last updated 6/25/21

Oh happy fall that was the occasion for so sublime a redemption.

Who

I was born in a small city in northern China, famous for its fragrant black vinegar and crab “fat” 小笼包. One afternoon when I was 5, my mom showed up at my preschool and asked me to say goodbye to my classmates. Unbeknownst to me, we would soon be jumping on my first flight over the Pacific to meet my dad in the U.S. and begin our new lives in Saint Louis, Missouri.

The years after immigration turned out to be a lot harder than either of my parents expected. With no intuition for western culture and little to no English, they had to start from scratch. My mom waitressed during the days and studied English in the evenings while my dad became a truck driver despite having a Ph.D. in chemical engineering. Growing up a witness to their struggles and triumphs inspired my perennial obsession with existentialism, self-determination, and the future of work.

I’m a human-computer interaction researcher turned engineer turned founder. A gap year in 2018 inspired me to get off the institutional escalator and a pandemic in 2020 motivated me drop out of Stanford. I’m passionate about democratizing access to meaningful work, developing empathetic computer mediated interactions, and building workflows to enable diverse, distributed teams.

What

I’m a 2020 Thiel Fellow building Pareto, a human API delivering the business functions startups desperately need, on-demand. In previous lives, I performed with orchestras around the world as a classical violist, researched team status hierarchies at the Stanford HCI Lab, built chatbots to destigmatize mental illness at Microsoft Research in India, and published near-earth asteroid observations with SSP in New Mexico.

When

I’m 23, living in the diamond age.

Where

Based in the Bay Area every other month.

How

Good vibes from healthy consumption. Here are my favorites.

Listenings

Readings

Doings