From San Francisco to Tanzania to North Carolina - Summer '24 recap
The last few months have been filled with traveling to new cities, working at new companies, and building new projects. But most importantly I've met some pretty awesome people.
Yo, it’s Tehseen.
I’m 18, from Toronto, and on a mission to make life a bit more interesting. I’ve always tried to push boundaries—sometimes in ways that got me into trouble—but now I’m channeling that energy into building cool technology.
I have dabbled in blockchain (DeFi infrastructure) and machine learning (for Internet routing optimization). Here is my portfolio of things I’ve done to contribute to this mission.
Beyond all those buzzwords I’m just a dude tryna do cool stuff with fun people
Here are the cliff notes from this edition:
Learnings from falling down: what my mistakes have taught me
Going to the Bay Area for the first time to pitch a product to LinkedIn executives
Finishing high school and transitioning to college
Wrapping up my internship at BenchSci
My solution for founders to boost productivity and beat isolation
Creating transportation jobs for young Africans
Some nifty content to consume
But first, check out my last newsletter if you haven’t already.
Turns out I’m pretty good at making mistakes…
And as a result, I’ve learned some invaluable life lessons.
Each of these lessons has a story behind it. Reach out to me to hear them…
People buy your why, not your what
If you give energy (rather than take) it is hard not to like you
Think from the other person’s perspective (incentives always)
Kindness is not being nice. Be a kind person but don’t feel the need to be nice to everyone (can lead to you being taken advantage of)
Small decisions should be quick (decide from the heart, not anything else)
Get a broad education so you can eliminate blind spots and make cross-references between subjects as the world is interconnected (travel often for broader insight)
Lets you find more inter-industry arbitrage opportunities
Simpler explanations are more true than complex ones (Occam’s razor)
Don’t confuse local for global maxima (“successful” people in microcosms)
Don’t have regrets, have lessons
When you are playing a point, it is the most important thing in the world. When it is behind you, move on.
Focus on 1-2 things at a time, don’t get involved with too many things at once (I’m still working on this myself)
Learning Silicon Valley’s Secrets: what a week in San Francisco taught me
Growing up on the East Coast, California was known as a land of influencers (SoCal) and hippies (NorCal). My aspirations at the time gave me no reason to head out West - it seemed the power was on the East Coast: Wall St, Capitol Hill, and home.
But then I was introduced to the world of tech and startups. All that quirky, free-spirited energy in California that put off many East coasters has morphed into wild creativity and life-changing innovation. As Bill Gurley mentioned at last year’s All-In Summit, this pace of innovation would not have been possible if the Silicon Valley were on the East Coast, closer to DC (regulation) and New York (corporate conformity).
So basically California’s weirdness is a net positive for the world.
And ever since I learned this fact I had been eager to experience it myself.
The first thing I realized after taking in how beautiful the West Coast is is that the vast majority of people in San Francisco (not the Bay Area, but the downtown core itself) are not from California at all. Meeting the variety of people from different countries and states proved to me the strength of the city’s magnetism.
The number of people who had booked one-way tickets from their hometowns with no intention of returning soon was astounding. And I was shocked to see how many Canadians there were. This is not the best data because of the circles I spent my time in, but I met more Canadians than California natives during my short time there.
The city operates very differently from any other place I’ve been before. The average age is remarkably young, the average person is far smarter and more driven, and it’s a city centered on personal development.
But, like all communities, Silicon Valley is its bubble with its status games that trap a lot of hard-working, intelligent people who live there.
Independent thinking is still a prerequisite to being successful anywhere.
Pitching a product to the founder of LinkedIn
We were aiming high—partnering with LinkedIn to launch our product, LinkedIn Mentor. To be frank, it didn’t go exactly as planned, but the insights we gained were priceless. While there, we spoke with a PM on the Moonshots team, the Global Head of Business Development, and later one of the company’s co-founders.
Tl;dr we are building LinkedIn Mentor, a search engine for young people to find niche experts based on a skill, competency, or experience to reach out to for mentorship. Instead of running the risk of using LinkedIn’s data and getting shut down for scraping, we decided to try to partner directly with LinkedIn to make this product real.
