I was actually spending some time reflecting and collecting a lot of my personal dialogue over the last few months, and I thought I would just send it to you in this format. A lot of this is just my thoughts, even the things that might not completely make sense, but I think it gives you a much better understanding of how I think, what I've been doing, and why I've made some of the decisions I've made.
I also feel like, in the beginning, when we first spoke, I misjudged the situation and assumed I was waiting for a Z Fellows call, so I didn't really put my best foot forward. I don't think I filled out the application to the best of my ability either, and I think the perception you might have gotten from that is definitely not representative of who I am. That's partly why I'm sending this.
I've been reflecting a lot on why it took me eight months in San Francisco to figure out what I actually wanted to do, and why I've spent so much of my life chasing these seemingly delusional things, and I think I've started understanding something about myself.
I have this urge to always do something that hasn't been done before, this rush to separate myself and win against all odds, and I love this feeling. I've had it my entire life. Every time I get interested in something, I want to take it to the absolute extreme. It's never really been enough for me to just participate in something, I want to do something completely extraordinary with it, and there's usually this period of complete delusion where I don't really understand the world I'm entering but convince myself that I can do something that nobody else has done.
And the funny thing is that this has repeatedly gotten me somewhere I couldn't have imagined when I started.
I've been thinking about this eight-month cycle, because it keeps happening in my life. I'll spend months trying to understand what I want, chasing something almost completely delusional, and then something clicks and I become obsessed with executing. Sometimes the original goal doesn't work out, but I end up somewhere that would have been impossible if I hadn't attempted it.
And I think that's the important part. I don't think the delusion itself is necessarily the problem. I think you have to reach for the stars and then see where you land. That's probably the best way I've found to move beyond whatever circumstances you started with. If I had just been rational about my immediate advantages and disadvantages, I wouldn't have attempted most of the things I've done.
I really like using this example from high school because I cannot imagine a single person I've ever met who would have done what I did, and I think it's probably the best representation of how my brain works.
I grew up in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and moved to the United States in my sophomore year of high school, literally two weeks after school had already started.
I was extremely disadvantaged. I had come from a completely different education system, I didn't get the classes I wanted because I arrived late, and my first year here was during online school. I didn't know anybody, I was trying to understand a completely different country and school system, and I had no idea how American college admissions worked.
And then during my first month in the United States, I met C.J. Cox.
He was the best basketball player at our school, one of the best players in the state, and now plays at Purdue and is an NBA prospect. At the time I had essentially no basketball experience.
We played one-on-one and he beat me 11-0.
With his left hand.
And literally that day I decided that I was going to become an NBA player and beat him.
I don't even know how to explain how ridiculous that was. I had just moved from Bangladesh, I'd barely played basketball, this guy had been training for years, and somehow my immediate reaction to being beaten 11-0 with his left hand was that I was going to become better than him and play in the NBA.
I genuinely believed it.
I wanted to become the first Bangladeshi to play in the NBA.
I started playing something like eight hours a day, three times a day, every single day, at this abandoned basketball court. It was online school, so I could structure almost my entire day around basketball. I would play before class, after class, at night, and I was completely obsessed.
For eight months I could barely think about anything else.
I literally couldn't see anything except winning against him.
And I actually ended up beating him.
But I played so much that I developed compartment syndrome and had to quit.
I think about this all the time because I had absolutely no reason to believe that I could do any of it. I didn't understand how much training elite basketball players had, how long they'd been playing, what their advantages were, any of it. I saw somebody who was much better than me and decided I was going to win.
And that absolute delusion made me do things I would otherwise never have done.
But the funny thing is that the basketball obsession also made my academic circumstances even worse.
Because I hadn't been paying attention to how the American school system worked, and because you have to choose your junior-year classes during sophomore year, I ended up missing a lot of the classes I needed.
I was already disadvantaged because I'd moved countries two weeks after school started, and now I had created another problem for myself because I'd been completely obsessed with basketball.
I had to chase down my counselors, my deans, and eventually even write complaints to their superiors to get some of the classes back.
The next year I was taking extra classes and applying for courses that nobody in my year was ordinarily allowed to take because of the school's rules. I had to make up most of the hardest classes in essentially one year, while doing extracurriculars, building businesses, and trying to create a college application that could compete with people who'd spent their entire high school careers preparing for exactly that.
