about

i was born in china and left at sixteen for united world college in mostar, bosnia. the school put a couple hundred teenagers from eighty countries in a town still marked by a war most of us had only read about. i went in expecting to study something practical and came out with cultural anthropology, which turned out to be the most useful thing i have studied. it taught me to watch what people actually do instead of what they say they do.

that is also how i ended up in cognitive science. i like the questions underneath products more than the products: what someone expects to happen next, what they will forgive, what they notice and what they never see.

teaching

i spent a year as head ta for berkeley's largest engineering startup bootcamp and the how to be a futurist class, and helped organize the first global student startup competition, which sent teams to korea. teaching a room of founders is the fastest way i know to find out whether you actually understand something.

elsewhere

twenty-odd countries so far, and the list keeps growing. currently in berkeley, california.