I applied to Y Combinator for the W23 batch. I didn't get in ("top 10%" - whatever that means) but it was an incredibly thought provoking experience. There's a wonderful video by Dalton Caldwell where he talks about why it's worth applying to YC. The entire video is worth a watch, but there were two things that he mentioned that have stuck with me:
- You create your own luck. You only get "lucky" by putting yourself in situations to be lucky.
- Applying gives you the chance to think deeply about what you're doing and where you're going. And that's what this post is about: who I am, where I've been, and where I'm going.
My Journey
The defining act of my life has been the continual re-engineering of my personal and professional journey; it's been a conscious departure from the worn path of traditional success. I’ve steered my life through a series of calculated risks: I’ve pivoted career and education directions, uprooted my life to move across the country, and deliberately placed myself among circles that would challenge and grow my perspective. This was a systematic effort to design a life that subscribes not to the status quo but to my vision of innovation and impact.
Through a cross-disciplinary lens, I drew connections between my architectural studies and the transformative potential of AI, agent systems, and immersive computing. This insight directed my PhD research - and it’s encompassing decade - dedicated to absorbing knowledge from every source to mold myself into the architect of the future I imagined.
Echoing Pirsig¹, I did not just demolish the factory; I’ve spent my life dismantling the rationality that built it. Embracing Meadows'² call to systemic thinking, I realized that understanding the system's architecture is essential to reconfiguring its output. I became a living testament to their ideologies, not just comprehending systems but actively reconstructing them.
As an antidisciplinary cognitive scientist, artist, and technologist, I have synthesized disparate disciplines into a single cohesive narrative. This pursuit goes beyond interdisciplinary—it's antidisciplinary, challenging the very notion of boundaries between fields. Like Russell³, I found my passion at the convergence of love, knowledge, and empathy, which drives my quest to humanize technology, making it an intuitive extension of our daily existence.
I've not only dreamt of a world where technology and human experience are inseparable but have also actualized this through my endeavors. Whether it's generating novel soundscapes through my music or designing generative tools for artists, I've blurred the lines between disciplines, building the world around me at the intersections of technology, art, and cognitive science.
This journey hasn't been without its challenges. Every unconventional choice was met with the inertia of traditional thinking. But with every barrier, I gained a deeper understanding of the system I was part of and the systems I aspired to change. This is my life's work: a continuous effort to build, adapt, and envision a more integrated future where technology elevates the human experience.
What I Have Lived For (by Bertrand Russell)
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.
I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness--that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what--at last--I have found.
With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.
Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.
This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.
¹: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenence - Robert Pirsig
²: Thinking in Systems - Donella Meadows
³: Prologue of Autobiography - Bertrand Russell