Jesse Zhang

I grew up in Colorado, in Boulder.

Boulder is a pretty academic town, but there's not very many people that are like super gunning for like these contests.

A lot of my friends had just kind of grew up in not the places you would think, right?

California, Texas, New York.

And so it gives you some level of community of like, okay, there's a lot of other people out there that are doing the same things as you and meet a lot of them.

And then now that we're all grown up, those relationships have lasted for a long time.

But yeah, then the environment is one where it's like similar to company building.

You're like how well you're doing is like fairly objective.

There's a lot that has to go into it.

There's a lot of preparation, a lot of having the feeling of it is like a long-term thing, but because your results are fairly objective, there's constant motivation to improve.

I think that's quite nice.

One of my big theses is that this audience of people or this sort of community of people, there's a lot of untapped potential there and to actually like turning them into people that want to do business or companies and things like that.

A lot of them have historically gone into trading or academia.

I mean, those are perfectly awesome jobs.

A lot of the folks here, this background is correlated to one where it's a little bit more like risk averse and kind of just get your good grades and like follow a track.

And if you can kind of divert some of that talent into like company building, I think there's just a lot that can be done.

One is the competitive nature that we just talked about.

The other is just like the problem solving.

So I think one thing that I believe very strongly is that one of the best things you can do when you're building a company or anything is just have pretty good introspection on where your strengths are.

And at least for this group, it's more on the problem solving side, just like, and the problem can be very vague.