returning home
dropping out of grad school, learning to code, joining two startups, running two marathons, and a proposal
After 6 years living in Vancouver, I’m returning to Toronto. Why did I move, what did I learn, and why am I coming back? The story involves dropping out of graduate school, learning how to code, joining two startups, running two marathons, and a proposal — but we’ll need to rewind a bit to make sense of all that.
⚀ — Navigating
Let’s speedrun childhood to university. I was born in Beijing and immigrated to Canada when I was 3. Grew up in Richmond Hill and made my way downtown to the University of Toronto (I wanted to join my best friend at McMaster, but got rejected; too much WoW).
I enrolled in life sciences at uni. I didn’t know what to study, but felt how the body operates was neat, so I majored in immunology & physiology to learn more about it. I did a lot of undergrad research, mainly since it was more interesting than coursework, and liked it. On that basis, an inspiring book (The Emperor of All Maladies), and not knowing what I wanted to do with my life, I decided to do graduate school and study interactions between cancer and our immune system.
Grad school was an experience - the first half was really good, and the second half was really bad. When you start out, you typically do rotations in a few research groups to assess fit. I rotated through three groups looking for cancer research projects, and chose one that was working with leukemia patients. Unfortunately, that choice was a mistake.
Looking back, I made an incorrect assumption: that what you work on is more important than who you work with. In my opinion, the reverse is true. If you do something you like but are in a stifling environment, your motivation is quickly sapped and you don’t get much done. Conversely, if you work in a great environment with interesting people whom you like, just about anything is engaging and work feels like play.
So, towards the end of my degree, I decided against writing a thesis and dropped out. But it wasn’t a waste! In addition to that sweet, below-minimum wage stipend, I also met my partner, ran my first race (8km; learned my heart rate can reach 200 bpm), and discovered the power of programming.
⚁ — Rebirth
I realized that via programming, instead of trying to imitate a robot running experiments, I maybe could get actual robots to do my job for me. Like running my own lab of alarmingly productive, questionably paid graduate students! With this grand vision in mind, I decided to study computer science.
At that point, I’d been living in Toronto for 6 years and wanted a change of scenery, so I decided to move to Vancouver Burnaby and enroll in a post-baccalaureate diploma program at Simon Fraser University. Luckily, I landed just-in-time to enjoy a pandemic in a new place where I didn’t know anyone. But I managed to have a decent time: drawing pyramids in the terminal with C, almost failing linear algebra, and discovering a love of running.
I’ll never forget the first web app I built as a side project. For some reason, I decided to learn C#, read a textbook about ASP.NET Core before bed each night, and then built an issue tracker that I deployed to Azure. It was a terrifying and magical experience. Terrifying because it felt like you needed to know a million and one things to get started. Magical because after you got through it all bug by bug and deployed the damn thing, it felt like you had unlocked the primordial essence of creation at your fingertips.
My somewhat unusual experience with C# and ASP.NET Core landed me an internship working with the same tech stack, and after 8 months and another semester, I graduated.
⚂ — Endurance
Job hunting was rough. Have you ever procrastinated so hard you wrote a deep dive about exercise physiology? During the pandemic, I connected with running profoundly - I think because endurance holistically expresses the beauty of physiology, compassion, and spirit. As Haruki Murakami put it: “running is both an exercise and a metaphor”. I’ve felt this about writing code, prose, and design too. It’s interesting how the end state of anything you engage with consistently over a long time seems to converge to the same artistry.
I felt drawn to joining a startup. Something about the type of people. The camaraderie, positive-sum games. The daring - why not us? The lack of theatre and realism. The breadth - verbs over nouns. And luckily, after a few months of looking, I was able to find a great match.
We had an overarching vision of helping people live more aligned lives. V1 was to manifest this in your wallet. The idea was: when the impact of our investments and spending are hard to see, we don’t look. The product aimed to clarify this: to look at our beach of wealth and distinguish each grain of sand.
Have you ever read that startups are hard? Yep. But they’re also hard in a way that can’t be resolved solely through text. Some things must be embodied to be understood. Still, I’d like to offer a take. Startups are hard fundamentally because understanding another human being is hard, let alone a “market”. Startups are hard because understanding yourself is hard. That’s the terror and magic.
Marathons are also hard. Curiously, they involve a different quality of discomfort than shorter distances. For a mile, the intensity saturates your cognition - so when it gets tough, you can just hold on for dear life to endure. Not so for a marathon. It’s a higher fiend who’s figured out that humans can suffer more if you let them think. So when it gets tough, each step is negotiated, stretching willpower to extremes, creating space for doubt to fester. To be dramatic, it’s figured out that humans are the best instruments for bringing about their own destruction. Ain’t that some shit.
⚃ — Prometheus
After the startup wound down, I wasn’t sure what to do next. I reflected on optimizing for astounding yourself and being truthful about your desires. I thought about pursuing writing, building an “open” startup, and documenting my running journey. A startup of oneself. But I stumbled before I could really start. Perhaps I didn’t give myself enough time to rest. Perhaps I still had a bone to pick with startups. Perhaps I was simply being a coward.
Then came an opportunity: to work at a startup with my best friend whom I’ve known since high school. And I had the exact skillset and alternative perspective they needed - the tetris piece to complete the row. I didn’t get into McMaster all those years ago, but sometimes things come full circle. When the student is ready, the master appears.
What we do is harder to explain, but here’s what I’d say the vision is. Humanity has progressed in part due to our increasing ability to transform matter to particular ends. Historically, the way we’ve done this by working forwards: trial-and-error with starting materials. Advances in technology have unlocked the potential to work backwards: given the end material, explore the space of possible ways to create it and return the best one. The legos for this vision are now here, we just need to figure out how best to assemble them.
Which is all quite frankly: amazing. To witness man becoming prometheus by the sweat of his brow. The student becoming the master.
⚄ — Together
Around this time, I proposed to my partner. It takes a rare soul to deal with someone with an encyclopedic knowledge of video game quotes and an eagerness to share them. I blame the Civilization series. Our relationship taught me that it takes someone else to fully see yourself, know yourself.
It makes me think about connection. Everything is much more of a whole than we realize. The elements expunged from the origin of the universe coalescing to form the Sun. The Sun’s primordial fusion blanketing Earth with light, harnessed by plants, loaned to man, returned at our ends.
Simply stardust, locally reversing entropy, trying to understand itself. Trying to understand what the hell 42 means. Maybe Steve Jobs figured it out: “Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow”.
∞ — Epilogue
Continuity is unusual; most natural things have seasons. You move away from the city to rediscover yourself, to hear the whispers drowned out by the noise. After figuring some things out, you move back to the city to find and connect with your people, who have also changed. And this cycle repeats, each a masterful strike against malleable steel, shaping and balancing the result.
This is nature’s duet of death and rebirth. You leave, turn over each of your atoms, then come back. The same, yet different.
spencer here. this is a first post to “reintroduce” myself to toronto (and the internet). did you connect with anything here? if so, i’d love to hear about it. is there something i should expand on in future posts?
if you’re in the north york area and are interested in any of: running, biology, design, software engineering, startups, trying to figure life out - let’s connect!
