TJHSST Student Interviews for Y Combinator
Many of us want to quit our jobs and start our own companies — but at the age of just 17, Mansi Amin has started one before she has even gotten a job.
The senior at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Virginia has just been offered an interview at Y Combinator. Y Combinator is a prestigious startup accelerator that is responsible for the rise of tech startup“unicorns”Dropbox and Airbnb. Between running two non-profits, breeding prize winning clams, receiving fan mail (even though she is a private citizen), and doing alright at Model UN, she has built an AI that personalizes a monthly matcha subscription based on the consumers’ heart rate information from their Apple Watch.
“I used Tensorflow,” said Amin in an interview. Her mom added in a follow- email,“Actually, she took advantage of a dataflow graph across many machines in a cluster, and within a machine across multiple computational devices, including multicore CPUs, general-purpose GPUs, and custom-designed ASICs known as Tensor Processing Units (TPUs). She was first author on the paper. She has also played piano at Carnegie Hall.”
Her younger brother Varun, a junior at Sidwell Friends (who unfortunately did not receive admission to TJ) is listed as Chief Product Officer.“I think this will really help for my college application,” Varun said. His mom added in another follow-up email,“Actually, this role is his background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful he believes his application would be incomplete without it.”
Mansi has been accepted to Harvard University, Stanford University, Princeton University, Yale University, Dartmouth University, University of Pennsylvania, Cornell University, Columbia University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Shanghai Jiao Tong University,and 43 other schools. She will be taking the entire month of April off of high school to visit the Ivy League schools to help her make a decision.“I’ll also be looking for potential acquirers while I’m visiting the campuses.”
When asked if she would do the Y Combinator program over the summer instead of working as a counselor for Research Summer Institute (RSI), a prestigious science research summer camp, she says she worries if she participates in the accelerator and raises money, she wouldn’t be able to attend college and then drop out to become a Thiel Fellow.
She hasn’t picked a major if she decides to go to college either.“I’m not sure yet — maybe economics or something I’m yet to explore,” she said. Mansi says investment banking and consulting both sound like exciting challenges with great exit opportunities.“I think having started a company will prepare me for consulting.”
Co-authored with Athena Kan