I ended up getting into Cornell.
And I can assure you that I don't know anybody who had my particular combination of circumstances and still got into a school like that.
I wasn't somebody who had been preparing for Cornell since freshman year, taking exactly the correct sequence of classes, building the right extracurricular profile, and getting advice from counselors who knew how to optimize everything.
I came from Bangladesh, had missed the beginning of school, barely understood the class requirements, spent eight months trying to become an NBA player, and then had to somehow put everything together afterward.
And I made it happen.
I've also been building products and businesses since high school in Bangladesh. I've always liked making things, selling things, trying different ideas, finding people, and seeing how far I could take something.
After I got obsessed with making money, I went through another one of these periods.
In my freshman year of college I was working something like sixteen hours a day, had almost no social life, and was doing 300 to 500 cold calls a day because I had decided I wanted to become a millionaire.
That was the game I was playing.
I didn't need somebody to convince me to focus. I could focus all day, every day, because I knew exactly what I wanted.
I was building businesses, doing sales and marketing automation, learning how to acquire customers, close deals, and actually make money. I'd built multiple businesses to six-figure annual revenue and made tens of thousands of cold calls.
But then I got to Cornell and eventually realized that making money wasn't really what I wanted.
Or rather, it wasn't enough.
I started asking myself what the point of all this was. What was I actually trying to accomplish with my life? If I made a million dollars, then what? Ten million? A hundred million? What did I actually want to do with that money?
And for some reason that question completely changed how I thought about everything.
I started reading an enormous amount of philosophy, history, science fiction, fantasy, economics, psychology, and different scientific and engineering fields. I was taking classes all over the place because I wanted to understand the actual foundations of how the world worked.
I've been interested in René Girard and mimetic desire since I was young, and became increasingly obsessed with Nietzsche, Aristotle, Napoleon, Augustus, Alexander, psychohistory, social physics, and how human beings actually decide what to value.
I wanted to understand why people want the things they want, why certain societies produce extraordinary people, why some historical periods have these enormous concentrations of invention and ambition, and why so many people spend their lives doing things they never actually chose.
I've pursued research across very different fields as well. I've studied exoplanets and extraterrestrial life under Dr. Lisa Kaltenegger, worked on personal projects and competitions including Q4 Bio, and spent time learning about longevity, AI, economics, philosophy, and scientific and engineering problems that I thought were important.
Last summer I even went to monasteries and spent time looking for different philosophical traditions, ancient teachings, and people who had devoted their lives to understanding these questions. I was interested in the traditions around Aristotle, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Girard, and other thinkers, and I wanted to understand these ideas beyond just reading them in a classroom.
I was truth-seeking. That's genuinely what I thought I was doing.
I was trying to understand the most important things in the world, what it means to live a meaningful life, how you should decide what to value, and ultimately what somebody should do if they wanted to make the largest possible contribution to humanity.
I've also always been a massive Tolkien fan. Gandalf was probably one of the biggest inspirations for what I started doing at Cornell.
The idea of somebody who doesn't necessarily personally build everything, but who travels around, finds people, understands what needs to happen, brings together the right people, and changes the outcome of the entire world through those actions was unbelievably compelling to me.
That's what I wanted to do.
And I started trying to build that at Cornell.
I created Cornell Commons, the first hacker house at Cornell, and founded the Cornell Longevity Association. I wanted to build an environment where people would live together and work on things that were actually at the frontier of technology.
I was also trying to create a fellowship where one student every semester could go to space, because I thought that was such an obvious thing that should exist. Imagine what happens to a student who grows up thinking space is something that only astronauts and billionaires can experience, and then suddenly somebody from their university actually goes.
I thought that would completely change what people imagined was possible.
And the hacker house wasn't even supposed to be the end of it. I wanted to create a moonshot house, a longevity house, research houses, and eventually an entire network of these things.
I wanted to get founders, researchers, investors, and people building extraordinary companies to actually spend time with students, bring capital into the university, and create a different set of incentives around what people were doing.
Instead of everybody optimizing for internships and consulting and banking jobs and club positions, I wanted people to become obsessed with solving difficult problems and building things that would have seemed completely absurd before they met the people around them.
It was pretty much a mini coup of the school.
That was genuinely how I thought about it.
