Studies: MSc Data Science @ EPFL ‘20-’23, BSc CS @ Alexandru Ioan Cuza University ‘17-’20
Experiences: Tech Lead @ OpenMined ‘23 - Present, Research @ Google DeepMind ‘23, SWE Intern @ Google ‘21, SWE Intern @ Google ‘20, SWE Intern @ Google ‘19, STEP Intern @ YouTube ‘18
Associations: Startup Manager @ EPFL-UNIL Entrepreneur Club ‘21-’22, Managing Partner @ Founderful Campus ‘21 - ‘22, Managing Director @ Girls Who Code ‘17-’20
Origin: Romania
Links: LinkedIn

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Growing up in Romania & working on side-projects

Where did you grow up and what were you doing?

In Romania, I discovered programming at age 10 through free local courses. Programming itself was interesting, but I got really fascinated by electronics - for a couple years, I built line followers, sumo robots and it was fun! I even learnt many physics concepts before they were taught in school.

Like many Romanian students, I did competitive programming for 7-8 years and that was very formative for my thinking. My interests eventually shifted from algorithmic to more realistic development, so I ended up participating in software contests where you present whatever you’ve built (games, apps, websites). These were great because I saw fellow high schoolers building Unity games with thousands of downloads and it fuelled my passion to build things in my free time.

I started with Unity and found myself some wonderful mentors in indie game development. It was an interesting community because everyone was building purely out of passion. This led to my first job at 16: building middleware for Unity where I worked on a memory pooling toolkit. It was tough to balance high school with work, so I stopped after a while, but not before we built my hometown’s first VR app for tourists - quite an achievement at that time.

Was this normal for your age? If not, what made you pursue these extracurriculars?

No, I was quite unusual and had my own path. I was fortunate to experience many different communities, and in each one, to find people who were truly passionate about their craft and had a contagious energy.

This continuously inspired me. To be honest, attending national olympiads in Romania also meant getting a lot of free time off from high school. As olympiads were approaching, you could skip regular classes and only attend math, literature and physics. This flexibility gave me the time to learn and build out a lot of my own projects.

You then started your bachelors in Romania. After your first year, you already landed a Google internship, which is super impressive! How did you even think about applying? Did you have mentors that suggested this?

During my first year at university, I was already working full-time and I was happy. On our way to the ICPC ACM regional competition, our trainer offered to recommended me for a job at Google. I knew little about Google and was not particularly interested in joining.

I still took the interview, but didn't take it very seriously, rather for self-evaluation. Given that, I was very relaxed and I ended up getting the offer. My parents were upset at the idea of me not going, so I ended up going. It turned out to be really fun - going abroad, meeting people. My first internship was in Switzerland and I got a taste for it. Ended up doing 4 more internships at Google after that.

It’s interesting that my previous mentors at that time - one being a veteran game developer who worked on Assassin’s Creed and the Hitman franchise and the other one from big tech - did not encourage me to join big tech, but rather to build things that I really believed in and I’m passionate about.

How important do you think mentors are? How do you find them?

Mentors are extremely important because they've already been in your shoes and have asked the same questions you're asking yourself now. You might eventually get to the same point without a mentor, but with one you can get there faster and advance more rapidly.

In my case, many mentors actually found me. I would go to different events, say hi to people, engage with them. I was young, but I would talk passionately about all the things I was building and was always asking questions. This impressed people and some of them offered to mentor me.

I think everyone should have the courage to proactively reach out to people and ask "Hey, do you want to be my mentor?"

If you want to have a mentor, be very clear about what you'd like to learn from them. Choose someone who has a career path or achievements that you aspire to. Then prove to them that you're worthy of their time investment.

Internship experiences at Google

So your first Google internship was YouTube in Zurich. How did it go?

It was funny because in the first year of university, you don't know much about networks, servers, and a bunch of related concepts. Yet there I was, tasked with developing a MapReduce pipeline for data migration - which was not easy.

There were many things I didn't know because no one had taught me before at university. It started a bit rough, but got exciting and I was learning a ton - there were so many brilliant people at Google to learn from and aspire to be like.

What made it unique, however, was access to Google’s monolithic codebase, seeing all the incredible things people had built before me. Google has one huge, not restricted, repository, and it was fascinating to just sit for hours and read through what other people had done.

I could look at design docs from almost anyone. It might be more restrictive now, but at the time I could easily search through and learn about the stack of YouTube, Google Shopping, Ads, etc., their approach to problems and the solutions they designed.

What's your advice for students trying to get into big tech and maybe even interviewing at the moment?

I was lucky because I had done competitive programming for many years, so the interview questions were very similar to problems I would usually solve. If you grind Leetcode for many months and do it rigorously, you should be able to pass the technical part of these interviews.

Then, it becomes about practicing, doing mock interviews, to come out of your shell and be more outspoken about your thinking process during the interview. This is actually more important because the interviewer is really evaluating if they want to work with you as a person.

If you're very anxious in the interview or too shy to speak up, then it's not going to come across well. Usually companies are looking for interns who are joyful to work with and bring positive energy to the office.

You learned many specific things like MapReduce during your internships. Are these skills valuable later on or are they hyper-specific to that use-case?

I was a bit worried about this because I did 5 internships at Google and Google is somewhat of a technology island. Most of the stack is built specifically for internal use at Google and not really used anywhere else (besides a few open-source projects).

Looking back, my concerns that the knowledge I gained was not transferable were not really true. The engineering principles and the technical stacks seemed to be quite similar across and surprisingly universal. When learning or working on something new, I ramp up very quick given that experience - what one of my mentors used to describe as “reading code like poetry”.

If someone wants to build their own start-up, is there still something valuable that they can learn from a big tech internship?

If you want to build your own startup, you need a lot of skills that are hard to gain as a SWE in big tech. Particularly, as an engineer within a big engineering org, you rarely get to interact with product or marketing people before becoming very senior.

In fact, you are usually working on a fairly isolated project that is high-impact: the numbers are massive, there was proper planning before and the engineering challenges are fascinating. However, you don't get much insight into broader company strategy, roadmaps, or the high-level decisions being made above you that explain where what you’re building fits.

Understanding these areas is very important for building your own startup, but you don't really get exposure to them in most big tech internships. Overall, you learn solid engineering skills that can take you a long way, but miss out on a important, yet less technical learnings.

You interned at Google Los Angeles and New York. A big question for many European students - how did you land an internship in the US?

It might be a little harder due to competition, but honestly not that much. The main difference is that the application timeline is quite different. To apply for internships in the US, you usually need to apply by mid-September. For Europe, you typically have until late October or even November for the big tech companies.

Regarding immigration, US internships require a J-1 visa, but major tech companies are able to sponsor without difficulty, as it is temporary. It's way harder to get a full-time job though due to the H-1B visa’s lottery system and even large tech companies cannot guarantee that.

Why did you want to go to the US for an internship? What's the difference between working in the US and Europe?

I had two main reasons for heading to the US. First, to experience living there - pretty standard bucket list stuff. Second, due to the assumption that people in the US tend to be more business-minded, and I wanted to learn from that environment.

This assumption was true to some extent. In Europe, I found we’re often deeply focused on technical excellence. You have brilliant engineers building awesome stuff, but there’s way less discussions about the broader impact and the go-to-market of what they're building.

The US offices feel different because you are commonly surrounded by directors, VPs and other high-level stakeholders so these business conversations happen all the time. This naturally leads to more impactful projects that get good support from the high-ups, since the decision-makers are all in one place.

There are a lot of crucial conversations and decisions that happen in the office over casual lunch breaks. If you're in Europe and your VP is in the US, you miss out on those informal chats that help you understand the thinking behind decisions and last-minute chats.

Why did you stay at Google for five internships? Why not explore opportunities at other companies?

The ability to be very flexible in choosing my projects was extremely appealing. My first internship was fairly generic, but I was also very young at that time.

After that though, I got to work on ML orchestration, ML performance, NLP, deployed ML in production, and even research. Going into a next internship, I had a great amount of freedom to choose what I wanted to focus on. It's rare to have that level of choice in a first internship at a company, whilst for returning interns, if you put in the effort to network with a lot of teams and knock on a lot of doors, you can find the ideal fit for your interests. It doesn't come for free though. You have to put yourself out there and set up a ton of calls.

Masters at EPFL

You came to EPFL for your masters. You could have stayed in Romania or even gone to the US, UK. So why EPFL?

The cost of education was a huge factor, so I didn’t consider US or the UK. The tuition is relatively affordable in Switzerland and Germany.

I didn’t consider ETH because they don't have a summer break, their exams run in late August, thus hard for internships. Therefore, I found EPFL to be the best option and it also seemed better than TU Munich.

Also, I wasn't ready to start ‘adulting’ yet. After the bachelors, you basically only have the choice to start a full-time job and I thought you’d learn much less then. Doing a masters was a way for me to extend my student years and have a few more internships to explore different things. I really wanted to get some exposure to research as well.

At EPFL, you joined organisations like Founderful Campus and EPFL-UNIL Entrepreneur Club. You already had an impressive experiences at Google, so why did you join these organizations?

I'm always seeking to maximise my learnings - as I’m very inquisitive by nature and these groups seemed super valuable, in terms of learning opportunity and the people I could meet. It's the same as before, a group of super passionate people coming together to build something meaningful.

The students I met were brilliant and really fun to work with. When I joined the EPFL-UNIL Entrepreneur Club as a startup manager, there was a lot of room to build new programs and infrastructure. The startup ecosystem at EPFL was quite limited at the time - initiatives like Blaze didn't exist yet. So we felt we were doing something impactful by gathering people and enabling them to collaborate on projects.

Later, I joined Founderful Campus as a managing partner, which was an incredible experience. I initially doubted if it made sense for me, since I've always been more passionate about building things rather than the venture capital side. However, it turned out to be hugely eye-opening and gaining exposure to the VC mindset is a critical asset for a founder - it teaches you to think more strategically and how to fundraise.

Especially, it forces you to think not just about what you're building for the next 2 months, but the long-term vision, where you want to end up, and how to actually get there. This perspective is immensely valuable for founders.

Being part of Founderful also sets a very high bar for any startup you may start or join in the future. You get exposed to so many founders and develop a taste for what makes a great founder and founders you’d aspire to be like. I recommend joining Founderful or other campus funds to all aspiring founders!

Working on Research

One of the main reasons you came to EPFL for research. What do you think about research after experiencing it?

Research is definitely exciting and the freedom of choosing yourself which questions to pursue is very empowering and intriguing. However, I love a little bit more to build things that get into the hands of users very quickly. It’s the small dopamine hits when you launch something new and see immediate user impact - those moments that confirm that you’re moving in the right direction.

Research requires patience - it is more of a long-game where you need sometimes years of dedicated work before seeing tangible impact. If you're fortunate with your lab, your professor will provide great direction and guidance to help you reach that point. But it can be hard to find.

For me, that pace and somewhat the solitary nature of research made me go back to building. I love the autonomy to build, launch, and iterate rapidly while getting feedback from real users. That tight feedback loop brings me a lot of fulfilment. In research, you also need to run a lot of experiments, see them fail and still continue until eventually something works - but I agree that it feels unearthly good when it does.

You did your master's thesis at Google DeepMind, how was that experience?

It was an incredible experience that I am very grateful for. I joined a research team focused on explainability, data selection & attribution as well as active learning. I was really passionate about explanability and NLP and that's what motivated me to start emailing a lot of researchers at Google working on similar topics.

It is true that some did not reply and some gave me very direct response, saying there was no reason to take me when they could get an more experienced PhD to fill the same headcount. But luckily, I was found a perfect fit for my research interests.

Besides the great mentorship from experienced researchers that were very hands-on, you also have access to a lot compute resources. In contrast, some of my friends doing their thesis in other places had challenges training models because they had to share resources and things were moving painfully slow. That is an unfair advantage in research in general.

At Google, the only limitation was how quickly I could code and read papers. So the experience was hyperproductive. During my internship, ChatGPT was released and it was also fascinating to see how an organization as large as Google could rapidly pivot and start catching up.

Joining OpenMined

Why did you decide to join OpenMined instead of continuing at Google?

There are a lot of talent and brilliant people you can learn from at Google and I benefited from it greatly. However, as with many large organisations, things tends to be slow-moving and bureaucratic. For myself, I’ve found I thrive in environments that move quickly, where I can assume a high degree of autonomy and I can solve problems holistically.

Moreover, Google was solving a different set of problems than the ones OpenMined is addressing. The focus on critical challenges around data access, information governance and enabling broad listening (as opposed to broadcasting information paradigm of web2) were compelling to me. Moreover, I have deeply inspired by the people I am working with now everyday, so it was an easy decision to move forward with OpenMined.

How did you find OpenMined and what do they do?

I've actually been an open-source contributor to OpenMined for about 4 years now. During my time at EPFL, I would periodically submit pull requests and contribute code, docs. What I found there was a small group of people who are extremely passionate about what they are doing.

There's no for-profit structure — everyone is in it because they believe in it and it's an awesome feeling to be in such an atmosphere everyday. It’s less of a "9 to 5" schedule and closer to a hectic startup environment sometimes - as we’re working against a quite ambitious mission.

Essentially, there’s a lot of questions we could answer, as humanity, today, but we cannot because data is siloed across a lot of institutions, companies and individuals, due to privacy risks or simply because they are valuable IP. If you think of machine learning, access to data (again!) and not necessarily compute is the incoming bottleneck for frontier models. Breaking such data silos could help us advance breast cancer, understand how watching Netflix impacts our health or solve much harder socio-economic problems. However, that needs to be done in a responsible way - without walled gardens and with appropriate governance.

In a nutshell, OpenMined builds the technology that could make that happen. If we get this right, there might be 1000x more data in every scientific field - that any researcher, regardless what university or company they work for, could use in their work. We could make so much more progress on really important problems. So that's what drives us.

Advice for students

What do you think about students dropping out to found a startup or join one?

University is awesome because it gives you time just to learn. Whereas when you start working, especially towards something specific like a start-up, the pace is very, very fast and the luxury to stop for a moment and study something that interests you is gone. There’s a time for learning and I believe another one for doing - having solid foundations is important.

Looking back, do you have any advice you'd give to your younger self?

There’s many things I would tell my younger self, but the most important is to trust your abilities more. Lack of confidence can be paralysing - it’s hard to share your work and speak up about your achievements. You end up always second-guessing, which fuels you - but also takes away some courage to do more ambitious things.

A good way to build that confidence is to share your work and get feedback. For example, in high school I built with a few friends a VR version of Hearthstone inspired by Yu-Gi-Oh. Only the game design ended up being 100 pages and the visuals were really cool. However, perfectionism held me back - I never released any of it because it didn't feel "ready". I guess sharing small achievement is great for growth and learning.

Do you feel like you have your future path all figured out now?

Each of us goes through an exploration phase and it takes time to reach a point when you know exactly how you want to spend the rest of your working years. I certainly don't feel like I'm at that point yet.