This was an incredible opportunity to get feedback and learn from some of the OGs of the tech world. From our meetings at the LinkedIn HQ, we got insight into the decision-making process at the company and how we can iterate on our product to make it an enticing partnership opportunity for LinkedIn.
Through our process, we were also introduced to one of LinkedIn’s co-founders, Allen Blue.
For now, it doesn’t seem the partnership plan with LinkedIn is going to work out as intended, but nonetheless, this was an incredible learning experience in product, partnerships, and sales.
My main takeaway from this experience is how to think of your product through the lens of different stakeholders. Understanding the right incentives for each party involved with the product is the most important part of building anything - from a startup to a big company - and I got some specific action items on how to do that from these experts.
This is why people say “talk to users” so often - it’s all about seeking perspective.
Chapter 2 comes to a close: thoughts on finishing high school…
After spending my early years in North Carolina (what I feel is chapter 1 of my life), and then moving to Toronto (chapter 2), I will now return to North Carolina to attend Duke University to study Electrical and Computer Engineering. Funny how that works.
I had a pretty awesome time in high school. I made close friends in my city, traveled to different countries, and explored my interests through projects. Every year in high school was quite different for me as my priorities shifted, but if I were to do it again, there are only a few major changes I’d make.
That’s why leaving my city has been difficult to accept - Toronto is pretty awesome. While I am excited for the next few years of my life, I feel I am closing a chapter that won’t come again…
I got deep with a friend the other day and he mentioned the only way to be content long-term is to live in the moment (or cherish your journey as some could say). That hit home during my last year of high school. If you can enjoy how you spend your time you will be happy - and the only way to enjoy your time is to focus on what/who is in front of you and be grateful it is there.
So as I enter the next chapter of college where strong mimetic drivers and competition lead to hundreds of things going on at once, I want to intentionally focus on embracing where I am and enjoying it so that four years go by and I don’t have regrets.
I’m stoked for these next few years. New freedoms, faces, and failures (what a quote).
Working at the intersection of science, strategy and policy - my internship at BenchSci
A fun learning I had this summer is the value of staying on top of policy changes.
This summer I interned on the Customer Therapeutics team at BenchSci, where I built tools to automate how in-house scientists propose product updates. I worked directly with PhD scientists to streamline their manual workflows of using data to understand client painpoints and creating product roadmaps to help our product better serve those clients’ needs.
I had an awesome time learning from the scientists, engineers, and executives who were kind enough to mentor me.
BenchSci was founded in response to a major policy change in 2008 when President Bush mandated that all NIH-funded research must be made publicly available within 12 months of its publication date. Instead of reacting negatively like much of the scientific world did, BenchSci’s co-founders saw an opportunity.
In 2015, BenchSci launched its platform that uses AI to help researchers quickly understand insights from the millions of publicly available papers to supplement their research. Today the platform has data from over 90 million experiments and supports some of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world.
Because I was at the office regularly I heard stories about the early days at the company and what the roadmap for the next few years looked like.
In typical startup fashion, the early days consisted of scrappy ways of acquiring customers, going near-bankrupt multiple times, and tight, fast feedback loops.
What struck me most was how hyper-focused BenchSci is on delivering its customers the best possible product experience. The first thing I noticed when I walked into BenchSci’s beautiful office was a giant plaque with every customer’s logo - a reminder to employees of their mission to help solve some of the world’s biggest challenges in disease biology.
This customer-centric approach is why BenchSci has such a robust team of in-house scientists. These scientists act as “consultants” for customers in scientific niches to understand their technical challenges, then relay that information to other teams (my job was helping automate that “relay”).
This system ensures every feature and product update is tailored to real customer needs, rather than having engineers who have never done bench research build unnecessary features. The scientists also test new features, providing another feedback node in their already tight feedback loops.
It’s one of the best examples I’ve seen of implementing startup advice like “talk to users” and “iterate fast.”
My biggest takeaways from the internship:
When interning at a mid-size company (50 - 500 employees), understand as much of the early stories as possible and learn why decisions were made in certain ways
Customers come first, not investors. Investment will come if customers are happy, not the other way around.
