I started by studying neuroscience, because I wanted to understand where everything came from.
I started at U. Oregon because of a scholarship, and soon wanted to speak directly with the people who wrote the books. I emailed some neuroscience professors at Stanford, got a research position, dropped out of UO, and drove to Palo Alto. I lived out of my car for a year while learning programming and working in two neuroscience labs. I’m grateful to people who took a chance on me early on, and work to pass that on.
I transferred to study CS at Berkeley and computational neuroscience at the Redwood Institute. Since field seemed blocked by lack of good tools for measurement and data processing, I cofounded NeurotechX, which still runs as a global open-source neurotech developer community.
That summer I got an email about setting up the neurotech company that would become Kernel. I joined as a founding teammate and stayed to research noninvasive devices.
After seeing the valley-of-death curve faced by science companies, I started looking at new tools for funding. This led to teaming up with some friends to build TrustLabs. We built the first digital dollar to partner with a US bank (TrueUSD)—a predecessor to USDC or Worldcoin. People told us it was too early and we couldn’t find a bank. I wrote the whitepaper and found the bank. TrueUSD grew to $250M AUM and was acquired in 2020. I got to work with an incredible team and cofounders.
Afterwards I spent time learning to build with the newer AI stack, and worked as an early-stage cofounder to build an AI company and a brain company.
The world will keep evolving faster, and I will too.
Some principles:
- Portfolio of Worldviews: I may not know yet, but I can cultivate a set of weighted hypotheses
- Conviction: Sometimes the best move is to swing exceptionally hard at 1 thing
- Feedback loops: I go out of my way to work with people who are more experienced than me. To choose to set up my incentives so that I keep evolving, so I can create more in the future.