I've been trying to figure out
how to introduce myself.

The short version is: I'm a software engineer who's lived across eight cities in four years, who cares deeply about building safe AI.

But that doesn't capture it. Not really.

When I was twelve, I watched my mum take her last breath. She was a teacher. At her funeral, everyone wore bright colours because she wanted it to be a celebration. Her former students told me she was the only one who believed in them. That was her gift: not love alone, but the ability to make people feel capable and seen. She fought breast cancer for seven years. She showed me what it means to face any challenge with a bright smile. She fought breast cancer for seven years. She showed me what it means to face any challenge with a bright smile.

Since then, I've carried one question: why did I get to stay? It sounds heavy. But 13 years on, I've transformed this weight into a mission. Since I get this chance to live, I'm going to use my life to make a difference.

Before I knew what I wanted to build, I knew what I wanted to understand. From 16 to 19, I studied philosophy, literature, and geography. Philosophy gave me the question: why do things work this way? Literature gave me the language to sit with answers that aren't clean. Geography gave me the instinct that context shapes everything. How people think. What they value. Who they become. I didn't know it then, but I was building the lens I'd use for everything that came after.

After high school, I took a gap year and tried seven jobs in twelve months. I drafted legal documents at an insolvency firm. I taught literature and English to teenagers. I spent an hour at a special needs school teaching an 18-year-old how to squeeze toothpaste, and I kept thinking: what if the tube was designed for him, not against him? I made a hundred sales calls a day for a startup. At the Ministry of Health, I helped move 40,000 COVID patients through a system held together with spreadsheets and will. Each job was a different answer to the same question: where can I be most useful? That question changed the direction of everything that followed.

That question changed the direction of everything that followed.

With four friends, I co-founded Mental Health Collective, Singapore's first nationwide youth mental health initiative. We organised a conference that 3,000 people showed up to. COVID hit halfway through planning. Everyone said cancel. We didn't. But the part I'm proudest of isn't the event. It's the months we spent in rooms with government ministries, working on youth mental health policy. Trying to change the infrastructure, not just the conversation.

So I learned.

What I'd actually been circling all along was three questions wearing different clothes. Philosophy asks why. Why do systems fail people. Why do incentives misalign. Why does care not scale. Psychology asks what. What happens in the mind when context shifts, when language changes, when trust is built or broken. Technology asks how. How do you take what you understand and make it work for millions of people who will never meet you.

I didn't switch from humanities to computer science. I just followed the questions deeper.

At Minerva, my classroom moved every four months. Buenos Aires, Taipei, San Francisco, Seoul, Hyderabad, Berlin, London. Each city was a lab, and not just for the work. Living in seven cities in four years, four months at a time, gave me something I couldn't have gotten from a textbook: a real-world laboratory for how the brain is shaped by context and culture. I coded in Mandarin with a team in Taipei. I worked alongside cancer researchers in Buenos Aires who showed me that certain Spanish expressions capture things English simply can't, and that the language you think in changes what you're able to think. I shipped features for a hiking app used by 100,000 people. I met a chocolate maker whose biggest dream was a shop in New York. I wrote down how much it would cost. I still have that notebook page. One day I want to fund people with genuine, simple dreams like his.

I still have that notebook page. One day I want to fund people with genuine, simple dreams like his.

I built an AI evaluation framework to measure where language models tell people what they want to hear instead of what's true. The finding: machines are most sycophantic about the things humans care about most. Values, identity, belief. That finding still keeps me up at night. That finding still keeps me up at night.

I climb mountains. I draw. I practice yoga. I have a deep, sincere love for life, and I'm still figuring out the best vessel for it.

What I keep coming back to is this. The things I've built that mattered most didn't start with a plan. They started with a conversation. Four friends in a living room saying someone should do something about this. A researcher in Buenos Aires sketching a gene on a napkin. A stranger on LinkedIn who replied to a cold message and changed the way I thought about my own work.

If you ask me what my superpower is, it's that. I can sit across from anyone and find the thing we both care about. I can bring people into a room and move them toward something none of us could see alone. I don't know what skill category that falls into. But I know it's the thread through everything I build. The best conversations I've had often started with a cold message.

The best conversations I've had started with a cold message. This letter is one of those.