I don't know exactly what I'll be working on next. But I do ask myself every week - “given my current skills and the time I'm willing to invest, what could I build or achieve that would make me feel really proud?” So that when I’m 90 years old and looking back, I’d be very satisfied with how I spent my time and all the little steps I took.

Basically, whenever I come across something that I think would give me a higher sense of accomplishment and fulfilment, I jump on it. So far, each experience taught me a ton of new things and abilities. Over time, these compound and you're able to take on bigger and more impactful challenges. I have trust in that process and let it guide my path.

Hey - Arnie here!

Thanks for reading this week’s month’s year’s (lol) edition of the blog!

As you can tell with the inconsistent posting - I’m having a hard time keeping up with writing blogs & all the other projects going on.

If you’re very passionate about the work done here and would like to help out - send me a message on LinkedIn or email: anirudhh.ramesh[AT]gmail.com!

In the message, tell me your biggest achievement and why you’d be a great fit to help run the blog :)

What you can learn:

• Mentorship, guidance, introductions from me (Arnie!)

• Opportunity to speak with excellent alumni from EPFL & ETHZ, to jumpstart your career & ambition!

Requirements:

• Super passionate about the blogs!! You should have read basically all of them :)

• Early bachelors/masters/PhD student (at least 1 until graduation)

• Excellent English-writing skills

Also, as always:

Studies: PhD Theoretical Physics @ MIT, MSc Physics @ ETHZ ‘22, BSc Physics @ ETHZ ‘21
Experiences: Student Research @ Google Quantum AI
Origin: Zurich
Links: LinkedIn

Growing up & high school

Where did you grow up?

My mother is from Belarus, from Minsk, and my dad is from Germany, from Munich. I was born in Switzerland, but we moved a lot during my youth within Switzerland and to Munich, Aarhus, and Minsk. But I definitely spent most of my childhood in Switzerland, which is also where I went to school, high school, and university, and where I feel most at home.

What kind of student were you in high school?

I was certainly not a model student. I was always curious and I started reading a lot from an early age - about history, ancient cultures, stuff like that - but that interest did not necessarily carry over to the corresponding classes in school. In high school, I was more focused on spending time with friends, doing other stuff like playing sports and video games.

But I was always very interested in math and physics though, and I was fortunate to have had a fantastic math teacher, Eric Fitze, who allowed me to further develop this interest in class as well.

Studying Physics at ETH Zurich

Why did you choose to study physics at ETH Zurich?

Studying physics always felt like the natural path for me. For as long as I remember, I wanted to better understand how the world around me works, why things function the way they do, and the deeper meaning behind all of that, if there is one. Another option might have been Philosophy, but it seemed to me that they only had tools for asking questions, not for answering them.

As for ETH Zurich, it was the perfect fit. My high school was in Zurich, and having one of the world's top universities essentially in my backyard, and practically free, made it an easy decision. I love living in Zurich, and ETH's physics program is exceptional - I still benefit from the rigorous education I received there.

How was your experience at ETH?

I loved it. To be honest, I didn't spend that much time at university during the semester - I was more occupied with traveling, meeting up with friends, getting new experiences. But I work very well with ETH's system of having big final exams at the end of the semester. I would shut myself off from the outside world completely for some weeks before the exams to study the course ''Skript'' from scratch in great detail until I understood all of it.

At least in Physics, once I understand something in depth, it's hard to forget it, because the different subjects are closely connected and build on each other. That study system always worked well for me. Another reason my experience at ETH was so positive is due to the the long-lasting friends I made there.

Master's Thesis at MIT

How did you complete a master's so quickly after bachelor's?

I had done most of the credits for the master's already during my undergrad, although not intentionally. At that point, I was starting to get interested in more abstract math and quantum information theory subjects. I took a bunch of those courses, and it turned out some of them counted towards the master's.

So for my actual master's degree, I only spent half a year at ETH Zurich to finish the required courses. I wrote my master's thesis at MIT for the other half year, so my master's was one year total.

How was the process of getting into MIT for your PhD?

I had actually applied to MIT directly after my undergrad, but I didn't get in. After doing my master's thesis with a PI there, I applied again to a bunch of US schools, and suddenly got into every single one.

I think the US admission system is a bit biased against people from Europe because the education system here is very much focused on taking demanding classes and learning the fundamentals very well. Your figure of merit is what grades you get. Whereas in the US, grades are highly inflated so people are evaluated mostly based on their research experience, which is hard to get at ETH for example during undergrad.

I should emphasize that I am incredibly happy that I did my undergrad at ETH, because it provided me with a rigorous education and allowed me to focus on the fundamentals. But this difference in emphasis bothers me a lot, because I know a lot of amazing people that would really thrive and do amazing work at MIT but didn't get in because they get evaluated the wrong way.

Working at Google Quantum AI

How did you get the opportunity at Google?

During my Master's thesis at MIT, I wrote a paper on a new kind of quantum algorithm. Turns out Google was working on pretty much the same stuff at the same time. Because of that paper, we got in contact and I got hired basically.

It probably helped that Google Quantum AI is a research division within Google, so the hiring process works differently than say if you apply as a software engineer. It's more personal and more based on your actual research work.

How was the experience working there?

It was and still is amazing. I got lucky with my manager because they were working on exactly what I'm interested in, which meant I was more or less completely free to do whatever I wanted - I could pick my own research directions and projects. I just had to convince my boss that they were valuable directions, but usually that's doable. So I had a lot of freedom and at the same time got to collaborate with amazing people and learn from them.

Of course, Google is a great employer in terms of facilities and work environment. Everything you need to work efficiently is provided, including amazing food, so you can really focus on your work.

The Quantum AI theory group is located in Venice Beach in Los Angeles, right by the beach, and I really enjoy living in that part of west LA. Google has surfboards in the office that you can just take and head to the beach to surf, which I did a lot. Coming from Switzerland, there are of course things about LA that I had to get used to at first, like the level of crime and homelessness, but still, there are a definitely many good reasons for why so many people want to move to California.

Pursuing a PhD at MIT

Why did you decide to do a PhD after working in industry?

Well, in terms of money, it's definitely a terrible decision. It was mostly about personal growth for me.

At Google, even with a good amount of freedom, you're still only working on what a certain company is interested in. At MIT, it feels more like science is your playground. You can dive deep into the fundamentals or explore the really 'out there' stuff that might not have any immediate commercial value.

And honestly, just on a personal level, being a PhD student at MIT is very rewarding. The academic freedom, the mentors, the students and other people you meet... it all helps you to push yourself even further beyond your own boundaries.

From a practical perspective, I feel like if you do an MIT PhD, you can always go back to a place like Google later, but the other way around isn't as easy.

How do you feel about the ambitious environment? Can it become too competitive?

I think it's simply amazing and inspiring. I've never once felt anything negative about being surrounded by such driven and ambitious people.

What does a typical day look like for you at MIT?

Most of my day is spent meeting with principal investigators, other students, collaborators. I spend probably 90% of my time on research and discussions, and only maybe 10% actually in classes.

The PhD really becomes all-consuming. Even if you go out for dinner, it's often with your research group. At ETH, university was just one part of my life. Here, it IS my life.

I enjoy this, because I'm passionate about what I do. But it can get intense and sometimes I need to consciously take a break and do something completely different to avoid burnout.

What bothers you most about MIT?

Probably that they banned kitesurfing in the Charles river. I’m actually currently organizing a petition to legalize it again, we already have over 300 signatures!

But on a more professional note, there are a lot of bureaucracies associated with studying and working in the US, some due to the government and some due to MIT, that I have to fight with a lot as an international student.

How do you juggle a longer term commitment like a PhD when things are moving so fast in e.g. AI?

There's a slight fear of missing out when I see the recent developments happening in AI. But it doesn't bother me too much because I'm very motivated and fascinated by my own research in quantum computing. I'm quite confident that if I focus on it, it will lead to great things.

What are your future goals?

Right now, I'm trying to push hard to make a research breakthrough in quantum computing. I want to figure out how to make quantum computers to do something actually useful.

There are only very few applications of quantum computing so far, and for most of them, it's not clear if they are actually useful yet. Over the past two years, I've published a few papers on new useful quantum algorithms, with much more to come. That's my main academic goal at the moment.

In the next few years, I can definitely see myself starting a research-focused startup. But I'm not focusing on that right now, because I think for it to be successful, you first need a lot of good research ideas that I'm currently trying to develop.

Super long term, when I settle down somewhere, I definitely want to move back to Europe, very likely Switzerland. Career options are very good in Switzerland, maybe not quite as amazing as in the US, but the quality of life is just orders of magnitude higher in terms of healthy food, good infrastructure, public safety, etc. So that's the eventual plan, but probably only a few years after my PhD.

Comparing ETHZ & MIT

How do you compare the academic environment at MIT vs ETH?

One thing I love about the academic environment in the US is how approachable everyone is. You're surrounded by Nobel laureates, people who literally founded the field you're working in, and you can just chat with them, ask questions, they'll invite you over for dinner. There's a real openness. At ETH, I always felt there was more of a hierarchy that made it harder to connect with faculty beyond your immediate teachers and advisors.

Regarding courses, I have to say that I found the classes at ETH to be way more rigorous, well structured, and challenging than at MIT. Maybe I have a biased view because I mostly took undergrad classes at ETH, whereas at MIT I took grad classes, but I would say that most of the grad classes I took so far at MIT were actually already contained within the first two or three years of my undergrad at ETH. The one exception are the research-centered grad classes at MIT, typically taught by the professor that invented the field. Those are excellent!

What about the talent density?

By virtue of having a much tougher and very different admission system, I would say on average, the people at MIT are more talented, more ambitious, and definitely pushing themselves more.

But I never felt like the top talent at ETH is much different from the top talent at MIT. Some of the best students in the world gravitate towards ETH, especially for undergrad from Europe and the German speaking part.

MIT will probably always have a slight edge because it attracts people from all around the world, whereas ETH mostly attracts Europeans for undergrad.

But you definitely have unlimited potential for personal development at ETH. It's an amazing place to be, with so many opportunities. Here at MIT, a lot of people speak very highly of ETH and want to study or do research there.

Reflections and Advice

How do you deal with imposter syndrome in such competitive environments?

I don't really get that anymore. Something that happened to me quite a lot is that, whenever I entered a new field, I was initially awestruck by how much deeper the other researchers's knowledge seemed to be and how much quicker they were able to piece together new insights and ideas.

But then, once you actually sit down and spend a few weeks or a month reading through the literature and trying to think yourself about the open problems in the field, you start to realize that even the level of most of the experts in your field is actually way closer, more reachable, than what you initially thought.

There are exceptions to this, and this is something I also learned more recently. I have met a few people where it seems to me that, no matter how hard I try, I will never be able to keep up with their intellectual speed. But this is rather inspiring than intimidating, I think.

What do you ultimately want to achieve in life?

I'm honestly not sure yet. I think I might be a little bit too ambitious at the moment, in the sense that whenever I set myself an ultimate goal, as soon as I say it out loud, it doesn't seem good enough anymore. On the other hand, I am genuinely very happy and satisfied with the way my life is going right now.

Right now, my focus is on making a real breakthrough in quantum computing research. But longer-term, I'm sure my goals will continue to evolve and expand.

What advice would you give to your younger self starting university?

Well, since I'm giving this advice to my younger self, it will come with some survivorship bias. But with that in mind, I would say that if you have one thing that you are extremely passionate about, which for me was theoretical physics, and also good at, then you should go and pursue that interest and not worry about things like salary expectations or chances of getting certain employers. From what I've seen from myself and my friends, the advantage you get by being passionate about what you do will almost always pay back many times over.

Closing notes

Hey, Arnie here :) Has a busy Summer, but going to aim for a more frequent posting (also did some cool automation work which I’ll share soon to my LinkedIn & Twitter :))

Thanks for reading this blog, here’s a quick poll for you:

Studies MSc Data Science @ EPFL ‘23, Exchange @ NTU ‘20, Exchange @ SMU ‘19, BSc Business Administration @ St. Gallen ‘20
Start-up Stacksync (YC 24)
Experiences Data Scientist @ Crewmeister, Sales & Marketing @ Quod AI, IT Desk @ St.Gallen
Origin France/Italy
Links LinkedIn

Fyi - Stacksync is hiring right now! Go check out their role here: 👇

Stacksync is hiring!

How selling snacks in high school led to studying Business at St. Gallen

Were you entrepreneurial from a young age?

I think in high school I was already a swimming teacher and participating in the young firefighters program for 5 years. And then I was always selling stuff, since I was a kid. When we would go to Italy to visit my mom’s family, I would buy products that were only available there and sell them to my schoolmates as snacks. I would arrive in the morning with a bag of stuff and leave in the evening with the bag empty and some cash. I was doing this from 15 to 17 years old.

And even before that, when I was a little kid, I would take stuff from the kitchen, put it in my room, and a few hours later I’d go to my mom like “Hey, do you want to buy this from me?”

I would do all sorts of stuff to make money, because I liked the idea of business - you do something and then you have a financial output. I really liked that. I was always a hustler, doing a lot of sports too. It shapes your mindset, you know.

So this entrepreneurial spirit led you to study business at St. Gallen?

Yes, I was always into business. I applied to Geneva, Lausanne, and I got accepted to a lot of places, but for me, St. Gallen was the best. And I believe it was a good choice.

What were you doing in St. Gallen besides studying?

I focused a lot on studies, but I also did a lot of sports, especially there. I even learned how to golf because I thought it would be important for business stuff later on.

I participated in student clubs like the St. Gallen Model United Nations, I was in the organizing committee of TEDxSt.Gallen, and I was in the sponsoring team of a sustainable fashion show called Catwalk. I also worked at the IT help desk at the university.

Do you think doing all these extracurriculars is more nature or nurture?

I think I was always busy with many associations, so that’s probably my nature. But doing so many things is probably also because of the environment. A lot of people were doing stuff, so I thought I should do at least that and more. My friends had similar profiles, they were doing a lot of stuff too. So I was pushed by my environment and I also pushed myself.

I think if you don’t engage in student associations, that’s probably one of the biggest mistakes of your studies.

You also did an exchange at SMU & NTU in Singapore? How was the experience and what was the biggest thing you learned?

I think that exchange transformed me in many ways. It was a culture shock and I didn’t know what to expect at all. When I landed, I was like, this is not what I expected to find. It was pretty crazy.

I really learned how to travel and adapt between different cultures and setups. Now, if I arrive in a new place like San Francisco, I know how to handle a change of country, a change of setup, distance from family and friends. Because I traveled to St. Gallen, then Singapore twice, then Germany, then Lausanne, then San Francisco. You start learning how to travel, how to move to a new place and stay.

Challenges switching from Business at St. Gallen to Data Science at EPFL

What made you decide to switch from business to tech?

So in St. Gallen, I did this data science fundamentals program in addition to the business track. And then when I went on exchange to Singapore, I realized like, hey, engineering is so cool. You build apps, you build stuff with data. So that’s where I started to go into data science.

