Personal Life
I did a lot of sports growing up. I played soccer for many years, ran cross country, and was on the swim team. Up until my sophomore year of high school, I was one of the shortest people in my grade, and I had a really hard time in athletics. But then I had a growth spurt. Suddenly people stopped being able to push me around when I played soccer, and my mile time dropped dramatically. I got ten varsity letters, and at our graduation ceremony, I was given our school's scholar-athlete award.
On my dad's side, I come from a military family. A number of my relatives are military officers. My great-grandfather even has his own Wikipedia page. On my mom's side, most of my family is in academics. Three of my mom's siblings have Ph.D.s, and one is married to a university professor.
My wife and I met in our freshman year of college. We were the two students from our year to win both the Dean's Achievement Scholarship, the top academic scholarship for promising freshmen, and the Computational Neuroscience Training Grant, an NIH-funded program between Emory and Georgia Tech to study computational neuroscience.
She is now a neurosurgery resident. She works from 5:00 AM until 8:00 PM most days, and takes an overnight call once or twice every other weekend. She has kept doing this even after getting pregnant. Neurosurgery is arguably the most competitive profession in the world. There is a strong practice of self-policing, motivated by a combination of extreme narcissism and a desire to deliver the best patient care, that manifests itself as being overtly verbally abusive to anyone who is percieved as "not good enough". It is a world where trying your best doesn't really matter, because messing up could kill someone.
When I told her I was going to move to Silicon Valley and start a start-up, leaving my well-paying job at Meta to make no money while chasing what I felt was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do something extremely important, she told me she would miss me, and that I owed her some pretty dresses when it finally worked out. She has never told me to relax or take it easy, and she doesn't tolerate an attitude of letting anything be outside of my control.
Startup Culture
I have a strong distaste for much of startup culture. To be honest, it has really failed to live up to my expectations. In my head, starting a startup was the way to participate in the purest form of competition - no more trying to make your boss happy or climb a ladder, the only thing that mattered was whether or not you could build and sell something great. But in reality, the incentives for early-stage and deeply technical startups are much more merky than I originally imagined. It seems like many of the startup people I meet are more interested in cultivating an outward appearance of competitiveness than they are in doing what it takes to win, and it is difficult for observers to tell the difference.
Peter Thiel has a famous quote about how competition is for losers. While the original spirit of the idea is that startups should focus on creating unique value and building a moat, in my experience it is frequently diluted into some version of "you need to raise a lot more money than your competitor", particularly with deep tech and long-horizon fields. As a result, the things that should matter - having some unique, unconventional insight into a market, building your company around a novel business model, or possessing a particular flair for technical execution - get inverted into being able to effectively sell an idea to investors. There are many deep-pocketed investors who don't particularly care about these things, for whom a digestible idea, a team which can plausibly execute, and a firm handshake are what matter. I think this is why so many startups fail.
Communication
The hardest part about moving from being an engineer into being a founder has been trying to communicate my ideas more clearly. I definitely have an engineer's tendancy to explain the nuances of technical decisions in a way that accurately communicates the difficulty of the problems I'm trying to solve, which, frankly, is not a good habit to have when trying to raise money or make people excited about the future. But the basic reason I like talking about this stuff is because it is bragging about why I'm the only person that can do it. There are many reasons for open-sourcing what we're working on, but one big reason is that I like working with people who are so confident in their engineering abilities that they think that even if we give away what we've done so far, other people won't be able to catch up to where we're going next.
America
I love competition, and I love living in a country where I can compete at the highest level. I like getting so good at something that no one can catch up to you. There is nothing more invigorating than waking up in the morning to a beautiful sunrise over a world with blood in the water. I hate the sort of thinking that has infested some corners of Silicon Valley that competition is scary. Competition is a forcing function to make sure that your life isn't wasted. Being beaten by someone better than you should be embarrasing, and should motivate you to do better, and beating a really good opponent is an enormous badge of honor.
I really like the opening speech in the movie Patton. There's one line in particular that makes me really proud to be American.
Americans love to fight. All real Americans love the sting and clash of battle. When you were kids, you all admired the champion marble shooter, the fastest runner, the big-league ball players and the toughest boxers. Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time.
I like winning, and I like the effort it takes to win. America is the only rich country that still works hard because Americans as a people are constitutionally predisposed towards eating shit for as long as it takes to win.