Going into college, I had one goal: to graduate as the founder CEO of my own company. To join the vaunted ranks of Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs. To earn my place in culture as the next paragon of youthful “disruption” — robbing my predecessors of the torch and leading the zeitgeist of dangerously naive and widely-inept youth to usher in ever-more iterative solutions to meaningless problems. My work would cement myself in the collective delusion of confirmation biases and narrative fallacy oft-passed as history.
To this end, I decided NYU was the best college of the ones I’d applied to — and not just because I was rejected by Columbia and Harvard. I wanted Harvard to accept me just so I could reject them. The only cool part of Columbia was the steps of Low Library. I wasn’t a big fan of the jail walls that defined the campus. NYU’s reputation, location in the world’s greatest city, and variety of resources seemed the perfect open ground to seed my entrepreneurial ambitions. Not to mention the variety of people (and women) I’d get to meet.
In the first month of my freshmen year, I started off with a project to make gait rehabilitation leggings to correct dropfoot in stroke & MS patients. Through the course of that school year, I’d convinced 2 people to join me in my quest to become the next Mark Zuckerberg of rehabilitation-wear, “fired” 3 or 4 more, inadvertently hustled my and my team’s way into an internship with a startup to build some MVPs for their technology, skipped over half my classes, experimented with polyphasic sleeping (which I decided to end after 2 months when I dumped a box of granola in a 16 oz. jar of Skippy’s peanut butter in the common area, drifting into slumber between spoonfuls of granola glob), went to the Thiel Summit, pivoted to a wearable for athletes that would predict injuries before they happened, and placed in a few business plan competitions.
None of those worked out for a variety of reasons I could explain and many I cannot. With failure, it’s nigh impossible to pin down precise causes. Failure is an overdetermined system. There are more factors than can be accounted for. At the end, I realized I was not going to be the Mark Zuckerberg of rehab-wear. At best I’d be a Zuckerturd.
I took the ensuing semester to act on my greatest revelation— that entrepreneurship is a combination of skills across disciplines (leadership, communication, selling, marketing, hustling, industry-knowledge, etc.). I spent the following summer taking inventory of the skills I felt I needed to work on most and created situations where I could develop those abilities.
In the fall of my sophomore year, I became more involved with school clubs, trying to take on more responsibilities and drive initiatives. I led initiatives to develop a podcast, co-facilitate a student project/innovation think-tank, built an app with a friend to connect students with projects that matched their skillset (my friend ended-up doing 95% of the programming due to rewriting my crappy code), became a Leadership Fellow, took a separate Leadership course/workshop, and worked with a group of friends and University administrators to create more opportunities for students to pursue entrepreneurial opportunities outside of school.
I also tried doing the school thing on top of this to prove to myself and my parents that I could get a high GPA and I wasn’t acting out of any insecurity with my academic ability. I landed a 3.5 GPA that semester, despite taking 5 classes, 3 of which were junior-level. I only skipped 30% of my classes, but spent many mornings and weekends working on problem sets and actually reading the textbooks.
That semester, I realized three things:
- First, college is just like high school except with people who’ve largely had their life path shaped to serving another 4-year sentence. I hadn’t fully-grasped until then that there are parents who help their children maneuver through the admission process, planning out each thing they should do to signal to the admissions counselors that their children are “elite university” material.
- Second, because NYU’s Engineering School is a 20 minute train ride from the West 4th “main” campus, I effectively attended an “engineer-only” school where 70–30 percent male-female ratio was still the norm. Huge bummer. Like massively huge. #triggered.
- Third, it’s highly disingenuous to talk about entrepreneurship and innovation without having actually created something. Academia exists in the realm of “tawk,” with a few practitioners with skin the game scattered throughout the system. The uphill battle my friends and I were fighting to create this culture was taking away from our time to work on our own projects and calcified our aversion to bureaucracy. I figured, ultimately, if someone truly wants to create something, they will figure out a way to do it just as I’d tried doing so as well as all Zuckerberg, Spiegel, Dell, and other wunderkind entrepreneurs that universities are marketing themselves as having created. You didn’t. They all dropped out.
I dropped most of this work by the following semester and decided I needed to improve my technical skills the most if I wanted to be in the best position to start a tech company. So I joined NYU’s Hyperloop team and spent 2 months getting acquainted with the design and beginning work on designing electronics for the braking system. Alas, fate had other plans. 3 of the 6 core team members left to pursue their own start-up, and once again, I found myself managing & doing administrative work for a team of 6 electrical engineers in April while also skipping over 50% of my classes.
I continued with Hyperloop from the spring of my sophomore year to the beginning of the spring semester in my junior year. The near-year I spent in Hyperloop was a case study in the importance of experience when leading complex projects with multiples stakeholders, multiple dependencies, and a huge delta in team members’ technical abilities. The team grew to 25 people and 10 electrical engineers by the end of my sophomore year. That number reached close to 70 people and 20–25 electrical engineers by the second month of my junior year. All this happened with a management team of 2 — me (the Electrical Systems lead) and the Mechanical Systems lead, who was also the team captain.