I wanted to completely revolutionize the environment. I had this entire vision of how the institution could be changed from inside, how you could create a parallel culture where doing something extraordinary became normal, and how you could get all these resources and people concentrated around that.
I was taking on an enormous amount myself because I didn't see many people around me who wanted to attempt something on that scale.
And I had much bigger plans for what would happen next, which probably would have gotten me close to being kicked out if I'd actually pursued all of them.
But that was the exciting part.
I was trying to do something nobody expected, in an environment where almost everybody was operating within the same set of social rules.
My thesis was that you don't just bring in some impressive founder to give a talk and expect the students to change their lives. The next morning they wake up, go back to their dorms, see the same people, and continue pursuing the same goals.
You have to change the actual environment.
What if that founder lived downstairs? What if there was a fund in the house that could give somebody money to build the thing they were talking about? What if the people around you were all obsessed with doing something that had never been done before, and you were constantly exposed to that?
I thought you could completely change people's trajectories.
I've always been fascinated by Isaac Asimov's Foundation books, especially the idea of putting groups of people at the edge of society and using their knowledge, resources, and environment to influence the course of civilization.
That seemed unbelievably powerful to me.
You could have a house for mathematics, a house for physics, a house for chemistry, and put people who were working on particular frontier problems together with the resources they needed.
I thought that might be one of the most leveraged things you could possibly do, because instead of personally trying to solve every problem in the world, you could get more of humanity to work on the hardest problems.
This is something I still believe matters enormously.
But then I came to San Francisco.
I came in January during winter break, stayed at The Residency, and had this abrupt opportunity to stay in the Bay rather than return to Cornell.
It wasn't like I had decided months earlier that I needed to drop out because I had some extraordinary company that couldn't possibly wait.
I had five days to decide.
And I actually couldn't justify it completely.
I knew I wanted to build a company eventually, but I kept thinking, why can't I just graduate and then do exactly the same thing? Even if I become a billionaire, I could still do that after school, right? What's the actual reason I need to do this now?
But I decided to leave Cornell in January.
I chose the harder option because I thought there was an enormous opportunity for growth in San Francisco, and I knew that being here would expose me to people, ideas, and opportunities that I wouldn't encounter if I went back.
And I felt absolutely zero clarity afterward.
I was in San Francisco, surrounded by these extraordinary people, and suddenly I had access to this enormous world of things that could be done.
At Cornell I had been trying to change the school. Now I could actually choose to work on almost anything.
And that created a completely different problem.
I wanted to find the single most important thing I could possibly do.
Not the most profitable startup. Not the easiest company to raise money for. Not the thing that would get me into an accelerator.
I wanted to know what would advance humanity the most.
I'd become obsessed with Asimov's The Last Question, and I kept thinking about what it would actually mean to get humanity to that future as quickly as possible.
The final question. The final question.
I couldn't get it out of my mind.
If the purpose of technology is to increase what humanity can do, and if we want to remove the limits that currently prevent people from creating the things they imagine, then what are the actual upstream bottlenecks?
Is it intelligence? Is it energy? Is it manufacturing? Is it the way people coordinate? Is it the fact that we aren't directing enough of our talent and resources toward the important problems?
I thought about all of it.
And because I was looking for the most ambitious thing possible, every time I got interested in one direction, I would think about something that seemed even more important.
If I was interested in robotics, I would think about why we don't have enough human data to train robots. Then I'd think about why we don't have better factories to make them. Then I'd think about the energy and materials those factories require. Then I'd think about how the scientists and engineers doing all this work get their funding and decide which problems to solve.
And eventually I'd end up thinking about human behavior and incentives again.
Because I had this thesis that the hardest problems in the world weren't necessarily technical problems. They were social problems.
If you wanted to change what humanity was doing, you had to change what people wanted to do, and to change that you had to change their incentives and environments.
So I became obsessed with information asymmetry.
I genuinely thought information asymmetry was the most difficult problem I could possibly go after, and that solving it could create more change in society than almost anything else.
I was thinking about how much information exists in the world that never gets used, how much of the economy operates through differences in what people know, and how much value could be created if the right information moved between the right people.
I thought about the fact that companies hold all these enormous datasets that barely get used, and that if you could make information available between parties in a way that benefited everyone, you could unlock economic value that otherwise never would have existed.
To me, that was the definition of net positive.
