Designing Slides for Caltech, Cofounding a Startup, and the TKS Hackathon
November (and October) Newsletter
Hey! If you’re new here, I’m a 17-year-old design engineer, writer, and entrepreneur. Currently, I’m building tech for the AI/ML and Web3 space while co-founding a startup. Previously, I’ve built an app awarded by the U.S. Congress, been published in the New York Times, and won the World Series of Innovation for my fintech startup :)
Working with the Caltech Team in the NASA BIG Idea Challenge
Near the beginning of the month, I had the wonderful opportunity to work with the Caltech team on their 140-slide deck to pitch their project LATTICE (Lunar Architecture for Tree-Traversal in-service-of Cabled Exploration) in the 2022 NASA BIG Idea Challenge. I live around an hour away from the Caltech campus and was able to drive up to meet up with the team, working 12 hours nonstop on the last day before it was due to finish up the deck. Honestly one of the coolest jobs I’ve had, and I had such a great time with the students there!
Watch their final presentation to NASA (with the slides in action) here; shoutout to them for winning the Visionary Concept award :)
Joining Kndrd as a Co-Founder: Day 0 at a Startup
Back in October, my now-cofounder Isabella reached out to me on LinkedIn asking for advice on a startup she’s creating (serendipity in effect!). The meeting turned out so great that I ended up joining as a cofounder! For weeks, we’ve been building Kndrd (pronounced “kindred”), an app that seeks to connect like-minded people through shared experiences. We have 500+ people on our waitlist and have been in contact with a lot of advisors and potential investors guiding us.
Over Thanksgiving, my cofounder flew out from NYC so we could meet in person and iron out our roadmap for the next few months (building the MVP, raising our pre-seed/seed round, applying to accelerators, etc.). I finished our landing page (www.kndrd.com) and we filmed an accelerator application vid, among lots of other progress :)
Follow along: Instagram • Twitter • TikTok
AgriChain: Solving the Food Insecurity Crisis with Blockchain
Nearly 1 in 9 on the planet go to bed on an empty stomach. Yet around 14% of the world's food is lost before reaching the retail level. There’s a paradox—in fact, episodes of famine are rarely the result of a lack of food; they’re the result of an inefficient supply chain.
This is the problem that Rohitha Baskaran, Drishti Sethia, and I sought to tackle during the TKS Explore Hackathon. We came up with AgriChain, a decentralized blockchain system that tracks the food supply chain by generating digital twins of food. We had such a fun experience working together, putting together our slide deck (while depriving ourselves of sleep), and pitching our final solution :)
Hmm…What Happened in October?
October was all over the place and I didn’t put out a newsletter, so here’s some stuff that went on:
Started a Twitter – come say hi!
Submitted my first college application 🎉
Submitted to the first stage of the Conrad Challenge—we’re creating a permissioned blockchain system to secure medical equipment donations
Joined TKS Velocity to push myself to reach my full potential
Threw a surprise bday party for my friend
Snippets :·゚
Monthly favorites & media that I’m consuming
📖 Currently reading: Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (for my 20th Century Dystopian Fiction class)
🎥 Film & television: COIN: A Founder's Story (new documentary that chronicles Brian Armstrong’s founding of Coinbase — worth a watch for anyone interested in Web3 & crypto)
🎧 Podcast: Helping to Launch the Thiel Fellowship, Founding the 1517 Fund & Raising $30M+ (Curiosity Podcast)—an interview with Michael Gibson by TKS students
🧠 Articles/Vids:
Good and Bad Procrastination (Paul Graham): written by the founder of Y Combinator himself
Practical tips for improving text layout (Danqing Liu): Laying out texts properly is 80% of what makes something look clean. An interesting read for you design nerds.
Startup advice & how to talk to customers with Rob Fitzpatrick (Digital Product World)
Favorite part of the talk: “University students are like the cockroaches of the entrepreneurship world. The reason they succeed is they just can’t be killed.”
Next Month
In December, I’m making a film about neural networks for a scholarship application, working on a TKS consulting project for Walmart, and getting my early college decisions back (then enjoying Christmas break…hopefully). See you then 👋
P.S. Some of you might have already heard my college news (I’m writing this newsletter a little late…), but I’ll save that for the December issue ;)
💡 Where to find me: LinkedIn • Twitter • Website • Instagram