Around 2023, I was invited to a dinner party with a bunch of young traders from a particular quant hedgefund. Almost immediately, I was greeted with a socratic debate with a stranger (let's name him John). Enamored by his intelligence, I realized I haven't had an interesting conversation rooted in ideas in years. I began to question what I was doing with my life. Inspired by that energy, I decided I wanted to work with these people.
The fund was elite, with less than 0.1% acceptance rate. I had studied accounting and finance from a non-target school. On paper, it was impossible. But nothing is impossible when humans are involved.
I took a huge bet, knowing that the fund was open to those with math talent. I pushed my “Top in the world mathematics award”. I knew John was impressed by my intelligence and my story of sneaking into a conference at 19 to find a trading job. I spent 300 hours of my weekend, on top of my 55hour work week, grinding through math. I loved every minute of it. Few months later, I sent "John" a video: a theatrical pouring out of my filled notebooks. I told him I was applying, that I had nothing to lose, and that I'd cold-call his Head of Trading if I didn't get an interview.
I eventually got the interview and learned that John fought for me in the background. But I failed. The other candidates were simply better. My heart broke, and I walked away with a new mandate: In whatever I do next, I need a 10x competitive advantage.
I've watched AlphaGo as a university student, and was deeply inspired by Demis dream of solving intelligence. AI was taking off. The fund was investing in Coreweave. Other quants were heavily sponsoring ICML. My intuition told me AI had already worked in trading.
When I told a senior trader that XTX Markets had spent $1 billion on a data center, he laughed and called it a bubble.
I suspected he was wrong. I cold-called several CEOs whose numbers I found on Bloomberg. They were loosely involved in AI infra (Gerko,Thiel,Gray). Their assistants politely rejected me, but it only clarified my resolve. I had to go all in.
I stayed a bit longer for my boss, but asked for one month to step away from my regular work and experiment with building a CNN based trading model. This was completely unheard of on the trading floor - a sales who studied finance working on pytorch code. I failed my experiment. But that showed me how great my boss is, my personal reputation and my convincing abilities. My honesty about quitting hurt my bonus, but it really doesn’t matter. In the long run, you should always leave abit of money in the table.
A few months after I left, I found this obscure firm writing detailed research on AI Infra for finance. I looked into their securities filing and found out that this quiet company of 10 people is a $100M USD revenue-generating business. I cold-called the company. The other guy was a young junior who was more than happy to exchange knowledge about the opaque business. You never know how much you can learn just by cold calling.
I saw an opportunity to build a business against the incumbents - supplying AI infra for hedgefunds. I knew my edge is in distribution and I was very excited to learn about the product. AI infra is also a horizontal layer technology, which means I can be anywhere in the world in the long term. If i fail in that idea, I can use my knowledge for a job in an AI Lab. This was the thesis I made with the limited information I had.
In Aug 2025, I cold emailed the innovation bureau of HongKong, showing them my blog and my interests. They were excited that someone in Hong Kong knew something related to neural networks and immediately gave me a phone number. It was the director of the local GPU lab. I cold called her and again, like many others, she was amused. She told me to just come and told her juniors to “teach Tiffany something”. I spent one month absorbing all the knowledge from engineers about AI infra supply chain, data centers and testing Chinese GPUs. The feeling of hustling sometimes gives me a sense of thrill - from bending the rules a little, from finding creative ways to get what you want and make things work.
There were tons of rejections. You just have to keep on trying, move on and forget about it. I’ve been doing this since I was 15. When people told me I was brave for quitting my high paying job, I am not sure if I feel brave. I am just quite used to dealing with uncertainty. I suspect courage is easy when you have no choice but to act. Prior to my success with AISC HK, I spent two weeks in the US physically cold mailing and fedex-ing to multiple CEOs and companies. For one of the company - I printed a t-shirt with a logo of theirs, videoed myself and sent it to every single board member. It’s not just chutzpah, you have to be different, thoughtful and prepared. I got an interview within hours, they were amused but didn’t want to sponsor my visa. In every call, I would always learn something and use that information to think for myself and roll the next dice.
I became more serious with my business idea and reached out to multiple conferences asking if they need a student volunteer. Open Compute came back with an offer to pay for my flight and hotel as part of charity. I was lucky, once again. I showed up, talk to people and gave them my wild duck PDF. This time, I actually had people proactively reaching out to me and saying they want to help me, offer me a job, none more enthusiastically than a well connected CEO called Dean N. I rejected because I knew it wasn’t the right fit
On the very last day of the conference, I got extremely lucky. I was unpacking my bags, taking out my GEB book on the table, when two older men noticed my “energy”and asked me what’s that book about. I yapped about Kurt Godel for 10 minutes, energetically talked about how that book inspired AI research (I know you might disagree).Turns out they were both senior data center leaders from Intel.
Over the next 40 minutes, they rigorously challenged my idea. I learned about hidden business practices no one outside could possibly know. This business is far more opaque than I thought. The previous 19 people i met either said my idea would work or said nothing. I also learned about the dynamics of AI Infra that makes margin incredibly difficult. I gave up the idea the next day - I will never be able to make a 10x product.
At NeurIPS, I felt aligned. "This is my people", I thought to myself. I was most impressed with a researcher in Reflection AI and two researchers from GDM. Their energy is palpable, and my instinct told me that I can really trust these guys, that I can work with them.
This is a room with 10,000 of the smartest people in the world. Once again, my heart wants to do something that is statistically difficult to achieve yet gives me so much energy. I looked back at my finance career. All I can think of is the people, not the money, not the fancy food, just the people.
The math might not always add up, but the chemistry surely did.