But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that solving something like that wasn't just about creating software.
You had to change incentives.
You had to change how organizations behaved. You had to convince people to participate in something they'd never done before.
It almost seemed more like creating a movement, or a religion, or a new set of institutions than building a normal company.
And that was exciting to me.
So I started going deeper into these ideas around intentional communities, equity-based research housing, and new cities.
I spent time north of San Francisco meeting family offices and talking to people about funding research houses. I spoke with organizations involved in scientific philanthropy and research funding, people trying to build new campuses and communities, and I thought that if you could concentrate extraordinary talent, capital, and resources in the right environment, you might create entirely new outcomes.
I was even talking to people working on charter cities and seasteading because I wanted to understand what it would look like to redesign the actual institutional environment people live under.
And then I went to Edge Esmeralda.
I contacted the director two days before the program started, and luckily there was one spot left, so I packed my things and went.
I wanted to actually experience what a deliberately designed utopia felt like.
What did the people who wanted to live there look like? How did they think? What did they value? What were the people creating it trying to do? How did being in that environment change what people worked on and what they considered possible?
Because in my head I wasn't just trying to build some startup that solved a customer's immediate problem. I was trying to understand how you could actually create a world where people had better information, better incentives, and fewer artificial constraints.
I wanted to understand what a completely information-symmetric world would feel like.
And the funny thing is, all of this came from exactly the same impulse that made me try to beat C.J. Cox when I was fifteen.
I saw some enormous thing that seemed almost impossible, and I became obsessed with it.
I had gone from wanting to beat one of the best basketball players in the state to wanting to change the direction of technological progress.
The ambition had expanded, but the underlying psychology was almost exactly the same.
And I think that's why I spent eight months doing all of this.
I was chasing the most ambitious thing I could possibly imagine, and I got trapped in that feeling.
Every idea had to be the most important idea. Every project had to be the most leveraged project. Every decision had to be the best possible decision I could make with my life.
And every time I encountered another person doing something extraordinary, I'd start comparing what they were doing to what I was doing, and then I'd question whether I should be doing something entirely different.
I think that's also a form of mimetic desire, which is ridiculous because I've spent years studying it.
I knew mimetic desire well, but I refused to think clearly.
I think I had this habit of not thinking through things completely and just filling the gaps with delusion.
I believed that I could bend almost anything, that if I wanted something badly enough and found the right people and resources, I could make it happen.
And I still believe that.
But there's a difference between being willing to attempt something extraordinary and understanding what would actually be required to accomplish it.
You have to be able to break it down.
You need the people. You need the capital. You need the actual technical knowledge. You need to know what you can do with the resources you have right now, and what the next step is.
For some reason I wasn't doing that consistently.
I had all this optimism, and I was using it to fill the places where my world model wasn't complete.
And that's where I think I was being delusional in the wrong way.
Because the ambition itself wasn't the problem. If I'd been completely rational when I moved to America and lost 11-0 to C.J. Cox, I probably never would have picked up a basketball again.
If I'd been completely rational about my circumstances at school, I probably wouldn't have chased down counselors and deans or attempted all those extra classes.
If I'd been completely rational about being a student at Cornell, I probably wouldn't have tried to create all those institutions.
So I don't want to lose that part of myself.
I think reaching for the stars is the whole point.
But you also have to understand the next step.
And for some reason that's what finally clicked for me.
Even if something looks completely delusional to the outside world, it should almost seem like an obvious step above what you're already doing from the inside.
You should know who you need to call, what you need to build, what resources you need, what the obstacles are, and what evidence would tell you whether you're making progress.
You don't need to know the entire future. You need to understand the next step.
I used to think that if I could find the perfect idea, everything else would become obvious, and then I'd be able to focus completely on it for the next ten years.
But I think that's completely backward.
You start doing something that matters, you learn things from doing it, you discover problems that you couldn't have anticipated, and your understanding of the world changes as you build.
That's what entrepreneurship is.
It's maximal truth seeking.
I've always thought that entrepreneurs are essentially philosophers who act, because you can spend your entire life thinking about how the world works, but you have to actually collide your beliefs with reality to create new information.
You can read about how mimetic desire works for twenty years, or you can create a house, bring ten people together, change their environment, and see what happens.
You can have a theory about the way a market should work, or you can build something, put it in front of a customer, and find out whether anybody actually wants it.
