About

You can find my resume here if you’re interested in my career story.

I thought it would be informative to write the rest of my About page using “ice breakers”. Googling “ice breakers” leads to results like “If you were a vegetable…”, so I searched for “normal ice breakers” instead. I still get “If you were an animal…”, but that’s better, somehow.

Here we go:

• If you were an animal, what would you be and why? My spirit animals:

  1. An octopus
  2. A sloth
  3. A hummingbird

  

  Enough separate friend groups have established versions of the joke that I get ready slowly, that I’ve incorporated being a sloth as a small part of my identity. Once, I was gifted sloth socks as a wedding party favor. I love those socks.

• What is one goal you’d like to accomplish during your lifetime?

  To contribute something that is useful to humanity 100 years after I’m dead. Because why aim low, right?

• When you were little, who was your favorite superhero?

  As an adult, I like Marvel movies as much as the next person. As a kid, I didn’t particularly care for superheroes. There are no rules. If the Hulk fights Wolverine, who wins? Who knows, because the physics of the world adapt, on the fly, to the plot. It’s all magic, in the end. Incidentally, I love a rules-based magic system, à la Brandon Sanderson.

• Who is your hero?

  I don’t know. I used to say “Elon Musk”, but as of 2022, that ship has sailed. Or… sunk? As a temporary placeholder, I’m going to say Kurt Gödel. Mostly so I can link out to one of the coolest blog post I’ve ever read: What Gödel Discovered.

• If you could have an endless supply of any food, what would you get?

  Maybe venison. This is a hard question because I keep thinking about all of the downsides of having an endless supply of a single food.

• What’s your favorite thing to do in the summer?

  Go to the beach. If it’s not broken, don’t fix it.

  • Water
  • Sunshine
  • Reading time
  • Late-night conversations
  • Seafood

• Who's your favorite cartoon character?

  I don’t immediately have a good answer for this, sadly. But there are a lot of different directions this could be taken. I briefly considered Waldo, as a general homage to Black Mirror. Mulan seems like a good choice cause she’s a badass. Plus, good music. And even though I haven’t seen it all Aang keeps popping into my head.

• If you could visit any place in the world, where would you choose to go?

  Angkor Wat.

  is a Hindu temple complex in Cambodia and is the largest religious monument in the world - Wikipedia

  The name is cool, the description is cool, the photos are cool. The whole thing just seems like something out of a fantasy epic. Equally important, I’ve never been anywhere in Southeast Asia, which seems like a fascinating place. I’d love to spend some time in the country experiencing the culture.

• What’s the ideal dream job for you?

  Being a venture capitalist qualifies as both ideal and a dream. I don’t know how you’d measure this effect, but I hypothesize that VCs have outsized influence over humanity’s trajectory. Even compared to CEOs, politicians, etc. There’s a lot more I want to say about this, but I don’t have all the words yet. I’ll leave a full explanation and defense to a later post.

• Are you a morning or night person?

  Night. This has shifted over the years, but my most of my favorite memories are at night, and many of my most productive hours are in the latest hours of the day. Some weeks, more gets accomplished in the ~10 hours at night than in the ~40 hours at work.

• What are your favorite hobbies?

  Even though I don’t spend as much time playing as I would like, I love ultimate frisbee. One of my favorite aspects of it is that a huge range of skill levels can play simultaneously. On one hand, noobies can still contribute because—at the amateur level at least—defense is more important than offense but takes significantly less technical skill. On the other hand, the frisbee and its slower speed of flight (relative to balls) allows for extremely exciting displays of athleticism.

• What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever eaten?

  Frog legs from a frog my brother and I hunted out of our pond and cooked over a fire. We weren’t sure how long to cook them, so we left them on the fire forever. While they weren’t burnt, every last molecule of water had been evaporated. They weren’t good.

• Name one of your favorite things about someone in your family.

  My brother has always intuitively known how to generate fun. That may seem like a boring and non-unique answer. But most people only know how to enjoy entertainment that’s provided to them. Mahlon knows how to generate entertainment from nothing. That’s a rare skill. It’s a skill I’m particularly thankful for him having, because it’s one I’ve been able to pick up over time, due to his showing me how to do it as kids.

• What's a unique or quirky habit of yours?

  Ehh…people like to imagine they’re super unique. Well, they are. But only because of the curse of dimensionality. Along any individual axis, people aren’t nearly as unique as they pretend.

  I’ve never heard anyone else called out for holding their breath while they’re thinking. This means I tend to exhale heavily at semi-regular intervals while working. I didn’t know this was something I do until one of my friends on my high school’s Academic Team yelled at me to stop because it was bothering them. Since then, multiple other people have kindly reminded me to “keep breathing”. I suspect other people also do this, but I’ve neither noticed nor overheard someone mention it to another.

• If you had to describe yourself using three words, they would be…

  Human. Creator. Bioinformatician.