Writings

Back in high school, my friends and I built a self-powered light-up drum - as the drumsticks hit the drumpads, the mechanical energy was converted into electrical energy that powered a small LED light. Though we had set out to create something that we had never seen before, all t…

My first two years in New York, I lived with three roommates on a block that was 15 mins away from any train station in a tiny 4B2B apartment with no kitchen countertop or space for a sofa, but a good number of mice. The national fair market rate for a 4BR apartment is $2,492. Ou…

I’m curious about how people become great engineers, operators, and leaders. I know the basic guidance - do good work every day, for many days. But what does good work mean? What’s the split of time between doing and thinking? To answer this question, I think about who would be a…

I’m grateful my engineer parents taught me to think mathematically and develop nuanced views about the world. My whole life, throughout my childhood and MIT, I thought the goal of personal development was to become a fully rational being - equipped with all the knowledge of how t…

I think the first exchange of a relationship is the most important - first impressions, first dates, and greetings. A warm introduction can initiate a lifelong friendship, a playful tease can spark a romantic connection, and a firm handshake can lay the groundwork for a strong bu…

The past few months, I’ve been immersed in biographies - Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Obama, Phil Knight. I visited home and my parents and I revisited Edison and Ford’s estate in Fort Myers. Reaching the two year mark of my full-time career has made me increasingly anxious about my p…

The way I envision the world progressing is like water making its way down a mountain. There’s a natural sense of gravity pulling the water through, but it will branch into streams, each one finding the path of least resistance. Some patches will remain dry because of physical ba…

My one close-up action shot from high school basketball is of me, jumping to catch a rebound with my arms extended, except the ball is hitting me in the face instead of landing in between my hands. I played basketball for about seven years of my life, during elementary school and…

I was able to work out today for the first time after a few weeks of pills, injections, and my first post-surgery recovery period. I’m still unable to fit into my jeans and worried about falling asleep at my desk from exhaustion. But I did get a bouquet of pink roses in the mail,…

Growing up, I loved building random practical things like tissue dispensers and desk organizers (impact has to start somewhere). I competed at the state engineering fairs with a sheet music turner and a typing device for people with motor disabilities. I loved the process of 1) t…

In February of this year, I met Renee, my wonderful nutritionist who dials in from North Carolina every month to check in on me. I figured if there’s any defaults I fix in my 20s, it should be my food defaults. Almost half a year in, I’ve started to put my diet on autopilot, and…

The experiment setup A few months ago, a friend and I joked about hosting a matchmaking night. People spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars on dates to try to find their person, so what if we tried to help? One thing led to the next. We found a gorgeous mansion in the…

In the past few months I’ve been captivated by a few startup books: Bad Blood (by John Carreyrou, about Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos) Careless People (Sarah Wynn-Williams, Meta) Shoe Dog (Phil Knight, Nike) Looking back, I realized I unintentionally got to see wildly different pers…

Yesterday we lost a close family friend to brain cancer. For a year, he fought hard, writing about his battle and even returning excitedly to his executive role at Google while still undergoing electric fields therapy. Ultimately, the cancer resurfaced and there was nothing more…

The past year at the Brooklyn Symphony Orchestra, we’ve been in trials with potential new conductors - our previous one led the orchestra for twenty years (!). At the start of the process, hundreds of conductors applied, and the orchestra exec committee chose 5 finalists to take…

I just finished listening to Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson and I’ve never resonated so much with a set of perspectives. Growing up and back in college, I lived in a mode of scarcity - thinking life is a zero-sum game, feeling afraid to spend energy and money on non-c…

Due to a scheduling oversight, I was scheduled to run 15+ coding interviews for engineering interns in the past few weeks, and so I did. Every time, I ask the same question and give the candidate ~45 mins to build a solution, typically in Python. It’s a good question that one of…

Note: Mostly a hypothetical thought experiment written from my own perspective. It feels so common now to go through a checkout process and check an additional box for insurance. Yesterday I booked bus tickets, added on the $9 insurance coverage, and received a follow-up email fr…