When I came back from Singapore, I decided to take a gap year to improve my tech expertise before doing a technical master’s. I found a job at a startup in Germany called Crewmeister, where I really had the chance to work closely with the CEO and build every data infrastructure, pipeline, everything for the company from scratch. That’s where I learned almost everything I know about tech. It was a very big step.

How did you find Crewmeister and how did you land a technical role despite having a business background?

I was in Singapore, out of my time zone, and I knew I had to find something. So what I did was I went on AngelList, looked at all the startups which had a job similar to what I was searching for, and I just started applying. I was taking the founders' emails from AngelList and sending them a message directly.

I wrote a 7-liner that went something like: "Hey, my name is Ruben. I'm looking for an internship for one year. This is my skillset, this is my ambition, and this is how this internship is going to help me grow. Would you like to chat?" I'm a very intense person, so when I decide to do something, I really do it. For two weeks straight, I was sending out 50-70 applications a day. It was crazy - sometimes I'd have interviews back to back.

I got offers from Germany, France, UK, Spain, Singapore, and more. But Crewmeister was one of the most appealing to me because the founder was really cool. Since I started in business but wanted to transition into tech, I really resonated with the CEO who did a PhD in computer science and a PhD in business. He was that bridge - a guy who understands everything about both topics and is very talented in tech and business.

I think he really saw something in me - this very big determination. And the ‘St. Gallen’ tag (which is very well-known in Germany) probably helped too, it was a good tag. But more than that, it was really about this deep motivation he saw in me to learn.

How did you learn to code and break down tech while at Crewmeister?

At Crewmeister, I did my first API call there. It took me a week to make the first API endpoint, which was a very easy Jira API. You just put an API token into a curl request, that’s it, data is there. Now I could probably do it in 20 minutes and deploy it to production.

How was the transition to EPFL for your master’s in computer science?

I needed to learn and deep dive into my data science and computer science expertise, and also improve my real-life credibility. Now people see me as a technical person. The diploma really plays a role.

EPFL helped me gain some knowledge and learn how to think in a different way, but in terms of concrete knowledge that I can activate in real life, very little. EPFL doesn’t help me do my job on a daily basis, but it helps me make better decisions. It’s more of a mindset - it helps me think but doesn’t help me implement anything, which is probably the goal of university anyway. Nobody claims university should teach you something useful for a job, but it teaches you how to think independently.

Building Stacksync and what it’s like to found a start-up

What does your start-up Stacksync do?

Stacksync does data sync and two-way sync between CRMs and databases. We help engineers ship CRM integrations in days, not months. Clients like Hyperline use Stacksync to ship customer-facing integrations without the engineering time, in days. Robust integration date.

What made you keep pursuing Stacksync over the years?

I really do believe that this is the future of the data movement industry. It’s hard to find customers for any company. You’re not gonna launch and then have to put up a waitlist or cut down signups. That doesn’t happen, except maybe for OpenAI.

Building a company is hard. It seems like it’s just building the product, but then you also have the legal side, the accounting, every problem falls on you as the CEO. People think the CEO has a cool job, but the reality is you do everything people don’t want to do - the trash jobs like booking flights, doing accounting, dealing with people who don’t understand. You have to get customers and supervise the technology at the same time.

As a developer, you have a button, you make something visual, it’s fulfilling. But as a founder, you might be grinding for years and still see no results, not a single penny in the bank account. You’re gonna have a lot of expenses and no revenue for a long time. And when you start talking to people about a really strong idea like Stacksync, they just don’t get what you’re doing at all. You start getting discouraged, but you have to keep grinding.

How do you deal with the ups and downs?

You have way more lows than highs. But it’s a question of mindset. If you discourage yourself, it means you don’t understand that having a low is actually an opportunity to grow and learn. Because if you knew everything, you wouldn’t have this low.

Every challenge, every problem is an opportunity to grow. You should look at it like “Oh yeah, there’s one more problem we can solve.” And if you do this at scale and do it fast, you’re gonna make your way through. But sometimes as a founder, you need to be a bit blind. You can’t see all these hurdles that come at you, you just have to continue no matter what.

How is it different working alone vs in a team?

Having a team is easier because you can hold each other accountable. You share the problems, you share the successes. It makes you stronger and less vulnerable. When you’re alone, it’s easy to say “I’m going to give up and nobody’s going to care.”

The problem is, if you have a team, you’re more marketable and that’s good. Keep talking about your project and don’t try to fake it like “Yeah we’re killing it” all the time. Being able to tell people your problems openly, to share success and failures openly, failing and succeeding in public, is something that really helps you figure out your way better. It makes you comfortable with your current state.

Getting accepted into Y Combinator W24 batch

How does the environment at YC compare to EPFL?

It’s completely different. At YC, you live in the here and now. People give feedback on your product and within hours or even minutes, founders come back and say “Hey, I fixed it.” You refresh and it’s done. There’s no planning, it’s just build, make something people want.

You talk to your users, you get disappointed, you record it, and you start building again. You do this over and over until you find product-market fit and become a billion-dollar company. The answer is always “Go talk to your users.” I have a problem, I don’t know how to build a feature - go ask your users.

What strikes me at YC is the truth. The truth is you have no clients and your business is not doing well. That’s the truth. You take the punch. People tell their stories and they tell you they’re doing poorly. And you can relate so much because you’re doing the same thing.

Being vulnerable is a very big strength in the end. The more honest, the more educated, the more experienced people are, the more truth they’re going to tell you. Because there is no incentive to lie in entrepreneurship. The first person you lie to is yourself, and that’s not going to help you. Actual acknowledgment of a problem is the first step to solving it. If you can’t acknowledge a problem, you can’t solve it.

What does your day-to-day look like?

Now it’s hyper-focus. You’re operative at 6am, so by noon you already have 6 hours of work done. You do sports, connect with people, do socials, build networking. You are vulnerable, you talk honestly, no bullshit. Meetings last 15-30 minutes max. It’s very efficient.

More thoughts and advice for students

You regularly do lots of sports - how important is exercise to you?

It’s very important to exercise, otherwise you can’t cope between physical activity and brain activity. I think it’s also good for productivity. It’s very important to do at least an hour of sports every two days.

What do you see yourself doing in 5-10 years?

Building something people want. Be it this company or another company, being a builder.

What advice would you give to students at Swiss universities?

My best advice is don’t be afraid to ask for what you want. You’ll be surprised how people are actually keen to help.

Last time we were at a hotel and the sauna was for-pay. It was cold outside and we were in flip flops. We just went up and said “Hey, we came all the way here, can we just try the sauna for 20 minutes for free instead of paying $50 for the day?” And they let us in. They said “Okay, you guys are bold for asking, that’s really crazy.” People are just happy to help.

Another example - at the end of every meeting, ask “Who do you think is the next person I should talk to?” Most people are happy to help, in general.

Closing notes

Hey - Arnie here!

Stacksync was actually one of my first internships and had a great time there. What really struck me the most was just how perseverant, energetic and hard-working Ruben was - that’s why I thought he’d be a great guest to feature here.

Switching from business to tech, and building a start-up while learning tech (at EPFL, from a non-technical background!!) is absolutely mind-blowing. It takes a huge amount of work, dedication and fearlessness, and it’s really no surprise Ruben got into YC.

Stacksync is currently hiring and I really suggest you take a look at what they’re doing + roles they have open 👇 What makes them so special is the founders (and Ruben’s deep business and tech skills)

Apply to Stacksync

As always, let me know what you think of this blog!

Studies PhD @ EPFL (ongoing), MSc SysCom @ EPFL ‘18, BSc Electrical Engineering @ Jacobs University Bremen ‘15
Industry Sonos, Snips, DSP Concepts, Fraunhofer IDMT
Student Orgs Co-founder @ LauzHack, Investment Analyst @ S2S Ventures
Origin San Francisco Bay Area
Links LinkedIn

Growing Up in the Heart of Silicon Valley

Where did you grow up and what was it like?

I grew up in Los Altos, in the middle of the Silicon Valley. Both my parents work in tech but I didn’t do anything remotely related to tech growing up, and I’m happy my parents didn’t push any of that on me. I played a lot of football (soccer) growing up. I really wanted to pursue a career in that, at least play in college. Obviously it didn’t work out, but playing at that competitive level developed a lot of discipline in me. And I think that’s something that characterizes the Silicon Valley — a very competitive and focused environment, which can be good and bad.

Leaving San Francisco for Europe

How did your high school experience influence your decision to study in Germany for university?

Growing up, I often felt out of place. My parents are from India and Argentina/Italy, and I grew up in California, which I guess makes me a fourth culture kid if that’s a thing? And even with the Bay Area being very international, it was hard for me to fit in. Most people just saw me as Indian, and assumed I did what other kids of Indian heritage do. I really resented that, which unfortunately made me ashamed of my Indian heritage when growing up.

When I was 16, I got a full scholarship to go to a boarding school in New Mexico called UWC-USA. I only applied because I got a bad knee injury which put playing football on hold. I had a really good feeling about UWC and decided to accept the offer, pretty much stopping competitive football altogether. Going to UWC really shaped the person I am today. With just 200 students from over 80 countries, I met other people who also came from diverse backgrounds and I felt at home in this international setting. There was no norm in this community, everyone came with a unique story. And I learned to be proud of my whole multi-cultural background, and not just cherry-pick the parts I thought were “cool”. That gave me a lot of confidence for later on in life.

When I came to the point of deciding where to go for university, I knew I wanted to continue being in such an environment, but that doesn’t compartmentalize that diversity. Also, I knew I wanted to study abroad at one point during my studies. I was very close to going to UCLA, but a visit for prospective students put me off. At one point in the visit, they half-joked, “engineering students go one way and athletes go the other way”. It was a small remark, but it left me with a strong impression. I thought: “Sure UCLA is well-known, but do I want to go to a place where paths are so rigidly set?” Another option was a little-known university in Germany — Jacobs University Bremen — where quite a few people from my high school went to. I never visited the place, but had a feeling that it would have a similar vibe as UWC, even though it was a continent and an ocean away. Luckily it was the case, and at Jacobs I got to do so much more than just study engineering, like playing football in the university team, working in the student bar, and playing in a jazz band.

Having grown up in the Silicon Valley, what made you decide to stay in Europe rather than return?

A lot of people ask me “you’re from Silicon Valley, why are you here instead of there, where we all want to go?” I’ve made my personal choice that I prefer living in Europe. I would for sure encourage others to go to the Bay Area, and I did have a second shot at it with an internship at a startup called DSP Concepts during my masters at EPFL. The work was really great, but outside of work, I much prefer the lifestyle in Europe. In Silicon Valley, everything’s about tech, it’s a monoculture. But that density of talent and tech is also why there’s so much innovation and many startups coming out of there. That contagious energy and willingness to take risks and think big (but practically) is something very unique over there. So if you are ambitious and driven, you should definitely go there, for the network and the experience. I can definitely say that the startup I was at helped open doors for my future career in audio signal processing.

But I still decided to stay in Europe - maybe because I wanted a more balanced and varied life, which convinced me to stay.

Studying in Germany, Switzerland and research in Signal Processing

You started with Electrical Engineering in your bachelors at Jacobs University, then moved to signal processing (SysCom) in your masters & PhD at EPFL? What interests you about this field?

Who really knows what they want to study when they enter university? There are those people that have been coding since the age of six, but I wasn’t one of them. I picked Electrical Engineering (EE) because I wanted to study something around math and physics. And I picked EE, instead of something like CS, because I actually wanted to avoid programming!

Signal processing is a core subject in EE, and I started having courses in it during my second year. I found it super interesting how so many things could be manipulated and analyzed digitally, in particular audio which I was really interested in.

And then that’s what got me really hooked on programming. When you find something you really enjoy, programming is essentially just a language for you to explore that application in a digital way.

What I really like about signal processing is this link between the real/analog world and the digital world. It could be in speech/audio like I was doing before, ultrasound imaging which I also worked on during my masters, or lensless imaging like I’m working on now. One advantage of working in CS and signal processing is we can shift around so many domains.

So during my bachelor, I did internships in signal processing at Fraunhofer IDMT, and got to meet the guy who invented the MP3 algorithm!

For my masters, I wanted to go to a university that has more expertise in signal processing, and again found myself deciding between US (Stanford) or Europe (EPFL). I emailed professors at both universities, and my current supervisor at EPFL (Martin Vetterli) invited me to visit and eventually offered a part-time job in his lab. He later told me that what he found interesting in my profile, was that someone from California went to Germany to study.

Tell me about the research you’re doing now with lensless imaging.

What I find really cool about lensless imaging is that it throws away the whole notion of trying to replicate the human eye like traditional cameras do. You can view it as a way to give eyes to computers. So many pictures now are analyzed by machines, not humans. Lensless imaging throws away the constraints of classic lens design - you can give fresh eyes to computers in a new way. But it’s a very early technology with many challenges since it mixes hardware and software and is sensitive to specific settings.

I hope with my open source toolkit I can flatten as many of those hurdles as possible for others to try out or use this technology themselves. For industry, it gives another way of thinking about imaging beyond classic camera design. It’s never going to replace normal cameras, but can augment them in a similar way we have many sensors on our phones, and it’s interesting to see how consumer products can push technology, like the display tech in Apple’s Vision Pro potentially being used in lensless cameras. There are manys angles people look at it from — more compact imaging systems, 3D/high-dimensional imaging, or visual privacy-as-a-first layer of encryption.

Working at Snips & Sonos

You worked at some really cool places like Snips and Sonos after your masters. What was that experience like?

I got super lucky finding that job with Snips after my masters. The main reason I got it was because I was contributing to a popular open source package of our lab for audio signal processing and room simulation at EPFL (Pyroomacoustics).

On GitHub, I saw Snips was using this package and reached out to them saying I was interested in what they were doing. They didn’t have a job opening for what I wanted to do, but we talked and they said it would be cool to have me do audio signal processing. So pro tip - find open source projects, contribute to them, it really opens up career opportunities.

I first joined Snips as a tech evangelist, kind of linked to the teaching aspect. I really thought the tutorials they did were cool and I had started doing some at EPFL. So I traveled around Europe doing workshops, teaching people how to use a Raspberry Pi and connect these tools. Then when I joined full-time after my masters, I focused more on audio signal processing and machine learning while still doing workshops now and then.

It was a unique role being the link between the machine learning models the engineers were developing, the more classical DSP (digital signal processing) techniques, and the room acoustics. I got to interact with a lot of teams at Snips and then also at Sonos when we got acquired. The acquisition was interesting because Snips was a very innovative machine learning company and Sonos is a very classic audio device/acoustics company. So my role was interacting between multiple teams to integrate both technologies, which was nice.

What made you decide to leave Sonos and pursue a PhD, even though things seemed to be going really well there?

