The current date is August 5th 2026, I'm entering my Sophomore year of Cornell, where I study CS and Philosophy as a dual major. Currently and over the past year or so, I've been going through this phase of discovery, in terms of my interests and what I want to do in the future. For instance, entering Cornell I was so certain that I wanted to work as a SWE at some FAANG or adjacent company, but I realized that I wanted to found a startup, and then now I'm focused more on being an engineer AT a fast growing startup. People think that being a technical founder and an engineer are the same, but I disagree heavily. Founder's own the whole stack from GTM, Customer Success, Engineering, etc. Whereas Engineering is, well, just engineering. Maybe if I find a problem I'm truly passionate about I'll try being more focused as a founder. That's a little bit of a ramble, but let's get to the main point: why I've decided to write.
tldr; Start building, keep trying, now that applies to writing too.
Why I've decided to start writing as a habit/hobby
Paul Graham is the main reason. If you aren't familiar, Paul Graham is the previous president of YC. He invested in Airbnb and many other successful companies, and he holds a strict mindset of focus and, most importantly, writing. Being a curious guy interested in startups, I would always read his essays in my free time, whether I was procrastinating schoolwork, at the gym, or eating. Some cool things I learned from him:
- Start building
- "Reading is to writing as reading a math equation is to solving it"
- Time is your biggest asset
If you want to read his writing (he mogs mine), I'd recommend:
Anyways, I think the biggest takeaway from the past year is to Start Building.
Last year attending Cornell I was very insecure about my intelligence. I was surrounded by IMO olympiads, big tech interns, and people with 400k+ in scholarships who would easily solve, say, the hardest 1920 (multivariable calculus) or 2800 (discrete math) questions, while I studied 50+ hours for both of these finals and still ended up with a C+ on my transcript. Being surrounded by such high achieving people is valuable, it shows you what's possible in this world, but if you look at your environment with the wrong lens, it can damage you deeply. I thought that since my peers performed better in class, I was "less." I also had the wrong assumption about what makes a good engineer, or builder. In my opinion, what makes a truly "successful" person (gonna write another blog about this, let me know if you're curious!) isn't how smart they are in class, it's about whether they hold true principles for what the future will look like, and if they run through walls to solve problems. What's great is you can go from having none of these traits to having both in one year with a simple reframing. Some stuff that's helpful here: Atomic Habits and the importance of identity, and just caring less about what people think of you.
Cornell Club Rank and the importance of gimmicky projects
Now fast forward a little bit, and it's now December or January of 2025-26. During winter break I decided to build my first college coding project, a quantitative backtesting engine written in polars. After posting about it on LinkedIn, I realized how cool it was to make stuff that you could use and learn from. This is even more apparent and important with agentic coding tools now.
If you don't know anything about Cornell, I'd say a decent portion of the students have a big ego, and their self-worth is dictated by status, what organizations they're in, what internships they have. One night I was lying in bed pondering this. Why are the students like that? (I still don't know, it's lowkey wild.) I was scrolling LinkedIn and saw a thread about a UC Berkeley website that let you rank the prestige of different "hackathons" (coding competitions), and suddenly it struck me: I could just make the same thing but apply it to Cornell clubs. Right after I finished my final exams, I stayed up in my dorm until 2am working on CornellClubRank.com. After successfully launching it, I told some of my friends (especially the ones in the business clubs) and went to my classes. Middle of the day I got an email from Cloudflare, the platform hosting the website, saying I'd used up all my daily web requests. Initially I thought it was a bug, but when I logged onto Cloudflare I saw "2,000 unique users today." Somehow my website had spread like wildfire and had 2k students (10% of Cornell) logged on.
Never underestimate the power of gimmicky projects, sometimes the most useless projects are the most useful. I learned how to host websites, but more importantly, the power of network effects and psychology when building products.
Sometime around this time, I joined Armada, an underground group of student founders at Cornell. At my first club meeting I was shocked to be surrounded by people building knockoff Meta glasses, peptide businesses, and drones for data centers. And here I was, accepted with my gimmicky project that let people ego off through their clubs.
Through Armada, I got exposure to people building because they're passionate, and that's the kind of person I wanted to be, so I naturally surrounded myself with them. This is when I met a close friend of mine, Hari, who told me about CEC, Cornell Entrepreneurship, a more startups-events-focused organization. When I first joined CEC, I met more startup people: Adi (Gabriel Castillo's cofounder), Darian, Hari, Mikey, Claudia, Eddie, Arsh, and Henrik, among many others. The people in bold were the Armada and CEC intersection, known formally as the "Linkediners." For context, we had a challenge to post every day on LinkedIn, and the first to break owed the others in the group dinner. I lost.
Keep trying, lowkey
Nowadays I'd consider myself a pretty good AI engineer, or just software engineer in general. But one year ago I was clueless. Honestly, everything in life is like going to the gym: if you're consistent, you won't see change until one day you're like "damn, I'm shredded." It was very similar with my experience with startups.
- September — in 48 hours we built this for a hackathon and got destroyed.
- October — got honorable mention for an AppDev hackathon.
- Nov–Jan — lost, straight up, 4 Cornell hackathons in a row, then got banned from Cornell hackathons for not showing up to one.
- June — won my first hackathon, for Ramp, and built this in 4 hours. Compare that to the 48-hour project, it's insane.
I wanted my first blog post to represent me, which is probably why it's all over the place. But to tie it all together: I'm going to apply this "keep trying" mindset to writing as well.