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i, at the tender age of 28, have found myself in charge of a research lab* https://t.co/JG7x9e3x4s
it's funny how i've settled into this situation without having much in the name of credentials i have neither a phd nor a history of publishing independent research in some corner of the internet and not for the lack of trying!
whence cometh this ungainly confidence? it's not my math ability: i easily take 2-3x as long to solve physics problems compared to my peers back in uni it's not my executive fn: i could never keep to a strict timetable like most people running orgs of this complexity
so where? who said i could do this? the easy cop out answer is that most people could have done what i did, but they just _didn't_. a lifetime of being really good at achieving things, ie a life i was as far away as possible from leading, opens a lot of doors
i have not achieved things of note. i am not the most widely-read, nor the most cracked engineer within a 100-mile radius i have thought about this question for weeks at this point and there's just one answer that i keep coming back to
i grew up in the philippines, a string of islands as far away from the intellectual centres of the 21st century as you can get without literally having to get your drinking water from the village well (although i did live for a few yrs in a house where i had to handpump water)
and it's stupid but on some level i've always thought of you all as fake, like TV chars in some imaginary world until i met some of you in the flesh, you were for the most part indistiguishable from monkey-typers, crafted by some alien power for me and my friends' entertainment
in other words: i was alone and before you castigate me for being too snooty, i did try to find My People for a whole decade. there were glimpses of it in online meetups, or tech dinners cloned from the bay, but somehow they never felt unquestionably Real
viscerally, all of the decisions matter equally from the colour of the feature wall, to the format of weekly check-ins: there's no such thing as 'big' and 'small' when you are frequently bombarded by inconsequential things ballooning into massive opportunities
like, earlier this week i was supposed to get coffee with an alumnus of one of my former uni orgs and suddenly we have ourselves a meeting with some bigwig in the gov't and possibly organising the biggest AI governance conference in the entire country
symmetrically, seemingly inconsequential things can snowball into giant problems later on and you can’t even rely on external advice for this! no amount of reading bell labs memoirs will let us escape the particularities of the space our lab is trying to become
channeling thiel here but every great moment in scene-building happens only once you try to adapt, make the right calls, fight the right battles. no one can teach you this but reality + being lucky enough to stave off the potentially existential risks (lol) along the way