The other day at Tandem we did a deep dive into healthcare land to learn about the flow of money behind medication access. It blew my mind that one unit of medication can cost up to $10,000 - even though its actual worth can be less than $5,000. In an ideal world… Manufacturers w…

This post is a brain dump of takes I’ve formed over the years - mostly an exercise for myself to form stronger opinions, though still loosely held. 1. First impressions matter. In the first two minutes of an interaction, people make up their mind about you. How did you come off t…

I just finished reading Tracy Kidder’s biography about Paul Farmer, Mountains Beyond Mountains, after a co-worker recommended it to me as one of the sources of his healthcare inspiration. Paul Farmer helped start clinics across Haiti, Peru, and even in the prisons of Russia. Paul…

Today I was talking with an intern at our company who’s an MIT freshman. It was the first time I felt old. He explained the new course titles to me as I reminisced about their old names, and as he listed his classes and clubs, I racked my brain for anyone we might know in common…

I’m writing this from our hostel room back in Puerto Natales, as I’m lying on a bed for the first time again in 7 days. My knees ache but my mind is beaming. I’ve wrapped up one of the hardest personal challenges of my life - hiking around 80-100 km across the O trek in the Torre…

U.S. financial services and the global order My view on the global order is based on a combination of Ray Dalio and Nassim Taleb’s perspectives — it’s driven by a set of cyclical factors and unexpected shocks, but countries can reduce these effects by being antifragile. The quest…

My co-founder and I have been putting on our sales hats for the past couple of months, selling to investors and potential enterprise customers. We’ve fully gone through the sales cycle with a couple of customers, from initial calls, to demos, to sending over a paid contract for t…

The context Finance, money, payments, transactions — these are all evolving as fintech develops. Movement of money is evolving, becoming more and more continuous rather than discrete. What are the incentives behind this change? Merchants want to reduce friction for customers Merc…

The past month and a half, I’ve been preparing Beethoven’s appassionata sonata (3rd mvt.) for a recital. I got it to a state of memorization relatively quickly, but then I hit a wall. I kept spending hours daily practicing, but I couldn’t get the piece up to speed. Whenever I tri…

My co-founder and I have talked to over 60 people during our customer interviews, and almost all of them have complained about data. whenever we touch the topic, there’s some sort of nightmare attached, with different flavors: 1. Quality — the data is a mess, and no one wants to…

Caution: spoilers! When I read the three body problem a couple years ago, I understood that: if aliens come to colonize Earth, we’ll be crippled by our societal divide more than by any technological gap. I just finished the first season of the show, which brought this societal ri…

Not very great work-life separation, and I usually try to not operate like a life-optimizing finance bro, but I’ve been thinking a lot about how to “underwrite” myself lately. How should you invest in yourself? How should you decide how much to invest in yourself? I believe every…

We hear a lot about today’s neobanks, like SoFi and Chime, but only about 25% of consumers have ever used a digital bank. Traditional brick-and-mortar banks continue to dominate the world of financial services and influence the day-to-day of the average American. Since leaving Al…

A year ago, I joined a neobank startup helping Latin Americans open bank accounts and send money abroad. I’m now writing this from the other side. We grew from 500 to 2000+ customers from September through March. Ultimately we didn’t have enough activated users, resulting in a hi…

I believe that we shouldn’t describe consciousness as a binary state. Concepts like “I think therefore I am” make it seem like a conscious entity either exists or doesn’t. But it’s clear that all types of species do some level of thinking, whether it’s trees receiving neighborly…

You suddenly wake up in a dark forest. You don’t know where you are or why you’re there. What do you do? A friend asked me this and my answer was — if it’s night out, sleep, since I won’t be useful for anything anyways. But as soon as daylight peeks in, choose a direction and wal…

Before working in fintech, I assumed data exchanges were instant, and the reason systems were slow was because no stakeholder had a reason to speed them up. Instead, I’ve realized data is async by default, due to the constraints of the financial system. Though user-facing experie…

Growing up in the U.S., I’ve been pushed to believe that one of the critical steps to building wealth is to become a homeowner. Why is home ownership glorified in the U.S., and does it actually make sense to buy a house solely for the purpose of growing your wealth? The origins o…

