My understandings of our cultures, our societies, and the world comes from the ability to connect directly with consumers worldwide. Being in retail is quite impressive as I am able to reach each and every individual consumer at a personal and meaningful level in order to solve their needs.I am still deeply involved in the development of our growth strategy and involved in all other major projects. Every day my job revolves around finding the optimal market fit for our products, negotiating distribution deals, and then ending the day with machine learning algorithms. Just kidding, the day doesn't end because I need to work on our React apps too. Margins are very thin in retail which forces me to value self sustainability and pure raw skill & performance in solving problems. There is no room for half measures, there is no room for bullshit, there is no room for error, or we are done.Sometimes I wish we can just launch a website, put things up for sale, and just be done with it. But the world doesn't work that way, does it? There are so many extremely deep problems here to solve. Every single day is a unique experience and I am very excited to continue solving them here.

I fell in love with the world of finance while solving an optimization problem at MochiThings. Our goal here is to develop algorithms & processes to be tested in our own hedge fund. We are not here to replace hedge funds with quant funds. We are simply here to do what we can to maximize earning potentials for our investors within a defined timeline.

MochiGroup was spun off from MochiThings and is currently led by our COO and operated by a former fulfillment associate to handle the APAC side of things. Yes, we grow and develop our employees no matter where they start from. My advisory role is to basically provide any kind of advice other than taxation and reporting compliance.

My raw skills and insights were incredibly valuable in the market. I decided to go out on my own and start consulting for early stage companies. My positioning was that I am a proven designer/engineer taught with formal theory with experience in scalability in the event my clients were able to hit insane traction. I was able to set up brand strategy, then define UX/UI and go all the way into an actual viable product for deployment. This positioning worked out extremely well for me as I was getting endless offers to build products in various industries. This was an extremely fun time for me and it was of course quite insane in the hours I was putting in. My skills grew tremendously here and while I was doing this, there was one and only problem I had in mind: how can I help all my clients extend their runway while working with me? I need to get paid too! All the fun ended (and my time as a consultant ended) when I was seriously burned by a bad deal. Not only did I lose out significantly from the cash side, there was also a serious threat to personal safety. This forced me to start looking into areas of risk assessment and due diligence. This costly mistake (at the time) had paid itself back tremendously in all my future endeavors. But this was a life lesson that had really set the next stage for all my future developments and really defines who I am today, what I stand for, what I believe in, and what I set out to protect.

I decided to join a very early stage startup a week after my graduation on the recommendation of my research professor. People thought I was crazy to reject corporate offers and to start working immediately. This experience was extremely valuable to my career development as I had the opportunity to attach myself to the executive team. I was tasked to build various products on the Rails stack to support the lead generation efforts as well as in-house offers on very tight deadlines. While I was performing my duties, I also ensured to operate like a research student to really develop insights on how to become an executive myself. I made sure to informally interview executives every chance I had. There were mixed experiences with the peers I was working with here. I can understand it due to the nature of early stage startups where the culture and governance is largely shaped around the personality of the executive team. I made sure I commit myself 100% into quality deliverables and ignore everything else. My advice for people seeking to join very early stage startups is that: you only get out what you put into it. Set your expectations correctly and realize that not everything in life is built for you or go your way. You have to commit and apply yourself or you are just wasting everyone's time.The timeline I was running on was that once I ran out of questions for the executive team and that no further insights can be developed, that was when I knew I was ready for the next opportunity.

I had been conducting paid research with Professor Sam Chung on various research topics that are related to Service Oriented Architecture and SaaS (Software as a Service) while I was going through my undergraduate studies. I developed various systems internally and externally for the ISOC Research Group. A notable project that is worth mentioning is eMath4KSEA. This was a mathematics competition management system for a non-profit organization. There were three versions of this product which were used for Dr. Chung's research. Each version utilized a different technology stack such as using the Java EE stack, C#/ASP.NET, and before I graduated, Ruby on Rails. This was all individual work and allowed me to gain absolute exposure in the entire development cycle from spec to implementation. I was able to practice and refine my craft in software architecture, test kits, and I was even able to put in my own UX & UI agenda to each version of the product. This experience was insurmountable to my career success and ultimately prepared me for the startup world by building sustainable products during my studies.

I graded two courses throughout the year: Discrete Structures I and Discrete Structures II. This is pretty much discrete mathematics spread across two quarters aimed at Computer Science majors. I still use this knowledge in my work today.