Life Story
I started programming when I was a teenager. Fell in love with computers. Started a small website agency when I was 15 or so. For college, I went to Lehigh because that’s where my older brother went and we wanted to stick together. I was accepted into the honors program which allowed me to do an integrated degree in computer engineering and business. I was a Presidential Scholarship recipient which allowed me to do my masters in computer science free of tuition. During my graduate degree I studied machine learning and brain computer interfaces at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab in the Intelligent Systems group under Bart Paulhamus. After graduate school, in 2017, I was deciding between joining Coinbase as a product engineer and Google (and becoming a monk in Plum Village… but that’s another story). I chose Google because they had the most advanced AI and data moat in the world. It was the best playground ever for a data gal. Over ~four years, I worked as an engineer and a partner tech manager across two teams - Search (Ops) and Research Systems (UX/ML). Early at Google, I started to organically meet venture capitalists through some of my angel investments. I had been mining cryptocurrency and rotated my profits into private startup opportunities. I received an investment analyst full-time offer at n renowned firm but I didn’t want to leave engineering. I had mentioned the situation to my friend Lee from Root Ventures who then introduced me to Bessemer, and they were willing to do a unique part-time arrangement where I would work at Google during the day but help them diligence crypto during the morning and evenings. So I did this funky, double agent life for 3 years. I wrote about that arrangement here.
If computing was my first love, venture investing was my second. Bessemer opened my eyes to what I can only describe as my dream job. Being able to theorize, form and test theses about the world, and team up with masters of their craft who dare to change the world…how does it get better than that? At Bessemer I learned the importance of disciplined, fundamentals-driven investing. If you ever have the opportunity to work at BVP, take it. By 2020, I knew venture capital was what I wanted to dedicate my career towards. I figured I should probably learn something about business. So, I applied to Harvard and Stanford and was lucky enough to be accepted to both. I ultimately decided on Harvard because I was admitted to this special program that was a dual degree in NeuroEngineering and HBS. I dropped out (almost immediately after premat) to join Paradigm as investment partner #5. I left Paradigm at the beginning of 2023 to bet on myself and expand my mandate beyond crypto into all of next-gen computing including machine learning and neurotechnology. I now spend my time doing engineering-first investing and learning through building. Most VCs slide into founders' emails, we slide into their GitHubs; most VCs source at conferences, we source at (and win) hackathons (1,2). My core thesis: the future of computing is open, augmented by artificial intelligence and more tightly coupled with cognition.
