a life well lived comes down to two daily acts: build something your future self will thank you for. feel something your present self will miss when it's gone.

hi. i'm justin.

taiwanese american, which i put first because it is the part i am proudest of and the part nobody asks about. raised on the north shore of long island, sent to taipei for middle school, returned, and then on to vanderbilt, which issued me a very handsome piece of paper that i keep in a drawer with the other receipts. since then i have been employed, more or less continuously, in interesting problems with interesting people. that is the whole résumé. the rest is detail.

by day i run the operating system inside an agentic data company, meaning everything the org chart does not show and everyone assumes someone else is doing. it keeps me sharp. after hours it gets harder to file. there is a sleep brand that is secretly a longevity play. there is a company that believes in exactly one molecule. there is a public person whose deal flow i look after, a market book i run with a council of machines whose opinions i keep score on, and a second brain that at this point knows me better than i do and has started to say so.

if you need the pattern, it is this: i make many-part things run as one thing. the method is less elegant than the pattern. a heat-seeking missile for pain: you find the one thing that is rate-limiting, you make it disappear, and then you find the next one, and you do this until the machine goes quiet, at which point someone brings you a louder machine. i have come to enjoy it. bring me the weird ones.

off the clock: calisthenics, skeet, climbing things, racing cars, and, before any of that, five years on a volunteer fire truck. on the fun scale below i aim for type two and am regularly promoted to type three, which is not fun during and not fun after and makes a story you can dine on for years. the most recent promotion: two reps short of the world record for pull-ups off a helicopter, and then jiu jitsu at three in the morning, which took the elbow. the elbow is recovering. the record is not going anywhere.

these notes are more for me than for you, but walk around. most of the doors are in the sentences. if you arrived here through someone we both know, that is the correct way in, and the email is at the bottom.