And I realized that I'd spent a ridiculous amount of time thinking about the most important thing to do, when the most important thing was to actually start doing something.
I could have looked at somebody who was already where I wanted to be, understood the actual steps they took, and used that to build a better model of what I needed to do.
Instead I kept looking for magic.
I was looking for magic, looking for magic.
And that made me incredibly inefficient.
I would wake up with extreme anxiety and go to sleep with extreme motivation, over and over again.
I could convince myself that I was on the verge of doing something extraordinary, and then the next day realize that I hadn't made nearly as much actual progress as I should have.
I was always obsessed with productivity. I'd worked sixteen-hour days before. I knew how to grind through unpleasant work. But none of that mattered if I wasn't actually doing the right work.
And I think that was an incredibly important realization.
I've been trying to understand why I couldn't just focus, why I kept pivoting, why I kept comparing what I was doing to what everyone else was doing.
And I think part of it was that I'd made the choice of what company to build into this enormous existential question.
I wasn't just choosing a business.
I was trying to choose the thing that would define my entire life, the thing that would contribute the most to humanity, the thing that would be worthy of all the ambition I felt.
Of course that paralyzed me.
I was demanding certainty about something that you can only really learn through action.
And the irony is that I had no problem working obsessively when I actually understood what I wanted.
Basketball was eight months of complete obsession. Making money was another period where I could work all day because the goal was obvious.
But in San Francisco I didn't have a clear enough goal at the level of daily execution, and I kept confusing the size of the mission with the clarity of the work.
I also spent a lot of time thinking about historical people like Napoleon, Augustus, Alexander, and the way they actually accumulated power and changed the world.
And there's something interesting about this because when I think about Napoleon, it's very easy to imagine the empire, the armies, the extraordinary things he eventually did.
But he didn't start with an empire.
He started with the capabilities and opportunities that were actually available to him, he developed relationships, he acquired resources, he understood the circumstances he was in, and he kept taking the next step.
I don't mean that everything he did was right, or that you can just copy some historical conqueror's psychology and become successful.
I mean that even these people who seem completely extraordinary in retrospect had to operate through the actual constraints of the world.
And I think I was skipping that part.
I was imagining the empire before understanding how to raise the first army.
I've also thought a lot about this idea of warriors, guardians, and healers, and how people orient themselves toward the world.
I've always identified with the people who want to go out and change something, not just preserve what already exists, and I think that's why I'm so drawn to founders and certain investors.
People who are willing to make an enormous bet on an outcome that doesn't yet exist, organize people around it, and take responsibility for trying to make it real.
But I think I was making that much more mysterious than it needed to be.
The best way to expand your will is through people.
And you can't just expect people to do important things for free.
You have to actually create the structures, organizations, incentives, and resources that let people work toward something.
And that's basically what a company is.
I don't know why it took me so long to understand that.
A company is a way of assembling people, capital, technology, and resources to change some part of the world.
And you can start with something very specific and eventually become capable of doing things that would have been impossible when you started.
That's what's so exciting about it.
I don't have to start by building the entire future. I can start by building one thing that moves us toward it, and then keep expanding what's possible.
I've also realized that a lot of the most important constraints in the world are very physical.
You can imagine almost anything with AI, but then you have to actually build it. You need materials, factories, energy, robotics, infrastructure, and the ability to turn some idea into a reliable physical thing.
I spent time researching embodied AI, human data, manufacturing, atomic-scale technology, autonomous factories, energy, scientific discovery, and the different bottlenecks that might determine how quickly civilization advances.
And I started to see how all these things fit into the same larger question I'd been asking for years.
How do we remove the gap between human ambition and reality?
How do we get to a point where somebody can imagine something that should exist, and we actually have the ability to make it?
I still want to answer the final question.
I still want us to get to the stars.
I just understand much better now that reaching for the stars doesn't mean that every action you take has to be some abstract, civilization-scale intervention.
Sometimes the right thing to do is to make a particular machine work, solve a particular problem, get a particular customer, hire somebody who knows something you don't, and keep building.
And that's what I'm doing now at Noldor Industries.
I don't really want to turn this into a description of what I'm building, because that's not the point of sending you this.
The point is that I think I'm finally getting much clearer about the relationship between my ambitions and what I actually need to do every day.
