My philosophy about luck is that it’s really about how many times you’re willing to flip the coin. At some point, it stops being luck and turns into inevitability.<\/p>\n
While studying at the University of Waterloo, I treated applying to internships like a statistical game.<\/p>\n
Working my way through a GitHub list of openings, I sent out 200-300 applications before landing an internship at Tesla<\/a>. The next recruiting cycle, I did it all over again to land one at Nvidia<\/a>. I honestly don’t even remember applying.<\/p>\n After the initial callback, the hiring process was pretty chill. I had two interviews before Nvidia told me I got the job, and all in all, it took about four days. It helped that my background in high-performance software happened to fit what the data center<\/a> tooling team needed.<\/p>\n The role was a little atypical because I worked out of the Redmond, Washington, office rather than Nvidia’s Santa Clara headquarters, where most interns are based. The community felt smaller, but I had great mentors, and the work-life balance was reasonable. Sometimes you would work overtime, but most people worked pretty normal 9-to-5 hours.<\/p>\n What surprised me most was how passionate everyone was. The engineers didn’t treat their work as just a job \u2014 they treated it like a craft, and genuinely cared about building great software.<\/p>\n The greatest gift Nvidia gave me<\/p>\n I came into the internship wanting to be a full-time Nvidia employee<\/a>. I thought that the money you could make in Big Tech would bring a sense of freedom.<\/p>\n But ultimately, being a small part of a larger organization felt unfulfilling. The greatest gift the experience gave me was teaching me what I wanted to do with my time \u2014 to build something of my own.<\/p>\n I also thought I’d become a better engineer by starting a company. At a startup, you have to understand the problem before you can build the solution, whereas in Big Tech, you’re often working within a much narrower sandbox.<\/p>\n I launched an AI startup called Gale<\/p>\n