Even when I joined Snips, I was actually between a PhD or joining them. It was always in the discussion, like could we do a joint PhD, but it didn’t end up happening. Similar to what Vinitra said about Microsoft, after the acquisition, for the first few months there were so many cool things we were building and incorporating. But then after that, I didn’t really see more growth or learning.

Especially when you’re no longer in a startup scenario where they’re more flexible with how you use your time. Like at Snips I was doing all these workshops, but after the acquisition they obviously wanted us to focus on putting together the product, Sonos Voice. We weren’t doing the workshops anymore since it was no longer a free tool people could put on a Raspberry Pi. And now it’s super cool to see the product out there and to use it at home!

But in the end, missing that component of going to developer events, interacting with the community, and not seeing that growth anymore were kind of the reasons I decided to go back to academia to go a PhD. Luckily I still had that contact with my now-supervisor Martin Vetterli, and I came back to his lab.

The Value of working on Open-Source

You’ve done a lot of work with open source projects, like with Snips. Why do you think open source is important and what have you gained from contributing?

The first open source project I got involved in was with the lab at EPFL. It really pushes you to do better practices in coding, because when you open source your code and it’s messy, no one’s going to want to use it. The gains you can get from other people’s ideas and contributions are as big as the number of people who can program or understand what you’re coding. So the easier you can make things for others to understand, the more likely you’ll get collaborators.

In terms of research, there’s more trust in your work because people can see your code. It could also lead to citations since people can see they can use your package or software. So there’s incentive for researchers there.

If you’re applying to companies, contributing to open source is a huge bonus to put on your CV. It’s a skill you’re showing that you can contribute to code that’s not your own, you’re comfortable putting your code out there. It’s almost a service to the community - if you can save someone even just 10 minutes or a few hours, that’s incredible. And they’ll probably figure out ways to make the development experience even better for others.

We hear more and more about open source as a huge trend, in industry, startups, academia. The space I’m really interested in is how people do business out of open source, like with Hugging Face. I’m curious what the business model is and how they’re going to sustain it, but it’s definitely becoming a trend.

Organizing Hackathons at EPFL with Lauzhack

What made you want to start organizing the LauzHack hackathon at EPFL?

My co-founder Sourabh and I both did our bachelors together in Germany. He was super into hackathons and had been to so many. He came to me saying there were no yearly hackathon happening at EPFL, there used to be a couple years ago but nothing regular. He asked if I wanted to try it out and I said sure, why not. I never thought of myself as an expert programmer.

We went to a couple hackathons together and realized we could do this. What really helped was when I came to EPFL, I was a master’s research scholar with Martin Vetterli. Having him in my network helped open the door at EPFL to say “can we do this event?” He fully supported us and it gave me something I was really passionate to work on.

Sometimes in your courses you don’t feel like you’re helping anyone, you’re in your own bubble. Even when doing a PhD it can feel that way. So organizing the events with LauzHack gives me more of a sense of service to the community.

Walk me through the process of organizing a hackathon. How do you handle everything with the LauzHack team?

We have a “how to” document that we’ve “open-sourced”. We essentially made it to show how to do a hackathon at EPFL, but it could translate to other places too. Anyone who wants to do an event can use this document.

Solal, who’s one of the founding team members, is a beast when it comes to logistics and planning. He put together this document that we use at the beginning of every hackathon to go through the steps, make sure we’re on track, and assign roles.

Ideally we try to have someone in charge of sponsoring, marketing, and the different aspects you can see in the document. That person is responsible for those items. Everything is broken down in terms of when it needs to be done, like a month or two before. We meet every two weeks getting closer to the event and make sure things are assigned.

What do you hope students gain from participating in a LauzHack hackathon?

It’s not something we’ve formally tracked, but a successful outcome is always at the beginning of the hackathon when I ask “how many of you is this your first hackathon?” and usually more than half the people raise their hand. There are so many hackathons around here and EPFL students are super busy, so for me, the success is that we get people coming out of their comfort zone. A lot of them continue until the end doing their first hackathon, doing something that’s not clearly defined like a school project. That’s already the win for me, it’s the start for hopefully more things down the line.

Why should people join Lauzhack?

A few things I would say.

First, it's just a really dynamic and cool team. The network you build is also incredible. Probably the people who’ve gotten more jobs out of our events are definitely the organizers rather than the students, because when you’re in the hackathon you’re just so focused on your project that you don’t really have time to interact with the sponsors. So we have lots of people who’ve gone to Logitech and other companies as well.

Another reason which I think is a big motivator for me was this ability to serve your community. There’s this speech from Martin Luther King, which I find super inspirational. He calls it the three dimensions of life. One of them is taking care of yourself, like doing everything you can for your career, your health… The second dimension he talks about is taking care of others and serving others. And the third one he links to God, but could also be your purpose in life.

So when I think of success, it’s really grounding and a healthy way to think about. With Lauzhack, I have the amazing opportunity to stretch these multiple dimensions in my life. Especially in the ups and downs of a PhD or maybe even in your studies, it's just so cool to be surrounded by people who are just so curious and hardworking and motivating and just people that you can learn from. So the ambience and mood of it is super encouraging.

You were also involved with S2S Ventures, a student-run VC fund. What drew you to delve more into the entrepreneurial-side of things?

What drew me to S2S was wanting to see some of these hackathon projects progress further. You see some amazing ideas at hackathons because people are in the zone, collaborating efficiently. But then a lot of it just ends at the hackathon.

So what interested me was - what could be the next step? What opportunities are there for students to take this beyond just a weekend project and really think about if there’s a business there? Ideally a business that can be useful and helpful to society.

I had already met Arnout Devos (founding member of S2S) a few times at different LauzHack events. He mentioned S2S and I wanted to try it out to see what opportunities were out there. I hadn’t thought much about VC before that, so it was interesting to see it from the investor side. What criteria do they view as important, looking beyond just “is this a cool idea”?

Plans after the PhD

You’re nearing the end of your PhD. What are your plans for after you finish, both in terms of your career and with LauzHack?

I have about a year left, hopefully. The plan is to go back to Paris. I’m not sure yet if I’ll continue in academia or go to industry, but probably more in the startup area. Not necessarily starting my own, I think I’d prefer joining an earlier stage startup. So something between those two paths.

For sure I want to continue events like LauzHack. That’s why I’m trying to put more of my content on GitHub and Medium, blogging, etc. Hopefully I can do these types of events in Paris as well, at universities but also for people in industry. I was really lucky to have already worked in Paris and did an internship at a lab at ENS, so I’ve been building up a network there to hopefully get involved with exciting stuff!

Advice for readers

Do you have any advice for students? How do you think they should spend their time?

I would say, don’t just do courses. Maybe I’m biased, but go to events like LauzHack workshops and hackathons, join or start an association, because you’re going to meet really cool people that way. Whether you work in academia or industry, you’re rarely going to be doing things on your own. It’s really important to work on your soft skills, especially that hard-to-teach mix of technical soft skills like brainstorming features, integrating incompatible code, and explaining technical concepts. All of which can be practiced at hackathons!

The second thing, are those three dimensions from the MLK speech. If you go all in on one dimension, you’re going to feel maybe empty on the others. So you’ll either lose your purpose/meaning, and you may feel ‘okay, what am I doing to help others’? So having those different dimensions in your life is important.

Closing Notes

Hey! Sorry for not posting the past two weeks - it’s been super busy (and I’m visiting SF!) - but I’m working on making the posts consistent here on out!

As always, hope you enjoyed this edition of the newsletter, and vote in the poll 👇

Studies MSc Micro-Engineering @ EPFL ‘18, BSc Micro-Engineering @EPFL ‘16
Experiences Tesla Battery Design, Tesla 25 Guns, DJI, Green Motion S.A.
Companies atopile (YC W24), MotionPilot (acq. by DJI)
Origin Geneva
Links LinkedIn

Growing up building things in Geneva

Where did you grow up and what projects did you work on as a kid?

I grew up in the countryside of Geneva. As a kid, my dad brought me some basic electronics early on, setup on a piece of wood with transistors, LEDs and light bulbs that I could connect a battery to. That’s how I first got into engineering.

One thing we did a lot with my dad was to build remote controlled aircraft. The first one was a large glider that we built in the basement. This taught me how to plan a project and use my hands to build it out. Building flying objects was always very exciting.

Later when I was around 14 or 15, FPV (*First-person view for drones) started becoming a thing. People would take wireless baby monitors and put the transmitter on an RC plane and the receiver on a small TV. That way they could fly from the drone’s perspective. There was one guy who did this and started a company in Morges called ImmersionRC, so I purchased some of his equipment, threw it on one of my planes and started flying FPV around the neighborhood. It started growing pretty quickly from there and I began building drones as well.

Moving to EPFL

Tell me about your furniture project, Sark.

Sark started when I moved to Lausanne to attend EPFL. My thought was that instead of just going to IKEA like most people do, I wanted to build my own furniture. The first project was a shelf I built using threaded rods and pieces of wood. The shelf turned out pretty good so then I started making lamps as well.

The experience culminated when the three of us roommates, who all loved music, decided to build a sound system. I came up with a pyramid-shaped subwoofer and put the tweeters and woofers into two towers. It was a whole adventure building your own furniture and sound systems.

As I did these projects, people showed a lot of excitement about them and wanted to purchase them. So I ended up doing small production runs - now there are maybe 10 people in Europe who have a version of my lamp or shelf.

What made you choose EPFL and Micro-engineering?

Everyone is a doctor in my direct family - both my parents and my two older sisters. So for me, the logical path would have been to follow that route too. But I always wanted to do something different. Since I was a kid, I was always building stuff, so EPFL seemed the way to go.

One of my older sisters actually started at EPFL in life sciences before becoming a doctor. So through her, I heard about what it was like to be at EPFL and it seemed exciting. That helped me decide to pursue it.

Did you ever face self-doubt or imposter syndrome at EPFL?

Oh yeah, the first two years at EPFL were pretty intense. I didn’t really have time to do other projects, apart from maybe the furniture.

As time went on, I started learning about topics I wasn’t familiar with, like electronics and microcontrollers. That was exciting since I had been using those device for years and finally understood how they worked. Being surrounded by people in the field also helped a lot to dive deeper and learn about the subject. I remember having a PhD student teach me how to use Altium to design circuit boards for example.

I started learning a lot and it became obvious that I wanted to build something in that space. My friend Thibaut was excited about that too and we started building a remote control for drones that worked with hand motion. Pretty quickly, we ran into firmware and electronics issues, that’s when our friend Arthur and Benjamin joined in and helped develop the project further.

As we kept building, people started getting excited. Ultimately, it snowballed into a small startup that we were running alongside our studies.

Building MotionPilot, a Motion Controller for FPV Drones

How did MotionPilot takeoff?

MotionPilot started after classes and during weekends. The first prototypes were built with Arduinos and Adafruit modules. Once we had a working prototype, we showed it to one of our professors and he offered us to continue building it in his lab. After winning a few startup competitions, we were able to rent our own offices next to EPFL.

The initial idea was to build a motion remote only. But after discussing with professors at EPFL, we started looking into adding haptic feedback so the user could feel in his hand the motion of the drone. This ended up being a rabbit hole. We spent years developing all kinds of prototypes that would create vibrations or various types of pressure in your hand.

Did you ever consider quitting your studies to focus on MotionPilot full-time?

At that point, it was still very much a side project. We didn’t feel at all that it was time to stop everything and just work on that. I’m glad we continued focusing on the studies since there were some amazing classes that I’m super happy I went through. For example a class on semiconductors and their application in industry.

I also didn’t feel like MotionPilot was taking time away from my studies. Maybe it was the specific combination of classes I took, but I still had time on the side so I wasn’t really in a situation where it was a tradeoff.

One thing we did was to negotiate and have our master’s project and internship be allocated to working on our own startup. We had to ask a few times but we ultimately received approval to move ahead. I’m very grateful for that to EPFL.

I believe they’ve turned this process into a recurring program where students can spend a semester focusing on building their own technology and venture.

The MotionPilot journey

How did you fund the early days of MotionPilot?

We won a few startup competitions - the Xgrant which granted us with 10k CHF, Venture Kick with 130k CHF and the START Contest, organized by START Lausanne, which granted us 30K CHF.

What were some of the lowest points in the MotionPilot journey?

There were two low points:

The first one was when we decided to abandon haptic feedback to focus solely on motion control for the remote. At that point, haptic feedback was a core aspect of the design and abandoning it felt like abandoning the whole project. In retrospect, this was a great decision. It enabled us to focus on other aspects of the controller, like the motion control algorithm and the long range communication protocol. It’s through this process of focus that the controller became a great product.

The second low point was towards the end of the project. We had spent years building the haptic feedback mechanism and had recently pivoted to doing only motion control. We were running low on funds and didn’t have a clear path forward to market. The situation was unlocked when two people entered the story, Estelle and Ramy. Estelle and Ramy saw value in something we hadn’t considered before: filmmaking. With them, we met the best drone filmmakers across Europe, which ultimately led us to meeting and working with DJI.

Working at DJI

How did the DJI technology acquisition come about? Did you reach out to them?

The one thing we did wrong with our project is that we didn’t launch enough iterations of our product which meant it took too much time to figure out what people wanted. For example, we spent years developing iterations of our haptic feedback mechanism, without testing it on our users and confirming that was the most valuable aspect they were excited about.

When Estelle and Ramy came into the picture, they saw the MotionPilot controller as a professional tool for filmmaking. From that perspective, they were extremely excited. So we made a plan to talk to everyone in the FPV drone filmmaking industry that we could get in touch with.

We met many of the best FPV pilots in Europe - we drove to France, Germany, Austria, and across Switzerland. Through them, we got introduced to different companies. Ultimately, one pilot introduced us to DJI’s CEO. So we flew to Shenzhen with our product and met the DJI team in a park. DJI’s CEO started flying with the remote and crashed on the first flight. I was quite stressed at that moment. It turns out that it was due to the goggles failing in flight. So he took off again and he loved the flight experience. He very quickly decided we should proceed with a collaboration. The timing was perfect because they were developing an FPV drone at the time and they were not satisfied with the remote that was paired with it. MotionPilot seemed like a great alternative.

How did you go about negotiating with DJI?

Well, everything started in a park in Shenzhen like I mentioned before. This is where the decision was taken to collaborate. 20 minutes later we were sitting at the DJI headquarters and discussed the details of the collaboration.

This whole process was started extremely fast compared to other companies we had interacted with, which was refreshing to see. After that it did take a few more months to iron out all the smaller details in the agreement.

An advice I would keep to myself is that negotiating with those large companies takes a lot of time. There is an enormous amount of inertia in entities of that size and trying to change some minute details can take months to figure out. I wasn’t expecting how consuming this whole process would end up being.

There were some other smaller companies that were interested in working with us. With them, the process would have been way faster but the impact probably not as large as what it turned out to be with DJI.

Working in Shenzhen

What was it like working in Shenzhen for DJI after the acquisition?

It was very interesting. First of all, I had lived most of my life in Europe, so entering a new country, a new culture, and having to adapt was a big change.

