Vlad Tenev

And so we really bonded doing these late nights in the physics building, banging our head against the wall, trying to solve these like super difficult problems.

Were they all problems that were already solved?

Yeah, yeah.

It was like, you know, homework problems, things like that.

Not unsolved novel research, at least at that point.

And then we both transitioned to math at the same time because...

Stanford physics department was geared towards creating experimentalists.

and I experienced experimental physics.

And these are the people that are like working on the massive colliders and it's basically like a industrial scale project, right?

And what appealed to me was one person, one mind sitting on a couch, lying down, maybe with a chalkboard and just taking 100% of your mental energy and creating an insight or a novel idea.

That's what I really loved about physics.

And it turned out that the purest way to capture that is math.

And I wasn't as interested in like the laboratory work, doing like electronics.

So you like the theoretical side.

I like the theoretical side.

And Stanford was much more towards creating experimentalists.

They had some good theorists, but if you wanted to get too theoretical, they sort of sent you to the math department.

But yeah, so my co-founder and I

we transitioned to math.

And then when we graduated, he was one year older than me, he stayed to get his master's in math.