going all in from carmel

i’ve always been told that i’m exceptionally smart.

but for the longest time, my parents drilled in the importance of hard work and never let me slack off. i remember missing countless birthday parties, hangouts, and breaks because i didn’t finish my schoolwork, piano practice, sports practice, or other responsibilities. this naturally continued into high school, when my schedule was so packed there was no time to worry. i spent my days juggling fencing practice, two non-profits, 5 school clubs, research, and much more on top of school. so when i got to berkeley and started struggling, i instinctively told myself i wasn’t working hard enough. i think that’s true to a degree, but at the same time, i signed myself up for too much. i thought the key to productivity was filling up my schedule so i had no time to be lazy. my freshman fall, i took 6 classes, joined 4 extracurricular orgs, worked part-time, and played 3 sports on top of a normal college life. and i think this mindset mirrors other parts of my life as well.

recently, i began to realize i was too scared. my friend asked me: what is something you are top 1% at?

i think i’m probably top 1% at fencing, but for “useful” traits, the only thing i could muster up combining multiple traits i was decent at for a parlay type statement to say i’m top 1% of being slightly above mediocre at a few important skills.

a question i’ve also been thinking about is being general vs specialized, and especially with AI, the clear answer is specialization is better. as i reflect more on myself, i’ve realized i’m well-rounded but don’t have anything that stands out. there’s the saying “jack of all trades is a master of none,” but the part that’s left out is “but is usually better than a master of one,” and that’s something i’ve always lived by. having more options in case anything goes wrong gives you the most flexibility and stability. that’s partially why i chose to go to berkeley m.e.t. and get a double major in eecs and business and a minor in stats. i was considering a career in vc, quant, swe, finance, startups, and ai research, because i’ve genuinely seen a good split towards all of these roles.

i’ve always wanted to be extremely successful, create something great, make a positive impact for the world, and work on something i’m interested in. i’m realizing to reach my goal of being exceptional and successful, the best path is to go all in and focus on a singular goal. the quickest path to a destination is always a straight line, where each experience builds upon the last. looking at my past experiences, i’ve worked extensively in neural network research. shadowing a professor from fau where i learned the basics of NNs and the research process, earning my first “publication” as an acknowledged author; learning from harvard professors on how to build NNs from scratch and achieving 99+% on nmist; eventually publishing my own independent research using a 1-D convolutional neural network(CNN) to diagnose dysgraphia; creating a startup for drowsy and distracted driving prevention with an AI dashcan, which contained cv for direction tracking, a 2-D CNN for phone and sleep detection, and a quantum neural network for noisy perturbed video use; and TAing for my school’s data structures class, where i taught about retrieval augmented generation before it was well-known. all this deep technical experience in ml research makes my transition into AI safety relatively intuitive. i believe AI safety is a promising field that is working towards a goal of improving society/humanity, and we are reaching an inflection point for safety startups making my long-term goal more feasible (more to come explaining my thoughts). to reach that eventual goal, my current goal/interest is to do technical AI safety research.

i’m confident that if i set my mind to something, i’ll be able to get it done and so i’m writing this as a sign of accountability. right now, i’m investing @ costanoa, and my project for the summer is discovering a new market for my firm. i began by exploring fintech, biotech, bci, SaaS, and defense and through that process, i discovered how important AI research is for the future of humanity, and this internship(truly cannot say anything negative on my time at costanoa) is my inflection point. i’m going all in, and i guarantee that one day i’ll be sitting on the other side of the table, raising and pitching (probably from costanoa because i truly resonate with the firm) to build ai that focuses on augmenting human capabilities rather than replacing them.

p.s. if you’re building and interested in raising from costanoa, reach out and find a way to warm intro to me. i love helping out my friends and i’d like to refer founders gritty enough to complete the simple task of getting a warm intro. (u won’t regret raising from costanoa, #41 best vc based on time but truly #1 in my slightly biased but also insider opinion). and thanks to tony, nicole, and alex for changing my views + inspiring me to write.