Rachael Chew

Work & Products

Things I've shipped

Each product is built for a specific audience, solving a real problem at the intersection of AI and human understanding.

Comms Teams

Pulse

Communications intelligence platform that monitors media narratives, tracks sentiment across Discord and Twitter, and fires real-time Slack alerts. Built for the people shaping how AI is understood.

Next.jsSupabaseClaude APISlack Webhooks

Real-time narrative monitoring across platforms

AI Safety Researchers

SYSCONBENCH

Sycophancy evaluation framework for frontier AI models. Measures residual value-mirroring drift across six behavioral categories, with a mechanistic interpretability extension on GPT-2.

PythonTransformer LensEval Framework

25.9% residual value-mirroring drift discovered

Explorers & Travelers

Buddy

Full-stack place-saving and guide-sharing app with AI guide generation, semantic search, taste graph, and trip journaling. 907 commits, 54,500 lines of code, solo.

React NativeExpoSupabaseClaude SonnetMapbox

907 commits in a solo build sprint

Youth in Singapore

Mental Health Collective

Co-founded Singapore's first nationwide youth mental health initiative. Government partnerships, nationwide events, lasting institutional infrastructure for youth wellbeing.

Community DesignPolicy PartnershipsEvent Systems

3,000+ attendees, government partnerships secured

Where I've Worked

2018 — 2022

Co-Founder

Mental Health Collective

Singapore

2022

Engineer & PM

Hikingbook

Taipei

2023

Software Engineer

Columbia Irving Institute

New York

2023

Software Engineer

genomIT

Buenos Aires

2024

DevRel Associate

Quantstamp / Zircuit

San Francisco

The Journey

8 cities. 4 continents.
Synthesizing Chaos.

Every four months, a new city. New language, new systems, no playbook. Two suitcases and one question: what can I build here? After eight times, I stopped fearing blank pages.

1.3521° N, 103.8198° E

Singapore

Home base · Where it all started

Co-founded Mental Health Collective. Ministry of Health COVID operations, supporting 40,000+ patients. Built the instinct for systems at scale.

Home

Building

37.7749° N, 122.4194° W

San Francisco

Current · Building

Where code meets conviction. Building Pulse, Buddy, and SYSCONBENCH. Learning to ship fast and think slow about safety.

37.5665° N, 126.9780° E

Seoul

Lived with a korean family!

Studied the tension between rapid tech adoption and cultural preservation. Learned that speed without wisdom is just noise.

Reflection

Narrative

51.5074° N, 0.1278° W

London

DevRel @ Quantstamp

Built a community pipeline from zero, onboarding 200+ global partner teams across 4 program rounds

52.5200° N, 13.4050° E

Berlin

Minerva rotation

A city that rebuilt itself from scratch. Understood that the best design honors what came before while pushing the frontiers of what's next.

Rebuilding

Scale

17.3850° N, 78.4867° E

Hyderabad

Interned at a cognitive science lab

Made me wonder about how culture shapes the way we attack a research problem.

25.0330° N, 121.5654° E

Taipei

Hikingbook · Software Engineer & Product Manager

I coded in Mandarin with a team in Taipei. Learned to read user intent from 20,000+ events. Data tells a story if you know which questions to ask.

Curiosity

Discovery

34.6037° S, 58.3816° W

Buenos Aires

Cancer Research @ genomIT

Applied unsupervised ML to 30,000+ biomarkers, surfacing trends used in 21% of prognosis models

About

Why I Build

I studied philosophy, cognitive science, and computer science.

One taught me to ask why.
The other taught me how people actually think and feel.

Now, I build technology at that intersection.

8

Cities lived and worked in across four continents, each shaping how I think about building for humans.

54.5k

Lines of code written in a single solo build sprint on Buddy. I don't just prototype. I ship.

3,000+

People reached through Mental Health Collective, Singapore's first nationwide youth mental health initiative I co-founded.

2

Degrees. Computer Science & Cognitive Science from Minerva University. The intersection is the point.

The Interview Project

150 Changemakers. 45 Countries.

I wanted to understand what it means to live a meaningful life, so I went directly to the source.

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.

150

Conversations

45

Countries

42%

Response Rate

28%

Meeting Booked

The System

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: 42% 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.

What I Learned

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.

The people who'd figured something out weren't chasing credentials. They were obsessed with work that mattered to them.

By conversation 150, I had a conversion playbook that worked across cultures, industries, and seniority levels. The best training for growth work was hundreds of rejections and learning from each one.

I build at theintersection ofpeople & products

I build at the
intersection of
people & products