Cassie Kozyrkov

no adding any embellishments, keeping things insufficiently heroic.

I know I could use a little bit of a heroism injection, but there's a, I guess, there's definitely a feeling sometimes of, that there needs to be translation between

When I hear an American talking about something and when I say exactly the same thing, there could be two different levels there.

We want to go far back.

Yeah.

OK, well, when I was about eight or nine years old, I discovered the most beautiful thing in the universe, which I'm sure you all know what that is.

Spreadsheets.

All right, it was gorgeous.

And so while the other kids were playing outside and they were climbing their trees, I had this gemstone collection.

And the entire purpose of this collection was every time I got another gemstone, there was another row from my spreadsheet.

What color is it?

How hard is it?

What is it called?

A sort of obsessiveness.

I loved data from a very early age.

At about 11 years old, I had graduated to my next love, which was databases.

I was playing with Microsoft Access.

My father is from Moldova.

My parents are both Soviet physicists, as one does, absolutely normal South African household, two Soviet physicists and their strange kid who likes spreadsheets.

And I'm not sure actually that they particularly encouraged this strangeness.