Somehow, we managed to make it to our Testing Weekend at SpaceX in that January. I credit that more to some individual engineers on my team taking the initiative and working with the right mechanical team members to get the job done — not anything I did.
Through this journey, I found my hell. Two months before the Testing Weekend, the Subsystems and Systems leads took the pod’s pneumatic braking system to a testing facility as part of our competition compliance check. Drills whizzed and vacuum chambers wheezed. Two engineers had just placed our system on the vibration table and stood idly, waiting for us to check-over the system once more to ensure we had wired it properly. In that ennui, I realized this was the life that awaited me if I ever put myself in the situation to join a large engineering firm. I’d work on a sub-node of a module of some really cool project that I would largely know nothing about. Unless I put myself in the right situation and had a true love to do design work, my career would unfold as an entropic climb towards middle-management, punctuated by the token Masters in Engineering, M.B.A. or some esoteric but suspect credential like Six Sigma.
Fortunately, around the same time I joined the Hyperloop team, I followed my childhood interest in medical technologies and emailed 20 medical researchers across NYU working on medical devices for a meeting to learn more about their work. Of the 20, 2 responded. One had recently left NYU after having his funding cut, while the other excitedly agreed to chat with me. We met a month later and every month thereafter brainstorming ideas to pursue. I dutifully wrote down my 10 ideas a day to let “my creative juices flow” as the nascent class of bohemian internet entrepreneurs-turned lifestyle-gurus had so touted. 3 months, 2 pencil pads, and some 500 or 1000 ideas in, I realized that 500 ideas x shit = 500 shit ideas. Fortunately, some kernels arose in our conversations throughout this time that, after some reflection, led to an insight about a novel way to image the brain.
I immediately began to work. I read hundreds of articles, poured through a couple dozens theses and bought a few textbooks to learn the theory necessary to conceptualize and create the initial designs for the technology. After some trial-and-error, pursuing a false-lead or two for a couple of months, several redesigns, and cold-calling multiple experts, I’d settled on the system that would solve this issue around May of my Junior year.
I was off to the races now. That June to the beginning of my senior year in October, I once again went through the motions of launching a startup. I conducted dozens of customer discovery interviews, cold-called medtech entrepreneurs to build my network and conducted patent keyword searches. I did market analysis, wrote a business plan to get another chance at earning some fat stacks from business plan competitions, and wrote the provisional patent. I even made a pro forma.
Even though I was mid-way through the fall semester of my senior year, I hadn’t lined up a job for myself or attended an career fair for that matter. In my 4 years at university, I never once handed my resume to recruiter or even talked to one to work at their company. The first and only time I’ve submitted a resume and donned my best monkey suit was in the summer after my sophomore year, when a friend snagged me an interview for a summer-internship at his job so I could get paid to be in the city while I worked on Hyperloop. The interview went well — no doubt due to my piercing black eyes, broad shoulders and soft smile. But when the interviewer had seen that I’d done some business plan competitions, he began questioning me over my graduation ambitions. When I told him I intended to graduate as a founder of a company, his chest fell and shoulders drooped. The interview was over.
To cover my expenses this time-around, I moved some money into cryptoassets. I made enough money between October and December to cover my expenses comfortably for atleast 12 months, buying me time to negotiate for IP rights and funding from the school. But, on returning to the comfort of differential equations and circuit analysis in mid-December, I realized a fundamental flaw in the design. The device would cauterize the brain as it was imaging it. On top of that, my crypto-reserves halved with the market crash in late December. I now had 3 months to figure out my next steps.
I spent the remainder of that December the end of January testing various ideas, from cleantech to some digital nomad favorites like copywriting, online courses, ebooks, and even a start-up version of Monopoly called “Technolopoly.” Ultimately, I realized I was bored of all the ideas I was investigating. I was bored by just typing them. Hell, I’m bored even now just writing about them. I didn’t want the money or financial freedom per se. No matter what I did after college, I viewed any decision I made as a stepping stone to starting a business that solved a Big Hairy Problem or generated cash flow. In the latter case, I would simply bootstrap the business to 5-, 6-, 7-, 8-. and then 9-figures.
By the of Janaury, my pre-order for “Crushing It” came in. I devoured it that night and immediately put Gary’s teachings to practice. Gary dedicated a chapter in the book to “$1.80 Strategy” for Instagram. The “$1.80 Strategy” consists of searching for the 9 trending hashtags for the industries you wish to be an influencer or lead player in and posting a comment in the top 10 posts.
