Personal Report, 2024

2024 was a year of change.

At the start of the year, 22-year-old me was one year into his London tech job after Cambridge, thinking about doing a PhD. Now, I am the co-founder and CEO of a new AI startup, closing a pre-seed round and heading off to YC.

Looking back, the year doesn’t seem real. It was about trying a thousand things; it was about confronting my own motivations; it was about taking a leap of faith.

This is my personal report for 2024. Every year, I spend the final week revisiting all my daily journals, weekly logs, and quarterly reflections. Writing up a report is how I try to make sense of it all. If my rambling by chance gives you any inspiration, that’d be my honour.

Seeing what sticks

When the year began, I had just returned from the first trip home since the Pandemic.

The trip gave me a chance to see my parents and my birthplace for the first time since I turned 18. It also gave me a chance to step outside and examine my life in London - I was getting too comfortable and directionless; it was time to try more things and see what sticks.

My started trying everything.

On LinkedIn, I challenged myself to write one post every working day for 100 consecutive posts; In my day job at Yonder, I built an algorithm to help maximise team connectivity, and tried to expand it to other startups; I took on three more research projects, from modelling social network de-polarisation, to using AI to simulate how companies respond to whistleblower policies; I even started posting Guqin music videos on Instagram, planning to launch a channel.

Soon, things started to stick. My LinkedIn following doubled in a few weeks, and I find myself having more interesting ideas and insights the more I wrote. Turns out, ideas and observation, like expression, is a muscle you can exercise.

Posting daily also gave me real-time feedback on my ideas. Turns out, people really resonated with my reflections on startup life at Yonder; people really liked the observation between research and industry, and between understanding tech and human behaviour.

It was then that a paper I had been leading - about using 33,000 AI agents to simulate a society - was accepted by IC2S2. When I went to Philadelphia to present it at the prestigious conference, I was surprised by how well our amateur project was received by professional academics.

“Funny that this artificial societies idea is really taking off…” I journaled back in spring, on the day we got accepted, “It might become something far more important in my career.”

Confronting motivations

All these projects, alongside my day job as the only ML guy at Yonder, kept me rather busy.

I started questioning my own motivation: Why am I doing all this? Don’t I already have a great job and a great life? Why am I wanting more?

My questioning was partly prompted by Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk - Elon has a Grand Mission, one that drives him to greatness, and at the same time consumes him in egoistic ambitions.

It made me question ambition: Should one strive to become a “hero”, who try to shape the world according to their “mission” and their ego?

Part of me was scared of where I was going. The last time I was doing this many projects was during high school, when I was driven by the insecurity of wanting to be important. This time, I must make sure that I wasn’t driven by the wrong motivation.

In the end, I arrived at one thing I cannot deny: I am still frightfully ambitious. But I think the motivation is not self-importance anymore; instead, it is a simple restlessness, an urge to express and build something interesting, something unique and irreplaceable.

I think this is the line that separates bad and good ambitions: bad ambition is all about the self, good ambition is about contributing and participating in something bigger than the self.

Good ambition is something wonderful: it is in participating in the world that we truly discover and express who we are, and it is in our most unique self-expression, that we make our most irreplaceable contribution to the world.

For me, this means building something new at the intersection between disciplines. I’ve been studying societies for all my adult life, and have been into tech for as long as I could remember - I want to build something new that bridges humanity and technology.

A leap of faith

Should I start my own company? My father said, if the cost of failure is bearable, there is no reason to not take the riskier option that can teach you more.

I incorporated Artificial Societies on September 18th, when Yonder kindly gave me a three week leave to try things out.

Of course, it was harder than I imagined.

Refining the pitch and building the MVP was great; being questioned by dozens of investors alone, that was soul-crushing.

My Taichi Mater taught me that to win a fight, I should never focus on the opponent, but instead focus on my own centre-of-weight and my own rhythm of movement. Yet, I wasted three weeks trying to test my idea and conviction with investors, instead of obsessing over product and customers.

The worst thing was that it made me doubt my own conviction: my life was nice, am I stupid to give it all up, and take arms against a sea of troubles?

But life surprises you at the least expected moment. After a coffee with a potential competitor, a lady stopped me when I was about to leave.

“Overheard your conversation,” she said that morning outside FWD Coffee on Whitecross street, “Can I introduce you to some investors?”

Things happened very quickly. 15 days later, we signed a pre-seed term sheet with a great VC fund, and with their encouragement, applied and got into YC.

On December 5th, I finished my last day at Yonder. 2 years and 3 months - It’s been an honour to have Yonder as my first job and to have “grown up” there. I have learned a lot and built a lot, and enjoyed learning through building, rather than learning by being taught.

And now, onward to a new journey.

Forward

What’s ahead?

As I write this, I am on the flight from London to SF, preparing ahead of YC W25.

I’m glad to be building Artificial Societies with my co-founder Patrick, and I’m honoured that despite the company being less than 100 days old, a great full-stack engineer has already joined our founding team to build the future together.

Thinking back to that feeling of directionless at the beginning of 2024, and the many threads of life back then, I am glad that I now have a single-minded focus in building Artificial Societies.

This is my life’s dream to combine the understanding of technology and humanity. Our mission is to scale collective innovation; our vision is a world where every message, product, and even policy, is first tested in artificial societies before being launched into the real world.

The future is now uncertain, and I love it. In uncertainty there exist infinite possibilities. I’m glad that instead of certainty, I chose free will.

We are in open sea now, with wind at our back.

There will be waves and storms in this sea of trouble. May we have the courage to make mistakes, and the courage to sail our own unique and irreplaceable voyage.

December 26th, 2024

en route to San Francisco