Philosophy

In the last few years, a pillar of my belief system has always been that intrinsic motivation is derived from fulfillment found in mission-driven consistency. Now how do we define fulfillment? For me, it’s the contentment of not needing to look for “more” extrinsically. Or as seen on a monk’s monastery in the outskirts of Kyoto - “I only know I have enough”.

In my 23 years of life, this sort of fulfillment has only ever been achieved through the idea of mission-driven consistency. This means having a vision for yourself that physically compels you to take on responsibility. Hard things don’t suddenly become fun, but instead they become non-negotiable - you can only continuously do them because of the mandatory compulsion that your vision commands.

Don’t conflate this idea with the feeling of happiness; I’ve often found that fulfillment is more so tied to pain, obsession, and sacrifice over long periods of time. But that knowing sacrifice of temporary happiness in the pursuit of something sufficiently compelling provides sustained direction and mental clarity - hence fulfillment.

Now the question is what constitutes a vision worth pursuing and sacrificing for? I believe that’s deeply personal. One must have sufficient understanding of themselves and what can compel them for them to act on that compulsion. Hence, the direction drives the magnitude.

This blog will be unfocused and unstructured in form. The purpose is to distill my experiences into a personal philosophy to hopefully ultimately answer the question of what I want and why I want it.

Lived Experiences

I am currently 23, born in Colorado, grew up in San Jose, and went to college at Berkeley. I’m now based in San Francisco!

I would say that before 18 I lived a generally unremarkable life (bar the fact that I met my lifetime childhood friends). This claim is derived from the fact that before 18, my accomplishments were purely a luck-based product of my environment. The luck to have an education-focused childhood from a somewhat stable family in a good neighborhood.

I definitely didn’t have early passions or a core central identity; my early life was just a sequence of random unintentional events that continued until I was lucky enough to stumble into independent consciousness.

At Berkeley, I met some of my now best friends who were exceptional because they were mission-driven at an early age (while maintaining that fun childish naivete), shattering the limiting beliefs that I had which constrained me to average.

They quickly convinced me that my freshman year, year-long stint at Cisco along with my other aspirations at the time (such as quant trading and Amazon AI that I had lined up for sophomore summer) were derived purely from extrinsic motivation and external incentives.

It was the first time in my life I witnessed intrinsically driven people generating asymmetric upside outcomes because they operated at a level that deviated from their peers both in scoping and in direction — and they were fulfilled while doing it.

And thus, I dropped out of Berkeley at 19 to be the first engineer at their startup. Pure serendipity.

I’ve been working at that startup, Conversion.ai, for the last 4 years. Since then, we’ve raised a seed and a Series A at a nine-figure valuation and have grown the team significantly.

For me, self-discovery is an ongoing process. These last 4 years, I’ve been wrong an infinite number of times and worked many times harder than the traditional 40-hour workweek. I’ve learned about fulfillment through tens of thousands of hours of failures and learnings put into the business. Right now, I want to win in startups — but more broadly, I want to always have an honest answer for why.