When I initially arrived at DJI, I wasn’t immediately allowed in the building. The first meetings happened at the local Starbucks. An engineer would come down with a few ideas, we would chat about it and they would go back to the main building. It took me a few weeks to gain the trust of the engineering team until I was allowed into the building.

I put a lot of effort in helping the team and ultimately got put in charge of executing the design. We went through a few iterations of the controller shape, placement of the buttons, flight modes and control algorithms. This whole process took about 6 months.

Joining 25 guns, Tesla and meeting Elon Musk

What drew you to working at Tesla in the 25 Guns team after wrapping up with DJI?

First of all, the engineering being done at Tesla was super exciting and the speed at which they were executing on really complex products was impressive.

At that time, it wasn’t exactly clear to me where we needed to go as a society to improve the climate situation. So I was curious to discover whether electrification would be one solution to the problem. Working in that field seemed like the logical thing to do to figure it out.

Did you get to meet Elon Musk while working at Tesla?

Yeah, when I was a 25 gun engineer, we would have meetings with him. I never met him in person because when I was in the US, he was in Europe and vice versa. But the rest of the team did!

How did you decide to leave Tesla to start a new company? What ideas were you considering?

Already when I joined Tesla I had ideas in the back of my mind. There were three main topics I was excited about:

1. Foiling boats to transport merchandise. Something that could serve a need between really expensive planes and very slow cargo ships.

2. Agrivoltaics - putting solar panels above crops to simultaneously grow plants and generate electricity.

3. Electric bicycles as a replacement for cars in our transportation infrastructure.

I researched those three fields and ended up starting a new project related to electric bicycles. The goal was to make an open source gear-less electric bicycle drivetrain. I worked on this with a few friends during a couple of years.

Founding atopile and getting into YC

How did you begin your new company atopile, and why did you decide to apply to Y Combinator?

As soon as I stopped working on MotionPilot, I started working with a few friends on a new drivetrain for electric bicycles.

As I was working on that, I realized that the electric bicycle market was an extremely crowded space - everyone was building e-bikes. So the question became, what could be different about this project? How could we build it in a unique way?

That is when open source entered the picture. What if we could build a piece of hardware but collaborate and share it like we can share software? We started building early versions of the project and we would version control the KiCAD files on GitLab. I continued working on the project with some colleagues at Tesla when I moved to the US.

Through this process, I met Matt and we started talking about how to make open source hardware work and how to collaborate around hardware design.

He had been thinking of ideas to build “git for hardware” similar to what git enables for software in terms of collaboration and version control.

We discussed the problems that existing companies face and how the fact that hardware design tools are so far behind software tools is one of the reasons it’s so difficult to develop hardware products, especially in large companies.

At first it was just discussions, then we started spending our evenings developing quick prototypes of what a solution might look like. We went through three iterations of the idea until we ended up designing our own language, which is the core of what we’re working on today. As we were building the tool, Narayan, another friend from Tesla started using it more and more and ultimately decided to join the project too.

We were working on the idea on the side for a little while, and then came the consequential decision point of leaving our jobs to focus on it full-time. We considered if we could bootstrap the company but our visa situation didn’t allow it.

That’s when we considered joining YC. We applied and got accepted. From there, it was a pretty straightforward decision that it was an opportunity we could not miss.

A few days ago, we launched atopile on hacker news and have seen a lot of excitement since then!

General questions and advice for students

What advice would you give yourself if you were back studying at EPFL again?

I would spend as much time as I can with engineering student teams. There are a few that work on various race cars, rocket, boats and other cool projects. When I was at EPFL, I did one project with the Hydrocontest racing team which was great. Those are super exciting people to be around with.

They recently setup a Makerspace at EPFL which I think is awesome. I would probably spend all my time there and meet the people who work there.

Within those groups, there are always a couple of people who are excited to turn their project into a business too. I had some friends I met through the Hydrocontest who are now building a racing boat and they ultimately want to spin the project into an engineering consulting company.

I think it’s also good to work on something that isn’t necessarily a business with people first, so you can get to know them and see how they work. Then if you’re excited to keep working together, you can embark on a more ambitious project.

Should aspiring entrepreneurs in Switzerland try to get to the US as fast as possible?

This one is tough for me to answer. In an ideal world, you wouldn’t have to leave your home to go where your field is most active. Unfortunately that’s kind of how things are currently even though it seems the trend is inverting.

I would say yes and no. If you’re in a very specific field and you know you want to work with the best people in that field, there is usually one place in the world where the experts in that area congregate.

If you want to master watchmaking, being in Jura is probably the right place because that’s where the knowledge is concentrated. If you want to be on the cutting edge of software and IC design, then the Bay Area is the hub.

If you want to be with the best people in your specific field, go to that place. On the other hand, there are lots of opportunities to build successful companies wherever you are.

When I was studying at EPFL, I used to work one day per week at Greenmotion. They were becoming the largest installer of electric car charger in Switzerland and they have done great. Overall, I’m very impressed by people who stay in their home country and build great technology that benefits the people living around them. We need more of that.

What was the most valuable part of your EPFL experience?

The people I met. Arthur, Ben, Thibaut, Estelle and Ramy who I ended up spending years working with on MotionPilot - I would not have had the opportunity to meet them if I hadn’t gone to EPFL.

Same thing for the professors and coaches who helped us in developing our startup by providing time, money, and resources to make it happen.

Closing notes

Hope you enjoyed this week! Speaking to Timothée was incredibly inspiring - someone I never would have met if I hadn’t started the newsletter.

There are some super inspiring people out there at EPFL, ETHZ, TUM, everywhere. Probably the best place to be surrounded by them is in the engineering associations and entrepreneurship/co-working spaces!

As always, message me on LinkedIn your thoughts on who I should feature next, what you want to ask the guests (more studies-focused or industry-focused?), what deeper questions you’d like to ask!

Arnie

Studies: MSc Data Science @ EPFL ‘23, BSc Computer Science @ Universitatea Politehnica din Bucuresti ‘21
Experiences: Quadrature, Bending Spoons, Google, BitDefender, IBM
Origin: Romania
Links: LinkedIn

Growing up in Romania & competitive programming

Where did you grow up and what did you study?

I grew up in Bucharest, Romania. I did my bachelor’s there in computer engineering and then moved to EPFL for my master’s.

Why did you start programming?

This is actually a pretty nice story because I think the whole reason why I’m doing software engineering right now is because on my first day of high school, in my programming class, the teacher asked me a simple question about what a line of code would do. It was something like x = x + 3. Coming from a math background, I was confused because that didn’t seem to make sense. I got the answer wrong, everyone laughed, and I felt really bad. So I decided I needed to learn programming.

I started getting better because I was studying a lot. Then one day I decided to try my luck at programming Olympiads. I posted on a forum looking for help, and a guy replied who became my mentor for the next few months. We’ve reconnected and he’s now working in London as well.

Are Olympiads common in Romania?

Olympiads are practically a rite of passage for any Romanian with even a hint of talent in any field. We seem to have Olympiads for just about everything imaginable. If you meet a Romanian in Switzerland, a good conversation starter would be to ask them which Olympiad they participated in.

Bachelors and Internships

During your bachelor’s in Romania, were you mostly focused on studying or did you have side projects?

During my bachelor’s, I participated in a lot of projects, which is something I didn’t have as much time for at EPFL. For example, I worked on an app for about two years that was supposed to automate the blood donation process in Romania, but nothing came out of it in the end, as the bureaucracy involved proved to be quite a big challenge. Nonetheless, it was still a valuable experience.

You did an impressive number of internships, at IBM, BitDefender, Google and more. What motivated you to do so many?

I think I was very competitive, even in university. After the first year, I had one of the highest GPAs. I remember I did my first internship when I was 19, and my colleagues were making fun of me, asking if I was still a minor. I started doing internships because it felt like the next big move for my career.

Doing internships during your bachelor’s is also something that’s quite encouraged in Romania. Many students don’t fare well financially, so they’re looking for ways to support their studies.

How did you prepare for all your coding interviews?

When I first started interviewing, I think what helped me a lot was my background in competitive programming. That still helps me now because I don’t need as much time to prepare since I still remember most of the problem patterns and approaches.

University doesn’t really teach you much about competitive programming, so it proved to be a significant advantage when interviewing. To give you a number, I feel like around 100 problems are enough to master any topic that may come up in an interview.

Joining EPFL for the masters

Why did you decide to go to EPFL for your master’s?

When I started my bachelor’s, I saw a newspaper article about Romanian students at EPFL. That’s how I found out about the university in the first place. That article had a special place in my mind throughout my bachelor’s. Whenever someone asked why I was fighting for a high GPA, I told them it was because I wanted to get into EPFL and needed a certain grade.

How was your experience at EPFL? Did it live up to your expectations?

It was really stressful. When I first got into EPFL, a friend told me something that stuck with me: if you manage to graduate from here, you'll truly appreciate that diploma because of the effort you put in to earn it.

For me, it was a huge difference from what I was used to in my bachelor’s, which was more project-oriented. Exams weren’t worth more than 40% of the grade there. But at EPFL, most courses were theory-oriented, so you had to study every week or you’d end up falling behind. I wasn’t used to this sort of approach.

How did you approach studying - were you keeping up with courses or cramming before exams?

During my first year, I tried to study only before exams. But in the second year, I found that it was too much. I ended up spending like three weeks without going out, just studying indoors, and it felt pretty lonely. So, in my second year, I aimed to study more regularly throughout the semester.

You considered doing a PhD. What made you decide against it?

Part of it was my own personal pressure during my time at EPFL. But also, every single PhD student seemed to be under a lot of strain. Most people I talked to were glad they pursued their PhD, but also relieved when it was done. I wanted to dive into more hands-on work rather than staying in academia.

Working at Quadrature, an algorithmic trader

You’re working full-time at Quadrature now. Why did you choose this job, given you likely had many opportunities?

I wanted to work in a hedge fund because the development process is much faster-paced than at big tech companies. In big tech, making a change involves going through thousands of reviews, and even then, the impact is often relatively small compared to the overall product.

Whereas in hedge funds, you have a lot more responsibility and autonomy, and you can actually see how your changes have an impact on how well the company is doing. Plus, I'm quite intrigued by the secrecy of research. In finance, people are constantly trying to come up with new approaches to outperform others without knowing what others are up to.

What brings you value in your work? Is it getting to work on hard problems and making an impact?

I really like competitive programming because it resembles logic problems and puzzles, which I loved as a child. Working for a hedge fund is the most similar experience you can get as a software engineer, because in many situations, you’re working on a problem no one has solved before and evaluating which solutions you have.

Academia vs Industry

Having interned at several companies, how does working in industry compare to research or studying?

I think it’s completely different. Now that I’ve started working full-time, I feel the need to do a bit more research, because when you’re in university, you’re kind of forced to stay up-to-date with every new development.

At the same time, I think working teaches much better coding practices because I’m collaborating with people who have a lot more experience than me. I would say both are useful and I’m really happy that I did so many internships during my bachelor’s.

How does working full-time compare to being a student? Anything you miss about student life?

One of the biggest differences, which I was looking forward to, is that now when I have a weekend or go home from work, I’m not going to do anything work-related. Whereas EPFL felt more like an all-the-time job.

Something I miss is that at EPFL, you could meet a lot of people constantly. You had group projects and courses your friends weren’t taking. That doesn’t really happen once you start working, since you’re usually with the same team all the time.

Thoughts & ambitions for the future

How does London compare to Lausanne? Do you think you’ll stay in London long-term?

London is much better than Lausanne in my opinion. It’s noisier but also full of life. I miss the lake in Lausanne though. There was a time when I was working in Geneva and my colleagues and I would go swimming in the lake during our lunch break and then come back to work. That’s not something you can do in London.

What are your plans for the future? Continue in quant finance, join or start a company, go back to academia?

The most likely path is that I’ll continue working for a hedge fund, because I actually really like it so far.

Ideally, I’d want to work at a relatively small company so I can see that my work is having an impact. Starting my own company is always something I’m going to have in the back of my mind, but the issue is finding the time for it now.

Advice for the readers

Any advice you’d give your younger self or others studying computer science?

I think some things I did really well were starting internships as soon as possible, because that helped me get future opportunities. I would have spent more time working on my own projects and startups though, because even though everyone told me I wouldn’t have time for that later, I didn’t believe them. But it turns out they were right.

I’d also say to socialize as much as possible because the opportunities are much fewer after university. Participate in competitions like hackathons and programming contests, those are really fun and help with building long-lasting friendships.

Closing Notes

Hope you enjoyed this week’s post! As always, let me know what you think of this blog! Feel free to also message feedback to me on LinkedIn:

• What guests should I feature next? Anyone you recommend?

• What questions should I ask them (more studies-related? more internships-related? more general advice-related?)

Next week, I’m featuring a super inspiring graduate - they built a FPV Drone Motion Controller during EPFL, exited to DJI, joined Tesla and currently are building a company in YCombinator 🤯 - so definitely stay tuned!!

Arnie

Studies: Thesis @ UC Berkeley ‘23, MSc Design & Engineering @ Politecnico di Milano ‘22, BSc Micro-Engineering @ EPFL ‘20
Experiences: Angell Mobility, Withings, SLIMDESIGN
Origin: France
Links: LinkedIn, Portfolio

Note: Make sure to check out Pierre-Louis’ portfolio, where you can see all his product design work!

Growing up and discovering product design

Where did you grow up and what drew you to design?

I’m French and come from a small city in the south of France called Rodez. That’s where I spent half of my life until I turned 13 and my parents decided to completely drop their careers and move to Morocco. We moved there because of their new business - they discovered a passion for renovating old houses. My mother was an architect really into design and my dad was interested in entrepreneurship. Together they decided to buy some old riads in Morocco, renovate them, and start renting rooms, turning them into guest houses.

I think I was always interested in design because when I was young, my mom had a furniture store in my hometown. I remember she would pick me up from school and I would wait in the shop for hours, browsing the shelves, looking at everything, trying out the couches and lamps. My house was also always full of interesting design pieces and furniture that my mom would find at flea markets every weekend. So design was always part of my life - I always had this sense of aesthetic and creative vision, even though I wasn’t practicing design myself as a kid. As a teenager though, I started using software to make graphic designs and infographics.

What made you choose EPFL and the micro-engineering section?

Moving to Morocco was really eye-opening. I went from being immersed only in French culture to this international environment with a new culture, religion, traditions, and people speaking Spanish, English, Arabic. I was really fulfilled by this international lifestyle I was discovering. So for university, I decided I wasn’t done with this and wanted a more international student environment rather than going back to France. I was considering places like TU Delft, EPFL, and schools in the UK, but ended up choosing EPFL because of the academic recognition, international environment, broad course offerings, and the amazing campus setting close to the mountains since I like skiing.