And I also think this is why leaving Cornell mattered so much to me.
When I decided to leave in January, I didn't have a company that made the decision obvious. I chose to stay in San Francisco because I saw an enormous opportunity to grow, to learn from the people around me, and to actually pursue what I'd spent years thinking about.
And then in August, things became much more difficult.
My cofounder decided to go back to school. I had no housing, no funding, no clear idea, no plan for what I was going to build next, and my parents and family were pressuring me to return.
Other people around me were telling me to go back, that I was being irrational, that I should finish Cornell, that I had nothing concrete to show for leaving.
And I understood why they were saying it.
I genuinely did.
I had no obvious external justification for staying.
But I had already made the commitment in January, and I still believed that being in San Francisco, surrounded by people attempting extraordinary things, was where I had the greatest opportunity for growth.
I didn't want to go back just because the circumstances had become difficult.
I didn't want the decision to be dictated by how other people would perceive me.
I grew up in Bangladesh, where the school you go to and the degree you get can carry so much weight, and I knew exactly what it meant to my family that I had gotten into Cornell.
My grandfather had worked hard to create opportunities for us, and I was supposed to carry that forward.
I had a very difficult conversation with him about leaving school.
My mother and I went about a month without speaking.
And the thing that really bothered me was that I could see how much of my own hesitation came from worrying about what other people would think.
I had spent years studying mimetic desire, thinking about how other people's expectations influence our decisions, trying to build institutions that changed what people valued, and yet I was still terrified of how my relatives would perceive me if I dropped out and failed.
And I think that's something I needed to confront.
I couldn't just keep saying I wanted to think from first principles while allowing my life to be dictated by the same social expectations I had spent years questioning.
I knew that if I went back, at least part of the reason would be because I wanted the security of the Cornell credential and the approval of the people around me.
And I didn't want that to be the reason I chose how to spend my life.
So I stayed.
Not because I had everything figured out. I clearly didn't.
But because I'd committed to pursuing this, because I believed the opportunity for growth was here, and because I wanted to actually see what I could do rather than retreat the moment things became uncertain.
I still feel the pressure. I still feel fear, anxiety, and sometimes regret. It's a daily occurrence for people to tell me that my decisions are bad, that I'm too delusional, that I should be more pragmatic.
And sometimes they're right about the particular things I'm doing.
But I don't lose faith.
I think that's something that's always been true about me.
I can be completely wrong about the next step, completely wrong about the approach, completely wrong about some idea I've gotten obsessed with, but I don't stop wanting to do the extraordinary thing.
And I think that's what the basketball story really shows.
The fact that I got injured and had to quit doesn't mean the eight months were some perfect success story. It obviously wasn't the optimal way to train. I knew almost nothing about what I was doing, and I pushed my body to the point where I couldn't continue.
But I also did something that would have seemed completely ridiculous to almost anybody who knew my starting circumstances.
And I think both things are true.
The delusion made me attempt something extraordinary, and my lack of understanding created consequences I could have avoided.
That's the pattern I'm trying to understand.
Because I don't want to become somebody who only attempts things that make sense given the circumstances he starts with.
I think that would be a terrible way to live.
But I also don't want to keep wasting months of my life because I'm confusing an enormous vision with an actual plan.
I want to have both.
I want to be willing to attempt the most ridiculous thing in the world, and then think so clearly about it that every next step actually makes sense.
And I think that's what I was missing.
I've been reflecting on this because I genuinely want to understand the gap between how I see myself and how other people see me.
I've made an enormous effort to meet the smartest and most ambitious people in San Francisco. I love meeting people who seem completely delusional about what they want to accomplish, people like Eddie at build.air and Hooman at Solcoa, because I recognize something about how they think and what they want to do.
I haven't met many people who I believe have the same level of ambition and reality distortion that I feel.
And I know that's an extraordinary thing to say.
But I'm trying to describe how I actually think, not how I think I should present myself.
I've spent my whole life getting obsessed with things that seemed completely unreasonable, trying them, learning more about the world, and then moving toward something even more ambitious.
I know I haven't always been efficient about it.
I know there are plenty of things I could have done better.
I know that eight months of searching in San Francisco can look like a complete lack of focus, and I think there is a legitimate criticism there.
But I also know that I wasn't sitting around waiting for somebody to give me permission to do something.
