What This Page Is Trying To Solve

Search demand around CMU Siebel Scholars often arrives as a half-remembered clue set: a year, a school, and a founder question. Most existing pages do not answer that cleanly. They either list scholars without telling readers who later founded companies, or they profile founders without proving the scholar link. This page uses a narrower standard so that the result is actually useful.

The inclusion rule is simple: a person must be identifiable on Carnegie Mellon's own Siebel Scholar records, and the founder role must be confirmed by a first-party or self-published source such as the person's own site. If we cannot verify both sides, we do not put the person in the main directory.

Short Answer

John P. Dickerson

Carnegie Mellon's Siebel Scholar records list John Dickerson in the 2016 cohort, and CMU's own 2016 announcement on the Computer Science Department site names him among the Siebel Scholars honored that year. That gives the CMU side of the verification chain.

The founder side is confirmed by Dickerson's personal site, where he writes that he is co-founder and Chief Scientist at Arthur. That makes him a clean fit for this directory: the school distinction and the company-founding role are both first-party verifiable.

Jeffrey Rzeszotarski

Carnegie Mellon's Siebel Scholar records also list Jeffrey Rzeszotarski in the 2016 cohort, and the CMU Computer Science Department's 2016 Siebel Scholars announcement names him directly as one of the honorees. That satisfies the scholar-identification requirement from institutional sources.

On his personal site, Jeff Rzeszotarski states that he co-founded DataSquid while he was a graduate student. That is enough to include him in a narrowly scoped AI-and-data founder directory, especially because DataSquid sits in the data and analytics tooling layer that these queries often imply.

Why Zhilin Yang Is Not In The Main Verified Table Yet

CMU's Siebel Scholar records list Zhilin Yang in the 2019 cohort. CMU's School of Computer Science magazine also says that Moonshot AI's chatbot Kimi was co-created by Zhilin Yang and Yuxin Wu in its feature on AI research transforming industries.

That is enough to show strong company-building relevance, but not enough for this page's stricter founder standard. As of March 28, 2026, we did not find a first-party company page or self-published profile that explicitly confirmed a founder title for Yang, so we excluded him from the main table rather than stretch the evidence.

What To Do With The 2015 Founder Query Pattern

Some search patterns point to a 2015 CMU Siebel Scholar founder. Under the verification rule used here, we did not confirm a 2015 Carnegie Mellon Siebel Scholar with a first-party AI-or-data founder claim strong enough for inclusion by March 28, 2026. That does not prove there is no such case. It only means we are not willing to publish it without a better source chain.

That may sound conservative, but it is the only way to make a page like this more useful than a generic alumni roundup. Readers using this directory should be able to trust that every main-table entry has been verified from both directions: scholar status and founder role.