I chose the micro-engineering section because I had always been interested in hardware and as a kid, I saw the engineering profession as someone who makes robots. But I also wasn’t completely sure what I wanted to do, and micro-engineering felt like the most generic section since it had classes in computer science, electronics, material science, chemistry, life science. Although it was hard with a lot of classes for few credits, it was super interesting and really taught me engineering in a broad, holistic way.

Making the difficult choice - pursuing your passion rather than following the herd

It was a big decision to switch from engineering at EPFL and instead go for design at Politecnico di Milano. How did this happen?

While at EPFL, design was completely out of the picture for me. I thought I wanted to do data science and machine learning like everyone else. So I did an exchange year in Lisbon taking classes only in artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics. But during the winter exam session, after doing so many theoretical exercises, I was questioning myself, suffering because I didn’t feel like I was liking it. I called my dad and told him I think I just want to do design. He said he would still be proud of me studying design, that it’s about how happy I am in what I do, not what I study.

That was the click for me. I started looking for master’s degrees in design that would accept someone with an engineering background. There were a few options in Europe, but the only two that didn’t require a design portfolio, which I didn’t have, were Politecnico di Milano and Aalto University in Finland. I decided to aim for Politecnico since it was one of the best design schools and a recognized scientific institution. I applied and got in for the MSc in Design & Engineering, which brings together 75% design students and 25% engineering students to work on developing hardware products.

What were the most valuable learnings from the program in Milan?

The program was really hands-on and project-oriented. Every semester we had a new company come and give us a brief, like “we need a machine that sanitizes the environment in private spaces open to the public”. Then we had to figure out what to sanitize, how to do it, where, what technology to use, and implement it into a product that’s functional and aesthetically pleasing while considering user experience, design and interaction. It’s a long iterative process, but exactly how it’s done in industry for real products.

I learned the design process, which I was missing before. At EPFL, you learn to quickly find a solution to a problem with hardware and that’s it. At Politecnico, I learned to take the good path, not the straight one. Design is an iterative process that takes a while with many considerations. I also learned I didn’t need to be a good sketcher or 3D modeler myself, because in a group you have designers doing that part. As the engineer, I would coordinate component selection, product form factor, and feasibility - taking the designer’s ideas and making them real. That’s the job of a product design engineer, being the link between the two worlds.

If there’s students that want to learn design, can they do it on their own or should they take a degree like you?

Of course you can learn it on your own, but I would highly recommend doing at least an online class on design thinking, product design and development, or user experience design. Try to understand the process behind it, because it’s not something that’s set in stone. But there is a way of thinking, of approaching projects, getting feedback, understanding human interaction design and how a person will interact with a feature or object. It’s not even about learning how to do it, but just knowing it exists and taking into consideration all the factors.

Master’s thesis in the US

Tell me about your master’s thesis experience in UC Berkeley in California. How did you find and apply for it?

For my master’s thesis, I called one of my professors at Politecnico who was my thesis advisor and he said I could find a project in any lab I wanted, it didn’t have to be at the school.

I started emailing professors in California because I wanted a last chance to spend a semester abroad and experience the American campus lifestyle. I got a product design project in a lab at UC Berkeley with a mechanical engineering professor working on micro actuators and sensors. They had developed a new cutting-edge technology for piezoelectric micro actuation that would be interesting for virtual reality applications.

Basically, the little vibrators in your phone that provide haptic feedback - they had found a way to make an actuator vibrate in only one direction without spreading vibration waves to the environment. This is interesting because you can develop a matrix of vibrators to vibrate at a specific point on the skin, replicating the sensation of touching a texture in VR.

When I arrived, they wanted me to take the actuator technology and build a wearable proof of concept to test it. In design, you always want to find a cool story to tell about a project. I felt like improving some billionaire’s VR gaming experience wasn’t a great story. I wanted to do something more social.

So I decided to build the product as the lab required, but instead of focusing the research on VR gaming, I researched if it would be an interesting device for blind people to receive navigation instructions on their wrist. It was a wristband with an array of actuators that I could send commands to via Bluetooth to activate vibrations in patterns, like a movement going forward to indicate “move forward”, or to the left or right to turn.

How did the US experience compare to Europe? Would you want to go back?

It was so nice, I really liked it. I think the main strength is the teaching - the professors have patents, so many research papers, high h-indexes, some have startups, some are famous, some have Nobel prizes. It’s an environment where all these incredibly smart people from all over the world come together to teach in one place.

The culture and mindset is also different. When you meet all these smart Berkeley people, it’s very interesting. I think I’d like to work in California at some point in my life, I really enjoyed the experience.

Gaining industry experience through internships

You also did many internships throughout your studies such as at the SLIMDESIGN design studio and others. How did you find them?

To find the internships, I literally just sat down for two weeks over Christmas break, Googling “product design agency” plus the name of cities I liked - Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Berlin, Milan, Paris, London. I made a list, wrote a short email with my portfolio and CV, and sent it to like 150 companies. I got two opportunities in design studios 100 meters apart in Amsterdam. Having the engineering degree really made me stand out, but you also need good projects in your portfolio showing your process. The degree gives you tools, but you need to show you can apply them.

After the US, you went to work at Withings. What drew you to the company and what were your main takeaways?

After my thesis, I did another internship at Withings, a company in Paris that makes consumer health electronics like smart watches and scales. I wanted to work in a less technical role, more on the managerial side, so I did product management there.

I was drawn to Withings because it’s the biggest company in France for high-tech consumer electronics. They have a big R&D department, the most patents on smart scales, and were the second company after Apple to release a watch with real-time heart rate monitoring. In Paris there aren’t many companies making products like this.

As a product manager, I was like the head of the project for developing a product, speaking with the designers, engineers, factory, organizing everything to manage the product lifecycle. It was really business-oriented with a lot of marketing and dealing with regulations. I learned a more holistic view of product development, dealing with the entire scope and lifecycle rather than solving one specific technical problem. It was fulfilling and stimulating, but I was also a bit bored by some daily tasks, especially the regulations and market research parts.

Current role and ambitions

What are you doing now and what are your goals for the future?

Now I’ve been working for a few months at a company in Paris called Angell that makes electric bicycles. I’m in a product development role, kind of in between pure engineering and product management. I’m not spending my whole day on mechanical design, but I still get to do some 3D modeling. I go to the factory every two weeks to meet with the assembly engineers, I test prototypes, build some prototypes, and work on developing future products. It’s very interesting and I think I’ve found my balance between the technical and managerial sides. I’m doing a job I’m really confident in.

For the future, I want to keep working on hardware - I love physical products and materials. As I evolve, I’ll likely take on more responsibilities and work on more managerial topics. In five years, I’ll probably move towards a product manager position. Eventually, I’d like to have my own company, either building my own products or a product development agency making products for other companies. A cool brand or a renowned design agency would be the dream.

Wisdom for students

Looking back, is there anything you would have done differently? What advice would you give to students?

I don’t have regrets because I made the best choices I could with the information I had at the time. One thing is I would have liked to do a gap year between bachelor’s and master’s, but it was during COVID so I felt it would be a waste of time without being able to find a job, travel or internship. So I jumped into the master’s still having some doubts. Taking more time would have let me be more sure.

I think EPFL students should also consider doing their master’s in the US, because technology is so big there. As an engineer in the US, you can earn way more than in Europe and have the chance to work at some of the most influential companies creating the most relevant products. Studying there also gives you OPT (optional practical training), letting you stay and work for 3 years after graduating, which is enough time to pay back loans and get amazing experience.

My advice would be: if you have an idea that’s unconventional, don’t be afraid, don’t underestimate yourself, and just go for it. Even if nobody believes it will work or make sense, if you believe in it, do it. You have to make your own path to achieve your goals and dreams. When I was younger I spent too much time worrying what people thought about my choices. I did my master’s in design at Politecnico di Milano after thriving 4 years at EPFL to become an engineer, the opposite of what people usually do. Some asked if I regretted it, but no, I was pursuing a goal I set for myself that I believed was right. Whatever path you take, you’ll end up where you belong. Life is well done like that.

Closing notes

Hope you enjoyed reading this one! I really related to this one - oftentimes I found myself studying things just because everyone else was doing it. Pierre-Louis’ story really resonated for me in this sense :)

As always, let me know what you think of the blog!

Theo Schafer

Studies: Thesis @ MIT ‘23, Robotics @ ETHZ ‘23, Micro-Engineering @ EPFL ‘21
Experiences: NASA JPL, Entrepreneur First
Student Orgs: EPFL Xplore, ETHZ ARIS
Origin: France
Links: LinkedIn

Growing up

Where did you grow up and what was it like?

I grew up in the countryside of France, near Metz which is a 120,000 inhabitant city not far from Germany. It was a very small town of about 10,000 people where I lived until I was 18.

What made you join EPFL for the Micro-Engineering bachelor’s?

In France, I did one year of preparatory classes destined to entering engineering schools. But I didn’t like the rigid structure and lack of autonomy in that system. I heard about EPFL through a friend from high school, looked it up and thought “wow, that’s the place I need to be”. So after finishing my first year in Strasbourg, I made the best decision ever and moved to EPFL.

Evolving study habits and priorities at EPFL

How did your approach to studying and classes evolve over your bachelor’s?

My first semester, I was working my ass off - studying all day, doing nothing else. I would redo all the problem sets every week, so by week 4 I was redoing problem sets from weeks 1-4. I was just killing myself with work, but it wasn’t even efficient. What’s important is not just knowing how to do it, but knowing how to do it fast. You need to intensely review right before the exam anyway to have it fresh.

So by my second and third semester, I was going less and less to classes. I’d rather just read the material, try the problem sets, and eventually I was barely doing the problem sets and just reading the solutions to understand them. That cut my work by like 80% while achieving the same grades.

Grades and studying for classes were not that helpful for later stages like getting internships or a master’s thesis. No one asked about my grades, it didn’t matter if you had a 4.7 or 5.7 GPA. You want to be as efficient as possible with classes, get a decent but not perfect GPA, and really focus on networking, student projects, and learning skills. That’s what matters.

When did you realize grades don’t matter as much and start thinking about internships?

I really started thinking about it in my second year, BA4. That’s when I got bored of theoretical classes. I had been in engineering school for 2 years but couldn’t change a light bulb, I felt like I wasn’t a real engineer. So I wanted to do hands-on projects to actually learn skills.

I joined EPFL Xplore, which was in its first year. I wanted to do something exciting like space-related. I considered the spacecraft and rocket teams but wasn’t sure I’d get in with no experience. Xplore was brand new and offering leadership positions, so even though it wasn’t my first choice, I joined as a team lead to learn even more.

Moving to ETHZ, joining ARIS and NASA

You then switched from EPFL to ETHZ, why did you do that?

I really liked EPFL. I had a great life on the campus and everything. And looking back, I actually enjoyed my life more at EPFL because the city, the campus, I just liked it better. I also had a girlfriend in Lausanne, but Zurich and Lausanne are not so far away.

But yeah, I think it was just based on the ranking, I was like, ‘I am in the top 15 university. I can move to a top 5 university. Why would I not?’ And I'm glad I made the move, because indeed, people knew about ETH way more than EPFL. At NASA, everybody knew about ETH. Few people knew about EPFL. In the robotics department, ETH is very famous.

You also double your network. The more universities you go to, the more people went to the same university. If you meet someone from EPFL, you can say, ‘oh, I went to EPFL’. If you meet someone from ETH, you can say, ‘oh, I went there too’.

So when you reach out to people on LinkedIn or you cold message them, you can be like, ‘oh, I saw you went to ETH or MIT, so did I’ - it makes reaching out easier. And cold messaging is a super important skill, it can take you really far.

What made you decide to join the ARIS student association?

After meeting Arno Rogg, a mentor from NASA Ames Research Center through EPFL Xplore, the seed was planted that maybe I could intern at NASA someday. So I joined ARIS with the goal of meeting people with contacts at NASA or ESA who could help me.

ARIS had 300 people and was diversifying into new projects beyond rockets, like a CubeSat, liquid engine, and recovery project. I joined the underwater vehicle for Europa exploration project as the project manager, since it was robotics-focused, which I was interested in.

Landing an internship at NASA JPL

How did you get your internship at NASA Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL)?

As I said, it was a two year effort to work on student projects, build up my skills and resume and meet people who could advise me and recommend me. But eventually, one day I cold emailed about 30 people at NASA. Three replied and one moved faster than the others. Within one week of sending those initial emails, I had secured my internship at JPL. It was kind of crazy how fast it happened.

What was your experience like interning at NASA JPL?

It was amazing and inspiring to be surrounded by such brilliant people. I got to meet engineers and program leaders who had worked on historic missions like Voyager. You could talk to someone with gray hair and they’d casually mention landing the first rover on Mars.

The other interns were great and everyone was so passionate. I really liked the campus vibe and how chill people were, at least in my group. I learned a ton and it further ignited my drive to work on ambitious, impactful projects.

Securing a master’s thesis at MIT

How did you end up doing your master’s thesis at MIT?

It actually came about through EPFL Xplore as well. We did a critical design review of our rover and an MIT professor, who was also a systems engineering professor remotely at EPFL, was an expert reviewer. Because I was team lead, I got to present for 30-45 minutes.

After the review, I decided to connect with him on LinkedIn. Within a minute he accepted. But I was sitting at my desk and was like ‘what's the point of having an MIT professor in my LinkedIn network? There's no point, right?’ So I was like ‘fuck it. I'm going to message him. And maybe it works. And he replies, or maybe it doesn't, but whatever’.

So I sent a message thanking him for attending, expressing my interest in aerospace, and asking if we could discuss how I could improve my resume for that field.

He replied within five minutes saying sure, and to schedule a call with his assistant and I was like ‘wow, crazy!’. Eventually the call got scheduled, and I showed him my resume, which at the time just had my EPFL bachelor’s and Xplore. He said it was a cool resume with great experience, and that he actually had a project that summer doing similar work with sensors and PCBs. He asked if I’d like to be part of it, and of course I said yes.

It ended up being delayed almost two years due to the pandemic and other circumstances, but I stayed in touch persistently. Eventually in early 2023, I went to MIT and did my master’s thesis with him. It took a lot of patience and follow-up, but it worked out amazingly.

Building a start-up in the US with Entrepreneur First

What made you decide to join Entrepreneur First and start a company rather than working at NASA full-time?

It was a mix of reasons. Partly ambition - I want to have the largest impact and I think building my own company is how I achieve that. There were also more trivial reasons that might disappoint you, like wanting to be close to my girlfriend who was supposed to start her master’s in London, and EF had an office there (whereas NASA in the US was out of the question).

A big barrier between me and entrepreneurship was student loans. I couldn’t afford to spend 6-12 months trying to find investors without an income. EF’s program, where they pay you a stipend from the beginning, made it possible.

They reached out to me on LinkedIn and although I ended up in the US anyway, the opportunity got me seriously considering EF and entrepreneurship. I joined and it worked out, so now I’m in California trying to build a company. It’s very exciting and stressful with a lot of uncertainty, but I’m glad I made the leap.