The next day, I deployed Gary’s $1.80 strategy for Instagram on Twitter to connect with people that: followed the same thinkers I did (Taleb, Thiel, Buffet/Munger), shared similar interests (blockchain/crypto, tech, start-ups, reading, philosophy), were in the circle of excellence as some of the thinkers/entrepreneurs I admired but were not saturated with comments/follows, or were smart people who I felt had a chance to break into that circle of excellence in 5 to 10 years. After two weeks of deploying that strategy, I commented on the Twitter post of someone I found on a crypto thread posting an article of someone he followed on his timeline regarding mimetic theory. I was fascinated by the lucidity of his thoughts, and knew from his post regarding mimetic theory he was well-versed with Thiel’s thoughts. I responded to that thread with a comment and proceeded to browse through to find any other threads with this follower and responded to that other one. Two days later I received a tweet from this person suggesting I should join his “myth/cult.”
I didn’t take Francis’ request seriously — I figured this first meeting would be a good first-contact to establish a relationship as a future investor or business partner. Since he called me smart I figured he had good taste. In calling his company a “myth/cult,” I figured he was just the right mix of cultured, intelligent and crazy to be interesting.
So I went ahead with emailing him and read through all the business reports he sent. And then I read his other business reports. And then I proceeded to read every single document on Invisible’s website. I tabled all of my projects and spent the week consuming as much information as I could.
“A bot that can do everything.”
“Automating digital repetitive work.”
“The Capitalist Worker’s Revolution.”
“Partner salaries do not get paid in full until we hit our target run rate.”
“We want to be the world’s first trillion dollar company.”
I was entranced by the mission, the elegance of the system, the simplicity of the design. I saw the beachhead market, I saw the adjacent markets, I saw the meta-platform that this could become & that it would be more valuable than the aggregate value of all of the platforms on which they automated work. It was the ultimate aggregator, the most leveraged form of Stracherry’s Aggregator Theory. This wasn’t a rocketship — it was a spaceship to go beyond where other companies had gotten. It was transparent in its desires. Bold in its ambition. And it was told with such purity. It was true.
I listened to all podcasts and presentations the founder who’d reached out to me gave. I read all of his posts. In some weird way, I saw a flash of what I could be in 5 years of disciplined work and study. He was the real deal — not a peacetime entrepreneur. He lived the code. He welcomed the struggle. He dared to be great. He proclaimed his greatness. He was willing it to being.
But I was more impressed when I met him. Intense, calculated, and reserved. At the end of our one-hour meeting, Francis told me to call the COO ASAP. We had our interview 2 hours later. I received my offer before midnight.
On joining, I observed the team and noticed that intensity. That longing for greatness. That pursuit love for the struggle. These were manifest in abundance throughout the ranks. I felt this was special. I believed in the mission — especially since it satisfies one of my goals to create a business that eliminated poverty through paying proper wages to people in developing nations so that they had a means to enter the middle-class and where the owners, operators and investors would also become very wealthy. It was a means to back my belief that creating the right incentive structures under capitalism would better solve the problems socialism is touted as the panacea for. It also would be a nice ‘fuck you’ to all the virtue signaling I came across in my 4 years in NYC. To all the self-righteous, Facebook-filter-changing, TOMS-shoes-wearing, GMO-free-latte-drinking “warriors” who denounce Western civilization as they browse Buzzfeed on their Macbooks in their air conditioned open-workspaces.
I joined the team and shut down 6 other projects I had going on at the time, save for the medical device project. In the Friday before my first week at Invisible, I hit an insight as to how to image in the conditions we desired that would be technologically simpler. We tested this insight and received some promising results.
But I realized around this time, while through experience and study I would be a good engineer, I’d likely never be a great engineer like Bernard Gordon or William Shockley. That week, a professor of mine with a successful medical technology company mentioned how he always carries a mini oscilloscope with him, and on some mornings, would immediately check circuit datasheets and program microprocessors. On hearing this, I immediately thought to myself “Who the fuck does that?” I realized 5 seconds later that he would do that. That attitude is a large part of why he is a successful inventor. I’d much rather read a book, exercise, write, philosophize on the interface between technology and humans or reflect on business case studies in the morning than program a microprocessor, much less debug a circuit. If I’m not willing to be the best at it, why bother?
So now I’ve begun to help build something great. To work with people who are great and to do great things. To be great.
This feels right for now.
I’m treating myself as the CEO of my role — not as an employee. I still have the desire to start a company in the future now, but I am channeling it all into Invisible. When I do it then, and if I do it, it will be because the spirit moves me. Because of my pursuit of a mission — a mission I trust will be apparent as I continue with my work and commence my disciplined study of the fields that captivated me so in my younger years.
This likely will evolve based on my interaction with the world. Through action. Not from reading another book. Not from listening to another podcast. Not from meditating.
For now, my mission is clear. And it compels the mercenary in me to rise.