The early days of acquiring customers have to be creative. There is no conventional path for acquiring early users
Find a few early “power users” to test features with and gain quick feedback
Play the game you can win, not the game that is the most exciting (shiny)
Thank you to everyone at BenchSci for putting this together!
Giving founders a productivity boost and eliminating isolation - building daylee
By spending time with communities of founders and people working on personal projects I’ve found that daily updates are a common way to hold oneself accountable to certain goals while also keeping up to date with and updating one’s friends.
And most of this happens in group chats or DMs. But it’s disorganized and tedious to have multiple accountability partners in different group chats or friend circles.
So I’m building Daylee, a social platform for builders to stay accountable to their goals and up-to-date with their friends through daylee updates.
postdaylee.com
You post something you got done today then can see what your friends are up to.
I am continuously iterating and shipping new features based on feedback I get from users. The product is young so any input you have could be implemented soon.
Take a gander and let me know ⬇️
Here are the features I am working on to implement next:
You can only see posts from friends (keep it intimate)
Exception: when you first open the app, you will be recommended a post from someone who had an update similar to yours from the prior day
Group buy-ins with friends where the person who holds the longest streak in the group keeps the buy-in
Long-term growth trackers
Wheels to wealth: how motorbikes can change the lives of young Africans
Tanzania has a GDP per capita of USD $1,122, lower than many other East African countries, and 49% of the population is beneath the poverty line.
Rural Tanzania, where 64% of Tanzanians live, is particularly affected as there is very little infrastructure to travel to urban areas where most economic opportunity exists. For example, 45% of kids in urban areas start (not graduate) secondary school whereas only 19% of kids in rural areas start. In addition, brain drain to urban areas with higher salaries leaves only 9% of doctors in rural areas.
In April, a group of friends and I concluded an effective method of helping bring urban opportunities (healthcare, schools, and economic opportunities) to those in rural areas was through motorcycle taxis.
However, motorcycles are mainly found in urban areas - and their high cost of $770 USD, which is ~6 years of income - leaves the larger problem in rural areas unaddressed.
Our solution: a lease-to-own bike model. We provide bikes upfront to motorbike taxi drivers in rural communities within 20km of urban areas and collect a daily payment through M-Pesa until the bike is paid off.
This model replicates how M-KOPA provides micro-financing for electronics in Kenya. The unit economics has proven to be profitable for both the driver and us and we are currently working on piloting the project in Kondoa, Tanzania.
One of M-KOPA’s main projects is leasing solar panels to homes in Kenya and collecting daily payments from the homeowner that come from the energy costs they are saving by using solar. The savings are essentially split between paying off M-KOPA and profit for the homeowner.
Our project works similarly but off the extra revenue made by being able to obtain resources at rural prices and sell for urban prices. A portion of the profit made there is returned to us as the lenders.
We are managing this pilot project entirely remotely and have hired a local operations manager to execute and provide us daily updates for us to analyze and iterate upon our initial plan.
This approach is contrary to the advice most people would give of being on the ground, but given the language and cultural barriers we would face, this approach has clear benefits.
Currently, our guy on the ground in the Dodoma Region in Tanzania has traveled to 8 small rural and urban villages to understand what type of villages would benefit the most from more motorbikes. His time in these villages was spent speaking with kids traveling to school, people who own motorcycles, village leaders, and local merchants to understand the biggest painpoints of travel in the villages.
Through this “market research,” we’ve locked in two villages near Kondoa where we are going to begin piloting the program with two motorbikes in each village for travel between Chemba and Kondoa (the local “urban” areas).
We want the project to be self-sustainable in Tanzania so the project itself creates jobs in addition to providing motorbikes.
This project is still in its early stages as we are working on securing our first few motorcycles, but we should have results soon.
Some gems for your consumption:
Podcasts:
Articles:
Thoughts on Techno-optimism
Thanks for sticking around!
If you know someone who’d get a kick out of this, feel free to pass it along. With college just around the corner, I have no idea what adventures are next, but I know I’ll likely go through some pretty drastic changes and have some funny college stories to tell in my next newsletter.
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always love to hear what you're working on - see you in Carolina!