I was meeting people, researching completely different fields, testing my intuitions, trying to understand which problems mattered most, and trying to find where I could actually contribute something that wouldn't have existed otherwise.
And I think those experiences have changed my understanding of the world enormously.
I also think there's a distinction between somebody who gives up when something becomes difficult and somebody who keeps changing directions because they're trying to understand what they actually want to devote themselves to.
I'm not saying the second is always better.
I'm saying that I don't think my problem has ever been a lack of willingness to try.
If anything, my problem is that I'm willing to try almost anything, and I've had to learn how to decide what deserves that effort.
And that's where the Z Fellows question comes in.
I don't really see Z Fellows as just an investment vehicle.
What I find interesting about Z Fellows is the thesis of betting on young people who could do extraordinary things before the rest of the world recognizes them.
I think that is a genuinely important thing to do, and I think it can change much more than just the particular companies that get funded.
It can change what young people think is possible.
It can change the incentives around leaving conventional paths.
It can change whether somebody who has spent their entire life thinking they have to follow a particular sequence of school, job, and career actually attempts something they care about.
And I think that's a very powerful form of institution building.
But I also think there's an interesting contradiction.
If you only bet on somebody once they've already raised money, assembled an extraordinary technical team, demonstrated traction, and accumulated all the signals that make it obvious to everyone else that they're going to succeed, then what exactly is the earliest bet?
I understand why investors use those signals.
I'm not saying ambition or confidence should be enough.
I'm saying the interesting question is how you identify somebody before all those things exist.
What do you actually look for?
Is it how much they've accomplished relative to their starting circumstances? Is it their willingness to attempt things that other people wouldn't? Is it how they respond to failure? Is it their ability to learn, to recruit people, to build things, to become obsessed with something, to change their mind when they're wrong?
I genuinely want to know.
Because I've thought a lot about my own life and how much of it has come from reaching for things that seemed completely unreasonable from where I started.
I came to the United States in my sophomore year with almost none of the advantages that somebody who'd grown up here would have had.
I decided to beat one of the best basketball players in the state with no experience.
I had to fight to take classes I wasn't supposed to be allowed to take.
I built businesses while still in school.
I got into Cornell under circumstances where I had to make up for years of disadvantages.
I went to Cornell and decided I wanted to completely change the institution around me.
I left for San Francisco without the obvious things that would make the decision rational to everybody else.
And when August came and I had no cofounder, no housing, no money raised, and no concrete plan, I still stayed because I believed in the decision I'd made and what I could become here.
And I've spent these months trying to understand how to apply that same instinct to something that actually matters on a much larger scale.
I don't know whether that makes me a good investment according to your model.
But I would really like to understand what your model is.
Because if you look at all of this and decide that I'm not somebody you want to bet on, then I want to understand why.
I'm not sure what perception I've given you, or whether you think I've been too unfocused, too delusional, too interested in the abstract questions rather than actually building something, or whether I just haven't demonstrated enough yet.
And I think my initial application and our first interaction probably didn't do a particularly good job of communicating any of this. I misjudged the situation, didn't prepare the way I should have, and didn't put my best foot forward.
That's not an excuse. It's something I should have done better.
But I also don't think that interaction was representative of who I am.
You've seen more talent than me.
You've seen more founders at the beginning of their careers, more people who've gone on to build extraordinary companies, and more people who probably sounded exactly like me and didn't accomplish anything.
That's why I'm asking.
I don't want somebody to just tell me that I'm ambitious and that everything is going to work out.
I want to know what you think I'm missing.
I want to understand why something that feels so obvious to me about the kind of person I am might not be obvious to somebody else.
Because I can't imagine a world where you really understand who I am and don't want to bet on me.
I know that's probably an absurd thing to say, but that's genuinely how I feel.
And I don't think the fact that I haven't raised funding yet, or that I spent eight months trying to understand what I wanted to do, changes that conviction.
I have anxiety, fear, regret, and sometimes I think I've been completely stupid about the way I've approached things.
But I never lose faith.
I think I'm always going to be willing to take the unreasonable bet, because that's what has moved my life forward every time I have.
The thing I need to improve is making sure that once I take that bet, I actually understand how to make it work.
I want to get to the stars. I want to answer the final question. I want to do things that wouldn't have happened if I hadn't done them.