Neobanks across the world have achieved unprecedented reach — 1 in 2 Brazilians has a Nubank account and over a third of the adult UK population has an account at a digital-first bank. Digital-first banks are relatively new. Nubank, SoFi, Monzo, etc. were all created in roughly t…

I love organizing — my favorite store ever is The Container Store (I would stay here overnight if I could hide from the mall security guards). Now I get to live my organization dreams by being a software engineer. As part of the engineering team at Alza, I think a lot about encap…

City walkability is a topic often thrown around Gen-Z twitter or urban planning internet groups — it’s probably one of the topics that has spread the most beyond the urban planning academic bubble. Cars are bad, public transit is good, and walkable cities are the cure-all to soci…

Office humor. The casual conversation about how it was supposed to be warm by now, but the weather keeps surprising us, or the smile about how the week flew by. A polite chuckle, some eye contact but not too much, and a final call to action to get to work. People hate on office h…

Countries like China, India, and Brazil (all part of BRICS) are fast-growing emerging markets that have been expanding at the fastest pace these past few months since last summer, and they’re in the world’s top 10 largest economies as of 2023. Where does this growth come from and…

With the AI-driven future in sight, UBI has surfaced as a way to compensate for the reduced employment. I personally have always been drawn to the idea of UBI and admired people like Andrew Yang and Jack Dorsey who have been backers of it. It seems like the simplest way to cover…

How to boost your credit score, which credit card to get, and how to maximize your credit card points are all google search queries that have quadrupled in popularity since 2004. The vast majority of adults in the U.S. (82%) now have at least one credit card. Credit cards are inc…

This past year, I pushed myself to take risks— I skydived for the first time, worked a month in Brazil, played a 1 hour solo piano concert, joined an early-stage startup, and moved to NYC. In 2024, I want to continue taking risks, but also grow by nurturing my existing hobbies, h…

During my recent trip to visit family in Bogotá, I explored the city to its limits, hopping through Chapinero and La Candelaria and hiking up the edges to quebradas and mountain churches. Bogotá was built on a plateau at a 2,625 meter elevation hugged by its surrounding mountains…

In my software optimization class this year, they taught us a saying from a philosopher, “I would choose an archer who hits the same spot over and over again, rather than an archer who hits the target sometimes.” The archer can be trained to move his target. They used this to tea…

My last year at MIT ~ The first question asked at tech events, during meetups, or when you’re just catching up with a friend: “So what are you up to?” Having been to way too many tech happy hours during my time in the bay, I programmed myself to give my spiel, a casual yet clean…

There’s something about art that draws me in sometimes and repels me other times. I’ve always appreciated art that helps us notice the beauty of life; a painting that shows how the light hits a mountain, a piece that mixes rich dark tones with a light melody in a melancholy way,…

Whenever someone asks me what my career would be if I wasn’t a tech startup nerd, if it could be something wildly different, I say I would be a professional pianist. Piano somehow weaves together all the core components I appreciate most of being human: expression, passion, perso…

Reflections from a now "social junior, academic sophomore" 5 weeks into my 2021 fall semester: Grad dorm life because MIT didn't have space for me in undergrad housing anymore Email in my inbox from a concerned prof. Whose class I forgot I had to take this semester Mid-identity c…

Placing time on a table and observing it for a bit Time is one of those concepts that I think could have tons of different words for it, but somehow we just merged everything into one four-letter word. We all decided to take all the different representations of "time" and build o…

Our reality and how it can be participatory ~ I've been reading and thinking about how quantum mechanics could influence how we think about our reality, and it's so insane to me that our entire idea of reality could be changed by these random quantum phenomena. Starting with the…

The Karenization of the consumer We’re all familiar with the “Can I speak to the manager?” Karens that we know and love. Most of us are aware of this phenomenon — a white woman taking advantage of her privilege to unreasonably dispute about a subpar (or slightly flawed) service.…

It’s happening — I’m finally getting around to that New Year’s resolution of starting to write. Just six or so months late, but still proud of myself for actually starting to do it so late in the year. I feel like for other things, it’s like, if by six months in you haven’t start…