Impact
Steve Jobs’ passion was “to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products”. His sentiment, to make something that creates after it was created, is the impact I wish to have on the world.
I’ve noticed that the world changes from the matching of people who think differently from the status quo and the tools and facilities that allow them to transcend the typical ways of doing things.
But every single time, there’s some type of innovation that results in “compounded innovation”. I’m inspired by the stories of the Macintosh and the iPod, which were not only innovative solutions themselves but also fundamentally changed the landscape for future innovation. That cultural shift that occurred by the Macintosh allowed Jobs to forge deals with big music labels to create the iTunes Store, marking the changing attitude towards what was possible with technology.
This past summer, I had the opportunity to work in DC for the US Digital Service. That experience has broadened my horizons to what was possible with revenue. Before this summer, I didn’t realize just how much could be done with technology. At the government, I worked with colleagues using AWS to build out an API to enable Medicare patients to enjoy functional Electronic Health Records, and Federal Employees using Slack to better communicate and respond to critical issues.
DC allowed me to work more in healthcare; prior to DC, I worked on a project at MedHacks 2018, where our team developed a method to graph electrical activity of the brain to assist in the tuning of cochlear implants. There, at MedHacks, I was limited by my tools and thus opted to modify a Muse Meditation device to divert the EEG data it was recording to a web app I had setup to graph the data and measure its variance.
What was exciting to me about that product — despite the eventual failure — was that it changed our teams outlook on what was possible. Healthcare — an industry viewed as unbreakable — opened, and thus shifted my outlook. I took a deeper look at industries like education and delivery, taking note how Coursera used technology to create personal, yet massive open classes while DoorDash brought once far locations right to your doorstep. These companies made waves in their industries, and continue to spur innovation in their fields. The sheer breadth of KP’s portfolio excited me tremendously; there’s so much for me to explore and do, and I can’t wait to get started.
In my short life, I’ve been fortunate to work in different size companies — research groups, small startups, massive bureaucracies — but these experiences have helped me realize that my goal is to further innovation by creating great products and services that make waves — not splashes.
Background Image Taken from OS X Mavericks
