In the last half of 2023, I read The Surrender Experiment by Michael Singer. It was a fascinating read recommended to me by someone at my first Vipassana meditation retreat.
Somehow, whether intentionally or not, I surrendered to life this year. I describe surrendering as openly welcoming change into your life. This act opened door after door for me in 2024. I want to take a look back at how and reflect on what occurred.
Q1
It’s hard to ignore that my break-up with my ex of 5 years was the catalyst for change. We'd shared a long, loving relationship and I was left broken after the break. I went to my meditation center often in order to speed-run the heartbreak, sometimes even for a few days. It didn't work. I needed to leave Vancouver, so I ended up spending some time in San Francisco. I started getting exposure and idolizing the right people.
Idolization is inevitable, and I’d spent my years at AWS idolizing the technically brilliant. My manager, one of my colleagues, a principal engineer — all possessed qualities of strong technical judgement. But having left that environment behind me in February, and spending time in SF, I idolized an obsession to solve problems that demonstrate an acute understanding of what the market needs, i.e. business acumen, paired with strong technical fundamentals. The blend of product intuition and the ability to execute on it.
San Francisco gave me a taste of that world. I knew I wanted to found a company, and so I joined EF in London, knowing if I can find a co-founder, I’ll have some pre-seed funding and a chance to stay in the US longer than what a tourist visa affords me. I also wasn’t able to make significant progress alone in Vancouver. In the moment, I surrendered. I left to London. In hindsight, the detour to London, and the incubator in general, wasn’t necessary, but at the time it seemed like for a startup newbie it was the right course of action.
Q2
In the beginning of April, I found myself in London, albeit couple weeks late to the EF program because I wanted to stay in SF and when I came back home to Vancouver, I only had a few days to sort out my visa. I knew I was interested in climate tech but before I dive into the kind of company I wanted to form, I have to lay some context.
While in university, I created ProjectX at the University of Toronto, a 3 month long climate modelling research competition. Datasets within the field were growing, more and more robust models were coming out, but primarily, I felt like we owed it to ourselves to use state of the art to not just push the field of advertising, but try out nobler pursuits. So when I found myself at COP28 in December 2023 in Dubai, I felt like I had found my calling. I had always felt a pull towards working on things within climate but now even fiscally, I felt convinced it was the right thing to do. I had seldom heard of high quality software builders enter the field of climate-tech. So I entered EF with the goal of building in climate.
I spent 8 weeks trialing co-founders and ideas until pairing with Harsh, whom I met at COP and he was also in London at the time. Together, we looked into software for heat pumps. As we realised there isn’t going to be a $100M business idea in the space and adoption was going to be difficult due to natural gas costs (read more about it here), we pivoted to a problem further upstream. Electricity generation and distribution is a silent behemoth of an industry, and reducing costs will have tremendous downstream implications.
Knowing we wanted to build this company in the US, we left London and got a month-long airbnb in San Francisco, even though the EF program was still ongoing. To be honest, London wasn’t doing it for me. I was still googly-eyed about my time in SF and frankly, I missed that energy.
Q3
In June, we had spent hundreds of hours in talks with people during the program, either at conferences, cold-emailing or bugging our network in order to find the exact problem we’re going to tackle that the market would be interested in energy. It was tough and it felt like we weren’t going to win without having some industry expertise. Harsh didn’t have a software/hardware technical background, and even though I was software-technical, it didn’t make sense for us to start this company. The intersection of companies that two technical people can build is enormous, but with one non-technical person, that intersection boils down to just the market edge, which we didn’t possess in the electrical grid space.
Even though both Harsh and I really enjoyed working together, halfway through July, I ended up taking a break. If I was going to pursue the electrical grid space, I needed to find the person with experience in the industry to help me execute. There’s a lot of work to be done there, and I have ideas in the space but boy you have to be ready to eat shit for years. But I guess that’s true for any start-up.
I ended up spending some time with family after parting ways with Harsh. A couple of my friends had made plans for south east asia and I decided to send it. I went with the pretext of exploring what the digital nomad life is like but deep down I knew I wasn’t serious about that. I wanted to fuck around.
After treating my body horrendously, aging a few years within a month and barely making it out alive (the ocean is an unforgiving beast), I landed back in SF in late August. The rest I got on the trip was energizing. I was hungry to continue with Enclaved (the energy start-up) and was keen to make some progress solo to impress someone from the industry to join me. I was tackling grid congestion, and had found the reinforcement learning algorithm AlphaZero applied to congestion management was a game changer.
Side note, the amount of research in papers that needs to be productized is tremendous. If you’re a founder looking for an idea and know of an industry you find fascinating, dig through research papers to find the next big idea. Or build an AI tool to do it for you.
September was a big month in helping me gain clarity. I was in talks with Senior Advisors at the DOE, IBM research group for climate and sustainability and got feedback that early demoes looked very promising.
Q4
I started the last quarter getting traction on this idea, solo. However, I still had more surrendering to do. In fact, life had other plans for me.
I’ve had a quarterly coffee planned with my professor, Ala Shaabana, who advised me in my final year in undergrad research, for nearly 3 years. He was working on Bittensor and I helped out on decentralised ML model training and benchmarking with him at the University of Toronto. It turned out that he’d been spending significant time in SF as well. We went on a walk where he described the vision for his next project. He was looking for his first couple of engineers. I told him that I’m hyped about the journey that I’m on and it wouldn’t make sense to leave now, especially as my demo was starting to pan out and the right people were invested in the success of Enclaved.
I left the coffee + walk atwitter. I had greatly enjoyed working with him and his co-founder, Jake, in undergrad. Working with them was the exact opposite experience of working in a corporate. Open green space, no bureaucratic structure and a top notch sense of humour. No bullshit small talk about the weekend. It was exactly the kind of thing I was looking for.
After mulling it over for a few days and making a weighted decision matrix with all the options (I love surrendering but I also calculated risks), I decided this opportunity is just too good to pass up. I was hooked into the energy space because of the opportunities it presented for a better life in the future. But AI is now. Decentralisation of the entire ML stack, hardware, infrastructure, training, fine-tuning, applications, are problems that need to be solved now. The deeper I thought about it, the more pressing this problem felt.
It helped that both David Lawee and Ala looked like they had assembled the A-team. So, in late October, I went all in on Crucible Labs.
We’ve been working on some products that people within the Bittensor ecosystem are gonna absolutely love. I'm excited to share more in the coming few months.
Here's to surrendering further in 2025. 🍻