Dr. Vijay Shilpiekandula is an investor at Dilation Capital, where he applies a systems-builder's lens to identify structural mispricings during platform shifts. Before entering capital markets, he was a researcher and operator, inventing and implementing hardware/software systems to solve real-world customer needs, for which he received 14 patents. He holds an Erdős number of 4 for his work on parallelizable algorithms applied to real-time factory automation. Vijay is an active contributor to the Value Investors Club, where his early theses on the generative AI buildout drew on his systems co-design background to flag the memory wall and the optical-interconnect bottleneck as binding constraints for scaling intelligence. Vijay won the 2024 Sohn Idea Contest after a blind review process by a panel of industry leaders. In his 2024 presentation at the NYC Sohn Conference, he was early in identifying the memory bottleneck and its link to lithography as a binding constraint in the AI infrastructure buildout. Before the DeepSeek selloff in January 2025, he called out model distillation and open-source replication as defining developments. He argued that the generative AI era is different from previous platform shifts such as the internet buildout or cloud computing, as the hardware and physical infrastructure layer becomes the binding constraint and accrues substantial value. Vijay holds a PhD (sponsored by Samsung) from MIT on a systems co-design application involving nanometer-precision positioning, an MBA from Harvard Business School, and a B.Tech from IIT Madras. He resides in New York with his family, where, when not running in Central Park, he enjoys building fun science projects with his young children