Returning home
After 6 years living in Vancouver, I’m returning to Toronto. The story of my move there and back involves dropping out of graduate school, learning how to code, joining two startups, running two marathons, and a proposal.
But we’ll need to rewind first to make sense of all that.
Navigating
Let’s speedrun childhood to university. I was born in Beijing and immigrated to Canada when I was 3. I grew up in Richmond Hill and made my way downtown to the University of Toronto.1 I wasn’t sure what to study, but thought that how the body operates was neat, so I majored in immunology & physiology to learn more about it.
I did a lot of undergrad research, mainly since it was more interesting than coursework, and liked it. On that basis, an inspiring book2, and not knowing what I wanted to do with my life, I decided to do graduate school and study interactions between cancer and the immune system.
Graduate school was an experience - the first half was really good, and the second half was really bad. When you start out, you typically do rotations in a few research groups to assess fit. I rotated through three research groups looking for cancer-related projects, and chose one that was working with leukemia patients.
Unfortunately, that didn’t end up well. Looking back, I made an incorrect assumption: that what you work on is more important than who you work with. Now I think that the reverse is true. If you do something you like but are in a stifling environment, your motivation is sapped and you don’t get much done. Conversely, if you work in a great environment with interesting people whom you like, doing just about anything is engaging and work feels like play.
So, towards the end of my degree, I decided against writing a thesis and dropped out. But it wasn’t a waste! In addition to that sweet, below-minimum wage stipend, I also met my partner, ran my first race3, and discovered programming.
Rebirth
I realized that with programs, instead of trying to imitate a robot running experiments, I could potentially get actual robots to do the job for me. Like running my own lab of alarmingly productive, questionably paid graduate students! With this grand vision in mind, I decided to shift my studies to computer science.
At that point, I’d been living in Toronto for 6 years and wanted a change of scenery, so I decided to move to Vancouver and enroll in a program at Simon Fraser University. Luckily, I landed just-in-time to enjoy a pandemic in a new place where I didn’t know anyone. But I managed to have a decent time: drawing pyramids in the terminal with C, almost failing linear algebra, and discovering a love of running.
I’ll never forget the first web app I built as a side project. For some reason, I decided to learn C#, read a textbook about ASP.NET Core before bed each night, and build an issue tracker deployed on Azure.
It was a terrifying and magical experience. Terrifying because it felt like you needed to know a million-and-one things to get started. Magical because after you got through it all, bug-by-bug, and deployed the damn thing it felt like you had unlocked the primordial essence of creation at your fingertips.
My somewhat unusual experience with C# and ASP.NET Core landed me an internship working with the same tech stack, and 8 months plus one semester later, I graduated.
Endurance
Job hunting was rough. Have you ever procrastinated so hard you wrote a deep dive on exercise physiology? During the pandemic, I connected with running profoundly. I think because endurance holistically reflects the beauty of physiology, self-compassion, and spirit.
As Haruki Murakami put it:
Running is both an exercise and a metaphor.
I’ve felt this about writing code, prose, and design too. It’s interesting how the end-state of anything you engage with consistently over a long time seems to converge to the same artistry.
I felt drawn to joining a startup. Something about the type of people. The camaraderie, positive-sum games. The daring: why not us? The lack of theatre and realism. The breadth, verbs over nouns. And luckily after a few months of exploring, I was able to find a great match.
We had an overarching vision of helping people live more aligned lives. V1 was to manifest this in your wallet. The idea was: when the impact of our investments and spending are hard to see, we don’t look. The product aimed to clarify this - to look at our beach of wealth and distinguish each grain of sand.
Have you ever read that startups are hard? Yep. But they’re also hard in a way that can’t be resolved solely through text. Some things must be lived to be understood. Still, I’d like to offer a take. Startups are hard fundamentally because understanding another human being is hard, let alone a “market”. Startups are hard because understanding yourself is hard. That’s the terror and magic.
Marathons are also hard. Curiously, they involve a different quality of discomfort than shorter distances. In a mile, the intensity saturates your cognition. When it gets tough, the goal is to just hold on for dear life and endure. That doesn’t work for a marathon. It’s a higher fiend who’s figured out that humans suffer more if you let them think. So when it gets tough, each step is negotiated, stretching willpower to extremes, creating space for doubt to fester.
To be dramatic, it’s figured out that humans are the best instruments for bringing about their own destruction. Ain’t that some shit.
Prometheus
After the startup wound down, I wasn’t sure what to do next. I reflected on optimizing for astounding yourself and being truthful about your desires. I thought about pursuing writing, building an “open” startup, or documenting my running journey. A startup of oneself. But I stumbled before I could really start. Perhaps I didn’t give myself enough time to rest. Perhaps I still had a bone to pick with startups. Perhaps I was just being a coward.
Then came an opportunity: to work at a startup with my best friend whom I’ve known since high school. And I had the exact skillset and alternative perspective they needed - the tetris piece to complete the row. I couldn’t join them at McMaster all those years ago, but sometimes things come full circle.
What we do is harder to explain, but here’s what I’d say the vision is. Humanity has progressed in part due to our increasing ability to transform matter to particular ends. Historically, the way we’ve done this is by manual trial-and-error: humans trying to be robots. Advances in technology have unlocked the potential to let humans do the important stuff and let robots take of the drudgery. The legos for this vision are now here, we just need to figure out how best to assemble them.
Which is all quite frankly: amazing. To witness man becoming prometheus by the sweat of his brow. The student becoming the master.
Together
Around this time, I proposed to my partner. It takes a rare soul to deal with someone with an encyclopedic knowledge of video game quotes and an eagerness to share them. I blame the Civilization series. Our relationship taught me that it takes someone else to fully see yourself, know yourself.
It makes me think about connection. Everything is much more of a whole than we realize. Base elements expunged from the origin of the universe coalescing to form the Sun. The Sun’s primordial fusion blanketing Earth with energy, harnessed by plants, loaned to man, returned at our ends.
At the end of the day, we’re just stardust, locally reversing entropy, trying to understand itself.
Epilogue
Continuity is unusual; most natural things have seasons. You move away from the city to rediscover yourself and hear whispers drowned out by the noise. After figuring things out, you move back to the city to find and connect with your people, who’ve also changed. And this cycle repeats, each a calibrated strike against malleable steel, shaping and balancing the final result.
This is nature’s duet of death and rebirth. You leave, turn over your atoms, then come back. The same, yet different.