My First Life — The Entrepreneur
I studied computing at the National University of Singapore from 2007 to 2011. I was not the most brilliant student, but I was restless. While others were content to graduate and find respectable jobs, I felt an itch to build something of my own. I tried, and failed, more times than I care to remember.
After graduation, I kept at it. In 2012, with two friends equally foolish and hopeful, I started a company called iCarsClub. The idea was simple enough: car owners could rent out their vehicles when they weren't using them. It sounded sensible — and to our surprise, it worked. Customers came, investors followed, and soon we found ourselves in the curious position of being taken seriously.
As Chief Marketing Officer, I spent most of my time trying to make noise — and succeeded. We were written about, filmed, interviewed, sometimes praised and sometimes mocked. The company grew fast and expanded to China, where attention and money arrived in greater quantities than we could manage. We received investments from firms like Sequoia and IDG, over sixty million dollars in all. In 2014, I was named to Forbes 30 Under 30. It was a heady time — full of movement, excitement, and confusion.
Success, as it turned out, was less solid than it seemed. The business made sense only at a scale we couldn't reach without exhausting ourselves. So we sold it. The decision was rational, perhaps even wise. Still, when it was over, I found myself wondering what exactly I had been chasing all along.
The Gap Year — A Search for Meaning
In 2018, I went to Oxford. I told my friends I was studying theology, but what I was really studying was myself. For the first time in years, I had time to think without the noise of business.
I read from Plato and Aristotle to Descartes, Hume, and Sartre — from the existence of God to the nature of morality and meaning. I was particularly drawn to the existentialists. Each offered something different: Christianity, its comfort; philosophy, its doubt. If there is no meaning given to us, then perhaps it is our task to create one.
That year was quiet. I walked a great deal, spoke little, and left Oxford with no grand revelation — only a clearer sense that meaning, like a business, must be built with one's own hands. As it turned out, that detour also shaped my later research, teaching me to think from first principles and to question every assumption.
My Second Life — The Researcher
After Oxford, I returned to the familiar disorder of startups. I helped build a property technology firm, then an online education venture called Vivaling. Both did reasonably well, but my mind was elsewhere.
In 2019, I came across GPT-2. It wasn't very good, but it was enough. I began writing small models to generate Chinese poetry, fascinated by the thought that a machine could play with language at all. What began as curiosity soon became obsession.
I decided to enter research. The universities disagreed. My first PhD applications were rejected three times — quite sensibly, given my background. But reason has never been my strongest suit. I wrote to Harold, told him my story, and asked for a chance. To his credit, he said yes.
I joined his lab in 2022 while taking a certification course in AI and robotics. That first year was hard. I read more than six hundred papers — more than I had read in my entire first life. At first, it was painful; later, almost pleasant. One can grow accustomed to anything. I earned straight A's, moved into a master's program, completed it within a year, published my first paper, and was admitted to the PhD program in 2024.
Now I am a PhD candidate at the CLeAR Lab, studying how robots can move safely through the open world — places they've never seen, with no map to guide them. It is a simple goal, though not an easy one: to help machines find their way, as I once tried to find mine.
The Other Life — The Art of Living
Work has never been the whole of life. I have always believed that one must also learn to live — to pursue beauty, mastery, and delight with the same seriousness one gives to labor.
When I first came across GPT-2, I did not use it to solve problems, but to write poems. I finetuned it on classical Chinese verse and watched, with quiet amusement, as it struggled and sometimes triumphed in shaping lines of unexpected grace. The exercise began as play, yet it became a study in rhythm and restraint — a dialogue between the ancient and the modern, between human intention and mechanical chance.
That same impulse toward form and harmony led me to study interior design at the National Design Academy (UK). What began as curiosity turned into craft. I learned how proportion and light could make a space speak softly, how stillness could be designed. Later, I put this to practice when I designed my own house in Shanghai. Each room, each shadow, felt like a thought made visible.
Tea, too, has been a quiet companion. I have always admired the discipline behind simplicity — the way a single cup, prepared with care, can hold centuries of tradition. I took a course in tea appreciation, became a certified advanced tea taster, and for a time created my own brand. I travelled through Yunnan, visiting remote tea gardens, tasting leaves still warm from the sun. It was not business but devotion — the pursuit of a flavor that felt like calm itself.
And then there is motion — the other half of stillness. I travel often, drawn by landscapes that remind me how vast the world is. I have wandered through Europe, North and South America, and stood among the silent ice of Antarctica. In Peru, among the ruins of Machu Picchu, I felt the strange humility of standing where civilizations once dreamed. I ski whenever I can — in Chamonix, Niseko, New Zealand and others— chasing the fleeting precision of balance on a slope that forgives no mistake. There is a discipline in that motion, a kind of meditation that happens too quickly for thought.
In these pursuits — art and design, tea and travel, poetry and snow — I have found a rhythm to life. Not the loud rhythm of ambition, but the quieter one that comes from giving oneself fully to whatever lies before you, and finding, for a moment, that it is enough.