On Growing Up

My parents emigrated to London over thirty years ago, where I was born and raised. Although I was never good at sports, I quickly fell in love with music. I started playing piano when I was about five years old, and loved tapping imaginary keys on my lap throughout the school day. In high school, I grew tired of classical piano so switched to jazz. Although my improvisation could still use some work, it’s a lot cooler to tell people you play jazz piano! 

On Shifting from Math to Engineering

I always knew I’d go to school for math, but I didn’t know how to turn it into a career. However, in my penultimate year of school, I attended a talk on Shane Legg and Marcus Hutter’s AIXI. I was captivated by the goal of artificial intelligence. I spent that Christmas break reading Goodfellow’s Deep Learning and was relieved that my grounding in mathematics made the material immediately accessible.

It’s different for college students in the UK, in that it’s a lot harder to just sign up for courses whenever you want to learn something new. You’re pretty much stuck studying the subject you picked as a 16-year-old! So I actually ended up teaching computer science and AI through NVIDIA for a couple of years, where I helped people in London make the career shift into tech.

On Moving to California and Finding Venture

When I was at Imperial College, I was always aware there was a bigger world out there. The few AI initiatives that existed in London, like DeepMind, kept getting acquired by companies in Silicon Valley. So I said to myself, “I can either stay here and watch this technology Renaissance happen from afar, or I can go there myself and actually be a part of it.” I decided to apply to Stanford for my masters in computer science.

If you told me a year ago that I’d end up in venture, I’d be shocked. But I’ve always loved talking to people, learning new things and running with seemingly risky ideas that are very, very different from the status quo. I’ve always enjoyed making bets on where you think things are going to go. And what’s so great about venture, is that rather than building and betting on just one idea, you can pursue dozens of different ideas all at once.

On Working with Founders

I love people who are passionate about their work and the odd one out. It doesn’t matter if it’s theoretical machine learning or baking gingerbread monstrosities. Their enthusiasm is infectious and the more they press on fissures in their corner of the world that others overlook, they might just make something new. Whether that happens tomorrow or ten years from now is a separate question, but I’d always bet on that person. 

On Working with Amplify

My focus is on AI and blockchain, which I understand has become a horrible cliche! I think blockchain technology has been misconstrued. People like to use lots of hyped-up adjectives to try to explain it, but really, all great tech is about making something better, cheaper and faster. Blockchains are a revolutionary platform for conducting political-economic experiments. It remains to be seen which experiments garner most traction, but in the meantime I am interested in making them cheaper and easier to run. I think the journey has only just begun in AI research, and whether it’s better learning algorithms, model architectures or reverse engineering neural nets to learn a periodic table of universal circuits, there will be lots of exciting breakthroughs over the next few years. 

On Life Outside of Work

I still play classical and jazz piano, and I love going to concerts any chance I get. I’m a voracious reader. Right now I’m trying to figure out why ultra processed food is so harmful to the human body. Usually I enjoy reading biographies. It’s fascinating to learn about someone’s story, and ultimately realize they’re just another human, with the same trials and tribulations everyone faces.