces what you are close to forgetting.
Vocality removes background noise from recordings — construction, traffic, HVAC hum, room echo — using a two-pass AI pipeline. Record directly on iOS, or import existing audio files for cleanup. The model handles what it is confident about. You review what it is not.
Ideuh validates a product idea before you spend months building it.
More is in progress.
CONTEXT
I am a high school student at Marysville Charter Academy for the Arts. It is an arts school, so there is little STEM — I started the school's first programming club to change that, and taught the first lessons myself: HTML basics, then an introduction to Python. Most of what I know about building software, I learned outside of a classroom.
I taught myself to program, starting with long hours on Code.org. Since then I have worked in Go, HTML and CSS, and Swift — Swift is the one I know best. It is what lets me build iOS apps across a real range of designs and functions. Shipping them was always the hard part; only a fraction made it to my GitHub. I am learning TypeScript and Next.js now so I own the full stack, not just the native side.
WHERE THIS IS GOING
Every Spades product serves one goal: productivity. Each one removes friction between a person and the thing they are trying to build, and stays simple enough that anyone understands it on the first open. Phi is first, built for learning. Audio tooling for musicians is what comes next — I am already working toward the denoising model it will need.
I am moving toward training and deploying my own models, not just calling ones that already exist. Right now that means getting fluent with RAG and fine-tuning, and learning to build an audio denoising model from the ground up for the products that will need it. This is the work I want to do at the intersection of product and research.
The Spades Company is not a portfolio. It is a real business — a subscription model, its own infrastructure, a design system built from scratch. The standard is one thing: every product has to look and feel high-end and genuinely reduce the friction between a person and what they are trying to make. Whether that work is music or software, this company is built for people who build.
What if?