Context
I applied to NVIDIA on June 11, completed 2 rounds of technical interviews, and received an offer on July 22nd. Around the middle of June, I had already received a RO at Sequence, and decided to finish off the interview process for fun. I found this process to be quite ironic, because I haven't done leetcode for almost 6 months, and YOLO'd the interview process with 0 preparation. For a company I always thought was 'hard' to get into, I was proven otherwise lol.
(I also have incoming interviews for Scale AI and others, but I'm not bothering to prep for them)
Reflecting back, this situation gave me an awfully large amount of relief, despite knowing I wouldn't take the offer. Everyone around me in Waterloo had already gotten big tech/pre-IPO unicorns. Whereas my resume consisted of a relatively unknown real-estate company, and a dead pre-seed startup (fuck you Soverin). Around this point in my career, the narrative of people around me has basically been like: I've had fun at these startups, but I should lock in for 2027 summer big tech recruiting.
Despite knowing that I wouldn't follow this narrative, it still played a role in my head on putting my skill on whether I could get a well known 'prestigious' job. Because Chinese parents only know about the big names like FAANG but don't know about the thousands of other ways people make money in the tech industry.
Background
I think to understand my decision making and career trajectory, you kind of have to view my choices starting from high school. The main thing is that I was the only person in my entire high school to do reselling. I loved the idea of making the decisions within a business, and finding unique gaps within a market to profit off of.
While everyone was following the 'right' thing like starting clubs, being good at their instruments for band, or overly obsessing over their grades; I did something unusual and doubled down on it. My most vivid memory during this time was as university applications rolled around, people were talking about their competitions and how they won xyz award. When others read my essays about running a business, people thought it was stupid and not 'impressive'. But contrary to what everyones beliefs, I got into every CS program in Canada on the first day of admissions for each of them (maybe a 99% average played a role, but whatever).
How Reselling Determines my Life Choices
When you take my past as context for how I play about my career, it starts to make more sense with my decision making. Instead of having a couple big tech names on my resume:
- I have a viral hackathon project
- I built topclip.ai that made $50k MRR in its first month
- I built betterwrite.ai that made $10k MRR in its first month
- I raised an angel check purely from the fact that I've done these things in the past
And an achievement that I personally think is even more impressive but have not yet achieved:
- Be an early employee at a company that goes unicorn
And when you see my achievements/goals compared to one thing:
- Get an offer and work in FAANG/MANGO/whatever else
... It feels off. And in my perspective, what I have done and paved for how I want to go about my career, is a lot more interesting.
Choosing Sequence
When you take my history of wanting ownership into perspective, it makes sense that joining/starting a startup is the logical step. But to be clear - I am extremely selective with the startups I work for now, and won't work for bullshit cash-grab startups. And as a result of that, I've decided to take my RO at Sequence. I get to contribute generational company, be a part of the most talented people I have ever worked with. And most importantly, take and fully own business outcomes.
Meanwhile, how can I exercise my desire to becoming an owner and face concequences of my business decisions as an intern at NVIDIA?