SF · Previously 8 cities, 4 continents
Singapore, Seoul, Taipei, Berlin, Buenos Aires, London, Hyderabad, San Francisco. New city, same first move — find the problem that won't leave me alone, open my laptop, start building. AI safety evals. Machine learning pipelines. Intelligence platforms.
CEOs, professors, authors, a butcher who became a vegan food founder. No warm intros. No platform. No budget. Just me, LinkedIn, and a question I couldn't let go of.
I built my first outbound playbook in 2020 before AI existed to help me. Cold outreach meant manual research, A/B testing subject lines in spreadsheets, and tracking response rates by hand. I tested 8 different message templates across 200+ prospects, iterating on length, personalization depth, and call-to-action framing.
The winning formula: 23% response rate, 28% meeting booked rate. Curiosity-driven outreach outperformed open-ended asks by 3x. Every conversation taught me something about building trust with strangers at scale.
The meta-lesson was about growth itself. How do you get busy, successful people to care about an unknown college student's questions? The answer wasn't luck. It was seeing every rejection as a data point.
20 people didn't respond to the 7-sentence version? Try 3 sentences. Still nothing? Change the subject line. Then send 100 more.
People who'd figured something out weren't chasing credentials. They were obsessed with work that mattered to them.
Become a certified yoga teacher. Learn anatomy, sequencing, yoga philosophy, and how to hold a room — all inside a body I'd spent twenty years using mostly as a vehicle for my brain.
I came out with a different relationship to my own presence. Philosophy taught me how to ask why. Yoga taught me how to sit with the answer.
Navigated the healthcare system in a country where I couldn't explain the injury in the local language.
I learned how quietly inaccessible our architecture can be — how many buildings assume you can take stairs, how cities are built for people who don't wait. I walked differently for three months. I no longer take my body for granted.
Hike for six days. Pitch tents. Cook in tin cans under a light that never ends.
Awe.
Wake up at 5am, meditate for one hour, practice yoga for another, eat every meal in silence.
I'd spent years confusing motion with meaning. Turns out some of the clearest thinking I've ever done happened in a room with no phone, no laptop, and nothing to prove.
Travel alone through three cities without a plan. Stay with strangers. Say yes to whatever the day offers.
A filmmaker's mum taught me how to shape chapati in her kitchen. A family with two kids took me shopping for fish food on a Sunday morning. I'd thought "travel" meant seeing things. It turns out the best parts were the afternoons I spent inside someone else's daily life.
Start a bouquet business from my kitchen. No training, no suppliers, no brand. Figure out sourcing, pricing, branding, photography, delivery, and customer conversations from scratch.
Every bouquet was really a small portrait of the person receiving it. Looking back, the best bouquets were ones where the type of flowers, colors, and wrapping all matched who the person was. I wasn't really selling flowers. I was telling small stories, one delivery at a time.
Spend twelve months saying yes to jobs. Drafted legal documents at an insolvency firm. Taught literature to grade 10 students. Made a hundred sales calls a day. Conveyed 40,000 COVID-19 patients through a Ministry of Health system.
Starting from zero seven times in a row taught me that being new isn't a weakness — it's a position with its own kind of clarity. You notice things the people inside might not see.