Founding Tetsuone Scientific - Accelerating scientific discoveries

What are you working on now and what are your goals?

I’m now building a startup called Tetsuone Scientific through the Entrepreneur First program. We’re developing an autonomous robot scientist that is able to reiterate on experiments. With it, we want to speed up scientific discoveries that will help solve issues like drug delivery, climate change or plastic pollution.

Our first partner is a small lab working to find treatments for rare genetic diseases, like one affecting only a father and his son. The current process could take them months. Our goal is to help them find a cure within days, which would be incredible.

It’s a longer-term play since we’re building complex hardware and software that will take a year or more to get the platform ready. But I’m committed to seeing it through and making a real impact. I don’t see this as a quick 2-year journey to acquisition, but rather something I want to pour my energy into long-term to maximize the positive impact we can have on human health. This is the kind of ambitious, meaningful work I want to focus on. It aligns perfectly with my drive and ambitions.

Diving deeper into motivation, imposter syndrome and focus

Did you experience imposter syndrome at EPFL and how did student associations help with that?

Yeah, imposter syndrome is a big thing, I’ve had it a lot on and off. If you’re ambitious and always trying to get out of your comfort zone, you’ll have it quite often. I had it a bit at the beginning of EPFL when I didn’t know any technical skills. Joining projects and learning a lot helped with that.

Then I got my NASA internship and I was like ‘damn, what the hell, everyone’s so brilliant around me’. But at the end, my supervisor said I was the best intern he’s ever had and tried to hire me full-time, so that external validation made the imposter syndrome go away again.

Now trying to build a startup, the imposter syndrome is back as I’m meeting investors in Silicon Valley. It always comes and goes, you have to handle it.

What drives you to achieve so many things?

That’s an interesting question. It’s quite dumb, but my mom and dad always told me to do the best I could when I was a kid.

So I'm just trying my best in what I'm doing, and I feel like for the leadership positions, just more because I want to distinguish myself from others. If I want to be among the best, I need to join a student project. Right? Because most students at EPFL just study, they don't do a student project. So I want to join a student project.

But on top of that, there are also other people who join a student project. So how I distinguish myself from them? It would be by doing a leadership position within those things and just trying to just really build my resume so that I'm standing out. Just my mindset is I want to stand out.

I want to go do prestigious things, assume leadership positions so that I'm the only one in the world who has this resume, basically.

I don't know why I want to do that though. Maybe recognition? I don't know. I just like what I'm doing, and it's fun.

Advice for ambitious EPFL students

Looking back, what advice would you give to yourself as a new EPFL bachelor’s student?

Work to get a decent GPA in your classes, but focus more time and energy on student projects you like and where you learn real skills. Spend time with professors and people you can network with who may be able to help you later. Cold messaging and reaching out to people is very important.

Always think about how you can improve yourself and your resume and make it stand out. But even more than the resume, I’m realizing now that social capital and the network you build through these experiences are what matter most, especially if you want to start a company someday.

I kind of regret not building stronger connections with EPFL professors, even ones not teaching my classes. There are so many interesting things going on in their labs. Go have coffee with a professor working on cutting-edge tech in their field and build that relationship. They may not work directly in what you do, but they’re always one degree away from someone who could really help you.

So in summary - work on student projects you like, learn skills, build your resume and relationships, and don’t stress too much about perfect grades. That’s my advice to ambitious students.

Closing notes

Arnie here - hope you enjoyed this post! I’ll be posting weekly from now on 🎉

As always, another poll, who should I feature next?

Anything else I’m missing? Feel free to comment or message me on LinkedIn!

Vaclav Volhejn

Studies: MSc@ETHZ ('22), BSc@Charles University ('20)
Experiences: Blue Vision Labs (acq. by Lyft), Jane Street, Bini, Lakera
Cool projects: Impromptu.fun, Polylog (60K subscribers), TikTok
Hobbies: Game Dev, Competitive Programming, Music
Links: LinkedIn, GitHub

Vaclav’s early start to coding

When did you discover Computer Science?

“I started programming when I was like 8 or 9. There was a programming language called Baltik, where you move around blocks, and a wizard that you can make do stuff, and then conditions. This was made by a Czech guy, I don’t think it’s very internationally known. I guess Scratch is the better alternative nowadays.”

What was the first proper language you learnt?

“I began learning Java when I was around 12, I remember hating it because I could have done it way faster with Baltik, so that was a tough transition.

The way I started is my parents signed me up for a kids programming course for Java. My dad, he's not a software engineer, but he works in tech and studied cybernetics in the 80s. So through this push, I continued programming, and I’ve been doing that ever since. It’s interesting though, had they signed me up for like maths or physics, maybe I would be doing that now. Who knows?”

You were one of the top competitive programmers at ICPC, how did you discover this passion?

Editor note: ICPC is an international algorithmic programming contest.

“When I was around 14 or 15, my dad found this correspondence seminar. It’s a format which is pretty popular in Czechia. And the way it works is you get some problems that you solve at home, and then originally you would mail your solutions in. Nowadays, of course, you just submit it through a web interface. They had some problems where you would just write algorithms on paper, so it was more theoretical. And that was my introduction to competitive programming.

What they did really well is that they had these camps where they invite people who did relatively well in the seminar. It was a pretty small thing, they would invite the first 30 people of out maybe a 100. And then you would spend a week with these fellow nerds doing algorithms and playing some games.

I remember these programmers would always try to break the rules of any games that we would play and try to find edge cases, which is a very programmer thing to do haha. There was this golf game, where you had a ball and were supposed to get it somewhere with sticks. And people were like, ‘if the ball lands on a person, and we carry the person around, I guess that doesn’t technically count as another stroke’. And that’s the sort of stuff that they would always come up with.

But I think that was really cool to see, because competitive programming is pretty niche. Before that, I didn't really know anyone who also enjoyed these types of problems. And then you get to meet a whole bunch of people who share the same hobbies. So that really motivated me to keep going with that.“

Interning at Blue Vision Labs (acquired by Lyft)

While at high school, you interned at Blue Vision Labs, a cutting-edge computer vision company that got acquired by Lyft. Tell me about it.

“Yeah, I got this via competitive programming essentially. There was a guy I sort of knew, who was 5 years older. And I think mainly through his referral I got into Blue Vision Labs. Now it no longer exists because it was bought by Lyft. And then the Lyft self-driving division got bought by Toyota.

And so the product was localization, for augmented reality. You have a phone and you point your camera to somewhere in a city, and then it can tell with centimeter precision where the camera is.

And the way they did it was by collecting big data sets from phone data. So they paid Uber drivers to install a phone in their car. And as they were driving around the city, they would just collect video footage. And then from this, they built these 3D point cloud maps that were then used for localization. So it was simultaneous localization and mapping. Scaling it up to cities was the main technical challenge there.”

You had a job at an amazing company before uni, you could have just continued full-time. So why did you decide to go to Charles University?

“I was kind of considering that. At the time I thought, ‘oh, I know everything there is to know about programming’. Which is kind of funny, because looking back, that's not at all true. And now I feel I know less than I thought before, because after uni, you sort of know about all of these things that you don't know. The horizon of knowledge is just bigger.

But yeah, I could have gone full-time, but definitely don't regret going to university. There’s so many fundamentals that I wouldn't have learned otherwise. And obviously, all the people you meet along the way that you wouldn't have got to do otherwise.”

Bachelors at Charles University

Why did you do 233 credits for your Bachelor’s?

“In my first year, I was still not sure if I wanted to go to university. So I ended up enrolling in two programs, I did computer science and philosophy. I thought the first year would be pretty easy, which it was, since in the first year they start from the basics because some people come in with no prior knowledge.

But pretty quickly everyone levels out and then you reach things that actually do take a lot of time. So a lot of these extra credits were from taking philosophy in that first year and running between the two buildings to catch the classes.”

What sort of a student were you? Were you studying? Partying? Working on side-projects?

“That’s a good question. I think it’s changed over time. During high school, I didn’t really care about grades since the subjects didn’t interest me, so I ended up doing competitive programming and also sank too much time into League Of Legends. I don’t know how many hours I spent, but I was like Diamond II towards the end.

At Charles University, I did try to get good grades though. It’s a shame though, compared to ETHZ there’s way fewer student clubs and extracurricular activities - most people go to lectures and that’s about it. So in the first year, I was still doing some competitive programming. An ongoing hobby of mine is also music in various forms - I was actually in two bands at the time, one with my technical friends and the second with my philosophy friends, which was pretty fun. I would play bass guitar, and it’s still one of my side hobbies nowadays.”

Interning at Jane Street

How did you get into Jane Street?

“I remember that year because, before that, I interned at Blue Vision Labs and then a small company in Prague and I wanted to go somewhere bigger. I was applying to Google and Jane Street and then maybe a few other places.

I don’t know how I knew about Jane Street, probably from the branding they do at maths competitions. The interviews went well, and the on-site interview was super cool because they flew me out and I could pick whatever flight and hotel I wanted.

At the same time, with Google, I was still in the interviewing process, but it looked promising. I got the offer from Jane Street though, so I had to decide soon. After I talked to a few people, they said Jane Street was harder to get into so I ended up going for that.

The competitive programming helped a lot for sure with the interviews. I feel it’s kind of unfair even, since you practice so hard to solve these small self-contained problems, which makes you good at interviewing. But that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to function well in a bigger project.”

How was the experience at Jane Street?

“It was really interesting, I’ve never been in a similar company. First of all, they were in the walkie-talkie building on the 30th floor, which was super cool. They had the internship set up so you have two halves/projects. During the first half, I was sitting close to the window that was looking towards Tower Bridge, and there was even a website where you could see which ships were passing and when the bridge was opening.

The first project was within the software engineering for the traders, so you sort of sit close to the trading desks, and you have people with like six monitors and a bunch of plots on them. There’s also Bloomberg terminals, everyone is shouting and they also had sound effects for different market events - it felt super chaotic and unlike any other place I’ve been, so it was pretty cool.

Technically it was also really interesting because they use OCaml which no one else really uses, so you spend the first week learning it. Learning OCaml wasn’t too hard, but it was the biggest codebase I’ve ever contributed to, so there’s significantly more overhead of just reading the code and trying to figure out what the things do and how they interact. So you just end up trying to figure out how the whole thing works before you even write a single line of code, so that was a new thing to learn.

In the second half I was on some compliance team and the project was about moving data stored in files into a database, so that was significantly less fun.

So yeah, first half was really cool and I also learned a lot about finance, like knowing that it’s not a zero-sum game, etc.”

Afterwards you never really did any big tech internships, you instead went for smaller experiences like IST Austria and Bini, why was this?

“Yeah I went to IST Austria for my bachelor thesis. A few people from Charles University had gone there before, I knew that they liked it, and it was pretty close, so I went for that.

And for Bini, I did actually want to go to big tech, because I hadn’t done that before and Jane Street wasn’t really big tech. So I thought it would be an interesting experience to at least try out, because I wanted to try as many different sort of work before setting on one after I finished studying.

But I started applying too late and then didn’t get into any big tech positions, because, you know, for summer internships you have to apply really early.”

What about Bini? Why did you get this internship instead then?

“So Bini was actually quite bad, the way I found it was my girlfriend at the time wanted to intern in Berlin, so I googled ‘Berlin Start-up jobs’ and on the site (berlinstartupjobs.com 😅) I found the position for Bini. But yeah that was an instance of me not doing enough research on the startup.

But so what they were doing was a competitor to Amazon Go - it’s those stores where you take stuff and there’s cameras and it figures out and charges you automatically. It was pretty funny because they were like, ‘oh read this book Zero to One from Peter Thiel’, where the idea is you should do something that no one has ever done. And their novel idea was to do Amazon Go, but in Europe.

And then I arrived there and it turns out that, well, first of all, I didn’t know, but they were not funded. It was just going out of the founders’ pockets, which was something pretty obvious to ask, but I didn’t at the time. So that wasn’t great.

And then yeah, I was the computer vision intern, so I’m supposed to help them build the system. But it basically turns out there was barely any system when I joined. So when investors came, the CEO would bring them to the demo area in the office with a few cameras mounted. He would take out his phone and grab a milk from a shelf, and on the app, it showed he grabbed a milk. And then he put it back and it would disappear. But as I mentioned, there was no system. And the way this worked was another guy was watching the video streams online, and then he was inputting commands in the web interface that would change what appeared in the app.

So towards the end of the internship, we had some sort of computer vision system, which was like 90% built by me. And of course it was very far from being anything production ready, but there was a pipeline of, we detect some objects and then we do some tracking of these objects across time. And then we project it into 3D space and we detect pick-up and put-back events. It was very brittle and didn't work very well, but it was also interesting to try out all of these computer vision techniques that I hadn't worked with. And I also had to architect the whole thing myself. But also, as you can tell, it wasn't going very well.

So that was a cautionary tale of like, there are some really bad startups out there. And this was one of them. So my advice would definitely be: do a bit of research beforehand, make sure they’re well-funded.”

Moving to ETHZ for the Master’s

After Charles you came to ETHZ, how did you choose that?

“Yeah, so for my Master's, I applied to a few places: ETH, Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial. I didn't get into Cambridge, I didn't get into Oxford. And then it was a choice between Imperial and ETH. And for ETH, I got the ESOP scholarship. So it was like, either I'm going to pay a shit ton of money to be at Imperial and have to survive somehow, or I'm going to get paid for going to ETH. So ultimately it was the scholarship that decided it.”

How was ETHZ different than Charles?

“I think, to be honest, it's sort of better in almost every respect. Definitely the quality of research that's done at ETH, of course, because there's big names and research labs that are doing really cutting edge stuff. And Charles University is only now catching up on modern machine learning.

I think Charles University was good for maths and combinatorics and discrete stuff. Since these fundamentals don't really change that much. But when it comes to staying on top of ML and AI, it wasn't really there. At Charles University, you basically have one lab that does modern ML-related stuff. And then at ETH it’s like half of the labs or more. That’s crazy, right?“

What was your favourite course at ETH?

“I took the ML major and the theoretical CS minor. Course-wise I really liked Advanced Algorithms, probably because of my competitive programming days.

Back then the Advanced Algorithms course was taught by Mohsen Ghaffari, he’s now at MIT. But yeah it was a really good course, it was a tough one but I learned so much, and it was very well taught. Also the exam is pretty open-ended, similar to competitive programming.”

Some cool side projects

What's Polylog, why did you start the YouTube channel and how did you get 60K subscribers?"

“So Polylog is something I started with my friend, his name is also Vaclav and he is a PhD student in theoretical CS at ETH. We knew each other from competitive programming. Our first video we made for 3blue1brown's competition in making math explainer videos called Summer of Math Exposition.

CS education is something that I was always interested in and this was a good opportunity to start doing that more seriously. So together we made the first video for the contest and decided to keep going even afterwards, and then one or two of the videos got blessed by the YouTube algorithm and that got us most of our following.

