Tell us about your career path, from big tech internships to entrepreneurship.
Towards the end of my time at Penn, I was deciding between returning to Apple as an Engineering Product Manager or starting a company with a friend. Returning from my junior year internship, I was pretty confident that I’d be headed back to the Siri team after school and was looking forward to working with great people on a product that millions of people use daily. At the same time, however, I was interested in natural language processing and thought it to be an area where a startup had the potential to be quite successful. This left me with a choice between two entirely different levels of risk: a known job at a large, established company or a completely unknown future at an incredibly small company of two.
At that point, I reflected on this idea we had been exploring and realized I would regret it if I made the decision to not start Plasticity with my Co-Founder. While at first it felt risky going into entrepreneurship right out of college, I came to realize that it was probably one of the best times in life to start a company. We were young, comfortable working long days, nights, and weekends, and had little to lose and much to gain. Fast-forward five years now, and I am still working on Plasticity after we were acquired in 2020.
What kinds of activities in college best prepared you for your career?
I like to break college down into three buckets: academics, people, and community. All three areas aligned for me at Penn in a way that allowed me to pursue my interests.
Academically, I sat at the intersection of management and technology, which, rather obviously, helped quite a bit when starting a software company. The Wharton core gave me a helpful baseline business knowledge, and I have used more specialized classes like MGMT 235 and 237 throughout my career. On the engineering side, I still write code every day and some specific classes on algorithms and scalable computing are relevant in my day-to-day work.
Maybe more importantly, I was also able to surround myself with really smart and incredibly thoughtful people while at Penn. I met my cofounder in M&T and the broader startup community in Philly was also quite helpful. Dorm Room Fund and Rough Draft Ventures were our earliest investors while we were still in school, and the entrepreneurial ecosystem in the larger Philadelphia area provided unique access and opportunities.
Are there any other classes you wish you had taken more of in college?
My view of classes is that, whether or not they give you specific skills that you will use in your career, they offer different ways to think about problems. I found a good combination of courses while I was at Penn, but if I had extra time I would go back and take a few other Wharton courses like negotiations and maybe some higher-level finance classes. All that said, in most jobs, you learn on the go. And this is especially true for starting a company—you wear many different hats.
How do you view your career trajectory now?
I have enjoyed my work with Plasticity and the overall entrepreneurial idea of solving a problem in a way you can make a sustainable business out of. I will most likely start a company again in the future, but I can also see the benefits of working at a big company where the role is well-defined and you meet a lot of new people. The ideal situation is a company that takes on a meaningful, hard problem while working with a team of really smart people.
What do you realize now was truly unique about the Wharton experience?
The underlying base of business understanding is unparalleled. It may not necessarily be tangible or measurable, but the idea of being surrounded by business-minded people and concepts throughout college gives you a leg up when starting a company. Penn’s location in a big city is a benefit and the brand name of Wharton opens up so many doors. All of that said, the largest advantage of going to Penn in my perspective is the network of smart students and professors doing really incredible things. There is so much to learn from so many people.
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