Startups

This page has been up for a while but I recently realized I had never written an explanation of why it exists: I’ve always had an irrational fear of getting stuck. Not just in a claustrophobic sense, but also in life. That’s partially why I’ve been drawn to startups. Every day is something new and you must constantly learn and grow, or die. There are many other more “college-essay / job-application appropriate” aspects I enjoy too (solving problems, building things, ownership etc are great), but this fear more than anything has been the biggest driver. That, coupled with a strong belief that following conventional wisdom will give you conventional outcomes, motivated me to drop out of college with a semester left when I received an offer from a company I truly believed in. At a startup, the constraints are mostly your own abilities, both technical and social, and those of your team. The outcomes are highly correlated with the choices you make and it forces you to be honest with yourself, as there are not others to blame when things go wrong. With that now said, here are the startups I’m most proud to be / have been a part of:

Endeavor AI

Currently working here on training and deploying LLMs + agents for manufacturing and distribution companies

Research Engineer

Aeternum Analytics

Began with facial recognition (failed during COVID), ended up selling trading cards (did $1 million in sales during the Pokemon / MTG frenzy)

Founder

Free Lunch, LP

Small-scale hedgefund from my quant trading arc. I got nerdsniped for a while but ended up realizing it's not how I want to spend my time

Cofounder

Osmos Learn

Service for K-12 teachers that scans assignments and automatically grades them based on a rubric. Started by my friend, I built a lot of the backend

Full-stack

Investments

Update: After dropping out and getting a clearer picture of the areas I want to work in, the motivations below no longer fully reflect my current thinking. Although I still want to invest in people and ideas that I believe in, I have come to view that the best way for me to leverage myself is by directly focusing on solving the problems I care about. This is also what excites me and now where I am dedicating the bulk of my effort.

Eventually I want to run my own VC fund, so I’ve been practicing through Reg-CF. Hopefully one day this will serve as a track record when I go to raise money from investors, but in the meantime it’s teaching me a lot and reading the quarterly updates is always exciting. I initially set out to make 100 investments by the time I graduated college, so far I’m 3 years in with 51 investments across 49 companies. Been slowing down lately to focus on other projects, so 100 seems unlikely, but I’m satisfied with my progress and I’ve learned a lot.