It's generally Vaclav as the theoretical CS expert who comes up with the topics and writes the script. Then I help edit it and I do the voiceovers. The animations were done by a bunch of different people over time, I'm actually working on animating the upcoming video because nobody else has time. Shoutouts to Richard Hladík and Filip Hlásek as well for helping with the channel.“

You’ve also started posting to TikTok recently, what’s your motivation there?

“So I really like working on Polylog but I also wanted a place to do videos that'd feel out of place on that channel. Mainly I wanted to showcase my side projects, usually small silly but interesting coding things that are hard to promote otherwise. TikTok is a really low-pressure environment to do that, where you can just create a quick demo of something, show it to the world and see if people like it or not. I'm planning to demo my future side projects there and then probably also make another YouTube channel to do longer, more in-depth videos about these projects.”

Go follow Vaclav on TikTok

Vaclav's TikTok

Joining Lakera, a leading AI security start-up in Zurich

Tell me about Gandalf. How did it start and how did you get to 500K users and over 30 million prompts?

“We had a hackathon at Lakera and I had read a blog post about prompt injection. And the original idea was that we would try out a couple of attacks and a couple of defenses, and then evaluate them against each other. And that's what we did during the hackathon with a few other people from Lakera: Max, Janet, and Mateo.

And then towards the end of it, I thought, ‘we have a bit of time, we could turn this into a web app’.

So then I made it a web app where you’d select the defender and then you’d try to beat it. Later we thought of the idea of turning it into a game. So we got rid of the dropdown menu to select the defender and instead we ordered the defenders by difficulty to form levels. And based on the initial feedback, we were like, ‘we could make it public’, maybe people would like it.

So I texted Mateo about it. And he was like, yeah, let's do it. So then we built the prototype web app. We worked on it for two weeks more or less, and then we published it. And we said, we're going to give t-shirts to the first 10 or 25 people who solve it.

We left it running for a few days and we had a dashboard to monitor the traffic. Then David posted about it on his LinkedIn and that gave us a traffic spike. I think the day after that, someone picked up on it and posted it to Hacker News, where it reached the front page. And on that day we had about 10 prompts being submitted every second, which was crazy.

And I remember, I came into the office and Max was already there. And he was like, ‘yeah, we reached the Hacker News front page and things are going crazy’. And the issue was that we were getting so many prompts that we were getting rate-limited by OpenAI.

So what Max did was that he asked everybody in the company for their OpenAI account and randomized which account would get each request. So it was a super hacky quick thing that alleviated the rate limiting issues. After this Hacker News thing, Gandalf just spread through network effect. And yeah, now we have 30 million prompts or something like that. It kind of went bonkers. “

Try out Gandalf

Vaclav currently works at Lakera, one of the world’s top AI security start-ups (based in Zurich and San Francisco). They built Gandalf, a game where you have to steal a password from a GPT.

Try Gandalf

Some words of wisdom

What’s some advice you would give yourself if you were just starting off studies again?

“I always had this fear of getting into new fields that I knew nothing about, such as making YouTube videos, or competitive programming (initially). You feel like ‘oh, these people are the experts, they’re so knowledgeable and wise, and I’m so far away from that’. But then as you learn more about the field, you sort of realize that the experts are less far away than you think. And that’s an experience that I’ve had repeatedly across different fields, and somehow that feels really motivating.”

Rounding off

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Arnie :)

👋 Say hi to Vinitra Swamy (26), 4th Year EPFL PhD and a serial “excellence” achiever

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Without further ado: This week I had the chance to chat with Vinitra, a super fascinating EPFL PhD. I tried my very best to make a summary of her countless achievements 😅

🏆 A track record of achievements

• While she was at high school, Vinitra interned at Google HQ through the CAPE program, where she met influential figures (like the creators of Python and Java!) and she discovered her passion for Computer Science. She founded “Bridging the Digital Divide”, a project to teach digital literacy to those in housing shelters and retirement communities. When she ran out of CS options to do at high school, she took community college courses (which also transferred to her undergrad). She also joined the First Robotics Challenge, where she built and competed in national robotics competitions with an all-girl team (at a Nasa Research Facility 😮). She then interned at LinkedIn as a software engineer (before uni 🤯).

• Vinitra did her undergrad at UC Berkeley, where she began TAing in her second year for the new Data Science course, receiving many awards and making significant contributions to project Jupyter and scaling auto-grading. She also interned at IBM Research by the end of her bachelors. Another notable achievement, she was able to complete her bachelors in just 2 years.

• She continued at UC Berkeley for her masters, where she worked on enhancing the data science education. All this while being involved in many student orgs (like president of the Computer Science Honor Society) and also researching at the UC Berkeley RISELab. She held the achievement of being the youngest Masters graduate in CS from UC Berkeley!

• After UC Berkeley, Vinitra went straight into the industry, working as an AI Engineer at Microsoft. Here, she worked on the Open Neural Network Exchange, to create a standard for neural networks so that engineers could translate between frameworks.

• After 2 years at Microsoft, Vinitra decided to go for a PhD in Europe, with a focus on explainable AI and neural networks. She decided to join EPFL, and currently works with Tanja Käser (ML4ED Lab) and Martin Jaggi (MLO Lab). Recently, she published a paper at the NeurIPS conference, and she was also part of the team working on the very first Open 70B LLM for Medicine (two very cool achievements!). That’s not all - she’s also been working on other projects, being involved as President of the EPFL CS PhDs (EPIC) and also in Wingman Campus Fund where she led a start-up investment into Adaptyv Biosystems (a biotech start-up that went to Y Combinator).

Vinitra is very clearly an exceptional person and super passionate about education, teaching and computer science. It’s one of the reasons she popped up directly in my head when I was thinking of people to feature for this newsletter!

There’s so much to talk and learn about her different experiences, motivation and ambitions, here’s how our conversation went:

Motivation and Ambition

How do you think being a 2nd generation immigrant affected your achievements?

“I think my parents had a perspective that whatever you do, be the best in it, take advantage of all the opportunities you have. Whatever you're passionate about, do it 100%. I think that mentality is probably very similar to what your parents had too.

My parents were living in Michigan before I was born and moved to California, away from a lot of their friends and their support system. At that time my Dad took a new job at Apple and my Mom was pregnant. Knowing that they made that change to give us the best possible education is really meaningful. I feel it’s very important to put in the hard work and feel proud about our cultural heritage, especially seeing the support they give to me and my siblings.

It's probably also why you see, especially in the Bay Area, a lot of second gen immigrants are doing really, really well.”

What's the main factor that pushed you to pursue all these projects?

“Well, from the very beginning, I’ve always liked connecting with people. And one great way that I found of doing that, luckily early in my time at Berkeley, was teaching. This was through helping people without a computer science background understand how coding can be applied to anything they felt most excited about.

The first research lab I joined was the Berkeley Institute for Data Science. And exactly at that time, Berkeley was starting to form a data science major and department. They had just rolled out the first pilot class, my first semester at Berkeley. It started with just a 100 student pilot. And when I left, we had 1,400 students in that one class a semester. Teaching that class was a lot of my time at Berkeley and how I ended up down this path.”

You were involved with teaching but also very involved with Project Jupyter. Could you tell me more about this?

“Using Jupyter, we were trying to remove the command line cost of learning computer science. For instance, people from a different discipline can kind of get intimidated in an intro CS class with even just installing the packages, getting everything to work, getting a program to run for the first time, how an IDE looks... But computer science is about so much more than that.

Data science, I think, sits at the perfect intersection for this. A lot of my master's thesis and my work with RiseLab and with David Culler, who at that time was the Dean for Data Sciences, was spinning up JupyterHub for education, a distributed cloud based version of Jupyter with auto grading, authentication and interactive extensions, and managed compute environments on this gigantic scalable cluster. For students, this meant that they could do data science with any device that could connect to a browser.

At the time, Berkeley was the first university to scale this. A lot of things were on fire all the time because you had live student users that were submitting assignments at 2 a.m. and then the server would crash and you'd have to figure everything out.

It was very chaotic. No better place to try something like that. And also I think the scale was also what made me interested in startups and entrepreneurship. There's no where else where you go from 100 to 1400 student classroom and then in addition to that, we had a MOOC with another 75,000 students enrolled and we had five more courses that were also using the same cluster and all these connector clusters.

Everything was growing rapidly and now the department exists, which is amazing. But it was just the coolest thing to be involved with and it was really only possible in those early years.”

What did you find most interesting? Was it the teaching part of the course or working on scaling JupyterHub?

“I was always kind of involved in both sides. I think the Jupyter ecosystem is a nice technical challenge, but what makes my heart happy is really getting people their first introduction to computer science in a way that makes sense to them and makes them feel excited and inspired about what can be done and what they're passionate about.”

You’ve done so many projects over the years, many in parallel. How do you juggle all of these?

“Whenever a certain project gets hard or you're feeling unmotivated to do it, switching is always nice. So I think it's always good to keep two projects on at any point in time. You can keep switching them out.

But yeah, I felt very passionately about teaching. And I also really liked my team and my job. Whenever I, for example, was getting tired of coding a bit and wanted to context switch into something more conceptual, I would think about how to frame an idea in one of my lectures. And then when I was tired of this, I really wanted to go into something practical. I would switch back to coding. So maybe I need both. Maybe that's the answer.”

Working in the industry

You joined Microsoft as an AI engineer right after your Masters. How was your experience?

“I loved it, honestly. It was really, really, really nice. I was on the AI Frameworks team within the Microsoft AI + Research division at the time, which has now since split off into Microsoft Cloud and AI. It was a really unique team for a couple of reasons.

One, the team was working on open source AI. That was really important to me because I think it really means a lot to be able to contribute to the community globally, even if you are working in big tech and not just in the form of products.

The second thing was that the team was quite special, it had a mix of both researchers and engineers working on the product side. So it was really a unique balance. And I think that this is exactly what you need to be on the cutting edge of AI, both how to implement the features appropriately, but also working on the next best thing or the state of the art.

And I think the culture at Microsoft is really really nice; the people, the company, they really take care of you. And Seattle is also a beautiful place, although rainy all the time. But the summers are particularly nice because everyone is so excited that it's sunny. All of those factors came together to have a really nice experience.”

As a student, we always have this big decision to make between industry and academia. You actually experienced both first-hand. I would love to hear how you navigated this.

“Yeah, well, actually after my master's, I never thought I would do a PhD. I was like, ‘Industry, take me! I want to work on hard problems at scale that impact tons of people!'

Industry has lots of exciting new things to learn, ways to contribute. I loved being part of a large organization and meeting lots of interesting, intelligent people, especially while presenting our work at conferences. The scale of industry resources, as well as ability to move quickly are unmatched.

However, about a year into Microsoft, I started feeling a bit restless. The work had stabilized a bit after a few large releases. The challenge became a bit easier. I realized I wanted to work on moonshot ideas and I wanted to teach again, both of which are much more possible in academia. I loved the team and I loved working on open source, but I felt it was time for the next adventure.”

Ok, so then you decided to pursue a PhD. How did you end up picking EPFL?

I was telling you about that golden handcuff feeling, right? I could see myself in five years hopefully making a lot of impact at Microsoft, but not really working on what I felt was the most pressing thing to work on.

I think later in life, when you maybe have a family and when you've settled down a bit, these kinds of jobs make a lot more sense with a stable career and impact and scope, roles. But at that point I was like quite young, I guess 21 or 22 (Editor note: 🤯).

I was very ready to go all in on something that was like crazy and unstable and very passionate working all-nighters with people that felt very strongly about it. And exploring the world and traveling and all of this.

So I only applied to European PhDs. I got a number of offers, which were really nice, but I think that was the time the pandemic started. All my open houses got canceled. I wanted to visit schools and make my decision based on how I felt about the people, etc. Instead, we had Zoom calls, and I felt strongly that the PhDs at EPFL seemed the most happy and balanced.

Also, the professors here seemed the most excited about what I was proposing, AI for education, but also specifically from the technical standpoint, my research interest in explainable AI and how we can understand neural network decisions.

There were not a lot of people working on it in Europe at the time, almost none. So you kind of had to convince people that, ‘this was interesting and we should work on this together, even though your lab doesn't do this right now’ which is quite a call to make.

And both Tanja Käser and Martin Jaggi here at EPFL were super enthusiastic about it. They were willing to say, ‘we will learn together on this’. And I thought that was just a really, really nice perspective, so that’s what led me to EPFL.”

LLM and NLP Research

You’ve published to NeurIPS recently, congrats! You’re also part of the team that launched Meditron-70B, an open LLM for medicine. What are your thoughts on the future of LLMs?

“Thanks! That's a big question, yeah. I think language models have done something very, very important, which has made AI accessible to the everyday person to see what it's capable of. And I know some people are scared of it and some people are very excited by it.

I think it has shown people very clearly what kind of tasks can be automated and what kind of tasks we really need humans for and how humans and AI can work together to collaborate, to create some amazing things.

I don't think AI is at the state (and maybe will ever reach the state) where it can reason more creatively than humans, without some huge technological advances.

What I do think is really awesome is that a lot of unnecessary mental labor like repetitive filing of things, etc, those kinds of tasks can really be taken care of with a higher accuracy and with not very much effort by AI, which leaves space for humanity to pursue so many more creative and higher level thought processes.

I think, we as a world will advance in terms of our intellectual curiosities, capabilities and contributions because of this.

From the education perspective, I think our schooling curricula needs to change to account for this in the way we test and the way we teach. There's a lot of work to be done even with the current advances, and I don't think it's been fully exploited yet. The next four or five years will show us exactly how many different ways LLMs can really help when it's integrated into our daily lives.”

Future Plans

What are your plans for later?

“I'm still figuring it out. I think end game I would like to teach data science. Right now, probably right after my PhD, I think the education space is primed for a revamp.

I’m hoping to found a startup in ML for education. I really think that there's a lot of good to be done here. I don't want to be yet another education platform, I want to tailor student learning experiences on existing platforms. I want to make exams far more intuitive. I want students to feel like they can connect with the material. And I believe all of this is possible with AI. The future is exciting!”

Advice for the reader

Is there any advice you'd give to the bachelor and masters students reading this?

“Find something you're passionate about and go all in on it. It doesn't mean that's what you have to do for the rest of your life. But I think that getting that depth is really nice.

The other part of it is to not let anyone tell you that you can't do something. I think a lot of people hear this abstractly, but if someone doesn't say a direct no, then it means that there is a way that it's possible. I think this ‘ask for forgiveness instead of permission’ phrase is really important when it comes to trying crazy things like graduating early or applying for a position you feel underqualified for.

Just try it. Don't be worried about what people think. And good things can happen to passionate people!”

Closing notes

Well, that concludes the super interesting conversation with Vinitra. This is just the very first edition of our student spotlights, and so we’d love to hear your feedback in the comments down below, I look forward to reading them :) Also vote in the poll!

Stay tuned!

Arnie

P.S. And for the many of you currently in your exams, best of luck 🤞!