Jason Zhao
Life is one sublime project in self-education. I use this website to clarify my own thinking, share bits of my mind, and hopefully stir up some interesting conversations.
As of now, I get to spend much of my time:
- building at the intersection of storytelling and crypto,
- thinking about philosophy, politics, and economics,
- trying to make more jumpshots, lose less at poker, and surf while maintaining my dignity.
As a kid I wanted to be an astrobiologist and look for aliens. At school I studied mostly philosophy (stoicism, political theory, existentialism) and a little bit of computer science. I taught a course at Stanford's d.school on moonshots and care deeply about education. I kicked off a digital publication centered around tech and society: Stanford Rewired. I like Roman history a lot and am currently learning more about intellectual history, grand strategy, and ideas around progress.
In a past life I dabbled in VC at Arbor Ventures (fintech), SWE at Google X (computer vision), Design at IDEO (quantum computing), and PM at DeepMind (climate tech, reinforcement learning) & Google Cloud AI (natural language understanding). Basically I stayed just long enough to reach the valley of the Dunning-Kruger curve in all of these industries.
Some of the more masochistic things I've done are run a marathon, canoe 100+ miles from Minnesota into Canada, attempt to endure mumble rap (prefer Billy Joel, Beatles, Beach Boys, blink-182, and anything 00s pop/hip-hip), and maintain my unwavering faith that Arsenal will eventually win the Champions League. COYG!
"Adhere to your own act, and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant and broken the monotony of a decorous age." Emerson
