Reflect - May & June 2023
With the academic year coming to an end, I have spent a fair amount of these past two months reflecting upon this transformative year and how I can keep up this progress moving forward.
Welcome back to my monthly update where I explain my highlights from each month as well as my biggest takeaways and lessons learned. For those that don’t know me, I am a 17-year-old student in Toronto interested in working with different emerging technologies to find solutions to the world’s many problems.
Over the past two months, pitched a proof-of-concept climate change solution to Toronto VCs, built a web 3.0 ticketing app, and attended the Collision Conference.
Before diving in, however, definitely check out my April newsletter for some interesting insights and experiences from last month
Saving the world with lasers
If you had a chance to check out my April newsletter, you would have read about my project on reducing ozone concentration in the troposphere.
Check out the final product below:
What a ride.
I originally got inspired to work on climate-related problems by Chris Sacca and the work he is doing with Lowercarbon Capital. So when I decided to participate in this moonshot competition to ideate a solution that would impact billions, I pounced on the idea of building in climate tech.
And I learned a ton. After countless research papers, discussions with industry professionals, and iterations this process has taught me so much not only about atmospheric chemistry but also about how to think on a 10x scale and bring a solution to life.
And after it all came to an end, our project won the Elon Musk Award for the most impactful solution! What a way to bring this journey to a close.
Bringing back million-dollar JPEGs
If I put the word NFT in the name of this project, I feel like most non-blockchain people would just keep scrolling. For those of you who think I may be click-baiting you, don’t worry I will not be trying to sell you JPEGs.
Instead, I want to introduce you to the future of ticketing. For flights, concerts, and sporting events, we have found this novel way of storing our tickets on our phones via Apple/Google Wallet. But the conventional ticketing methods have flaws that are often glossed over because people don’t see an alternative. Well, fear no more…
I present to you eventChain — a decentralized ticket exchange facilitated by a smart contract instead of an intermediary like Ticketmaster or SeatGeek.
To learn more about the applications of this decentralized app as well as understand the backend code to build it, check out this technical walkthrough I made.
Attending Canada’s biggest tech conference
I attended my first tech conference in September of last year and had a blast. So when I got the opportunity to be sponsored to attend Collision I was over the moon!
And it was amazing!
I met founders and investors across all industries from AI in healthcare to AI in finance to AI in law to AI in AI. ;)
All jokes aside, it was great to meet so many smart, ambitious people and learn about different career paths and stories.
Shoutout to all the people that made the events so memorable and let’s stay in touch!!
Podcast of the Month
Episode 1742 — OpenAI vs ClosedAI
This is the best place to put this block after just making fun of how many people have hopped on the AI train.
Jason Calacanis is a very decorated tech investor and has invested in startups like Uber and Robinhood, but I think his talents are best used on his podcasts, All-In and This Week in Startups.
In this specific episode, Jcal, Sunny Madra, and Vinny Lingham discuss the implications of open-source AI compared to private models like OpenAI. They explore how platforms like Hugging Face AI will speed up AI innovation to an exponential pace, but how rapid innovation could cause problems such as, well, AI taking over the world.
I highly recommend this episode for anyone interested in the business of AI and some laughs with the guys.
What does July look like?
Starting Soft30 with a group of my friends:
It’s basically a mini “75 hard” — if I complete this 30-day challenge, I’ll try 75-hard in a few months.
I really want to use these next 30 days to grow holistically and document this growth.
See you on the other side!
That’s all for May and June. It was a very interesting series of events and a great way to close out my penultimate high school year. Be sure to subscribe for free to get next month’s edition straight to your inbox.