I
I was ten years old when I arrived in Australia. I didn't speak English. I didn't know anyone. I remember the particular strangeness of sitting in a classroom where everything happening around you is completely legible — human beings, desks, a whiteboard, the rhythms of a school day — but completely closed off at the same time. You understand the shape of things but none of the meaning.
That first year was hard in the way that things are hard when you have no framework yet to understand what's happening to you. There was the language barrier, which was almost the easier part — a concrete problem with a concrete solution, given enough time and stubbornness. Harder was the subtler kind of alienation: the sense of being perpetually adjacent to things, never quite inside them. I was different in ways I hadn't chosen and couldn't yet articulate, and other kids, as kids do, noticed.
I don't say this for sympathy — I say it because it matters to who I became. Being forced to adapt to an environment that wasn't built for you teaches you things that comfortable belonging never does. You learn to read rooms. You develop a tolerance for ambiguity. You figure out that identity is something you have to actively construct, not passively receive. By the time I was a teenager, I spoke English without an accent and played rugby on weekends. I had, in the most practical sense, adapted. But I never stopped being the kid who arrived not knowing the language either — and I've never wanted to.
Being forced to adapt to an environment that wasn't built for you teaches you things that comfortable belonging never does.
II
University was where I first started to feel like I was finding my own terms. I studied Actuarial Science and Law at the Australian National University — a combination that probably says something about a personality that finds comfort in both precision and argument. I threw myself into it. I competed in the UBS Australia Investment Banking competition and made it to the national finals as an undergraduate. I ran the Inward Bound Ultra Marathon in Canberra — 95 kilometres through bushland, which I finished. It remains one of the things I'm most quietly proud of.
These weren't just achievements to collect. They were experiments in what I was capable of. I think I needed to know. The ten-year-old who couldn't communicate had grown into someone who could compete academically, who could push his body further than seemed reasonable, who could hold his own. There was something being settled in me during those years — a growing confidence not in any specific ability, but in the general capacity to figure things out.
III
My early twenties were less structured, by design. I wanted to move, so I moved. I lived in China, Australia, the UK, Singapore, and eventually the United States. I travelled widely outside those — through Southeast Asia, Europe, South America, places I'd had no particular reason to go except that I wanted to see them and meet the people who lived there.
I've never been interested in tourism in the conventional sense. I find museums fine, landmarks forgettable. What I actually want when I travel is to eat where locals eat, to get slightly lost in a neighbourhood that wasn't on any list, to have a long conversation with someone whose life looks nothing like mine. The best travel experiences I've had have left me feeling less certain about the world, not more — which sounds like a complaint but isn't. Certainty, I've come to think, is mostly just familiarity you've stopped questioning.
Those years were also where I stayed connected to the parts of myself that Australia had taught me to hold loosely. I visited China frequently — still do. I read in Mandarin. I stayed curious about Chinese culture, politics, food, literature, in the way you stay curious about a language you were born into but had to re-learn to speak fluently on your own terms. I think of it less as heritage and more as an ongoing conversation with one half of who I am.
IV
I'm in New York now. I play tennis most weeks and have recently discovered pickleball, which I suspect will become a problem. I hike and snowboard when I can get out of the city. I read — in both languages, fiction and non-fiction, whatever holds my attention — and I play chess. Chess reliably humbles me the moment I think I'm getting good.
I mention these things not as a list of personality traits but because they reflect something I genuinely believe: that the quality of a life, and honestly the quality of work, has a lot to do with how fully you're paying attention to things outside your lane. Tennis teaches you something about patience and pattern recognition. Hiking reminds you that your problems are the right scale. Reading in a second language keeps a certain kind of cognitive humility alive.
What I'm trying to do now — professionally, personally — is synthesise. The kid who adapted. The student who competed. The traveller who got lost on purpose. The engineer who learned to frame a business problem before trying to solve it. These things aren't separate chapters; they're the same person trying to leave something worth leaving.
I've never been particularly interested in being the smartest person in the room. I'm more interested in being the one who understands what the room is actually trying to do.
That's the honest answer to not who, but w(h)en: I'm the sum of every environment I've been dropped into and had to figure out. Which, it turns out, is a reasonable preparation for a career in applied AI.