New York Tech Week 2023
Highlighting my experiences at NY Tech Week 2023.
This past week I was able to travel to New York City for tech week hosted by Andreessen Horowitz. Firstly, I would like to thank the staff and mentors from the APEX Center for Entrepreneurs at Virginia Tech for their generous grant that allowed us to expense our travel and lodging. As I approach my graduation this December, I want to express my gratitude toward the people who have propelled my personal and professional development. No question I have ever asked has gone unanswered.
I was able to travel with two friends, also founders within the APEX Incubator program, by train from Union Station in DC at 5 o’clock in the morning. This was a great bonding experience for all of us, as we were able to talk about our future plans while sleep-deprived. During the train ride, we even got our friend who is afraid of a keyboard to write a few lines of code, a skill I promised would pay him dividends in the future.
Once we arrived to the city, we each tended to our own events. Leaving each other than regrouping to combine our shared brain dumps into overall takeaways. I was personally gravitated toward several of the applied engineering events. My other friends ventured off to fundraising events and meetings with other founders, which turned out to be the perfect storm of information to retrieve most of what was offered around the city.
In particular, an early Wednesday morning event hosted by personal.ai turned out to be the hidden gem I have wanted from LLMs. personal.ai is a user-friendly interface to let you upload and train an LLM, based on your own personal data. You can upload incredible information about yourself, ranging from articles you have written (such as this one…) to the model to learn more about you. Some of the exciting use cases will be to generate content for both personal and professional development. I can’t wait to try personal.ai to generate my next LinkedIn post. personal.ai does offer an API that allows you to integrate with other platforms. Available is a one click integration with Google Drive, which allows you to supercharge the model for your needs. A potential integration I can imagine is to combine your information with a productivity suite such as Notion to conduct weekly planning.
A second great experience was being able to venture to an undisclosed WeWork location to meet with a sports tech founder not much older than our group of 22-year-old undergrads. Being able to witness complete organization and obsession over a niche was amazing to witness. It inspired most of us to continue with head-first advocacy for our individual projects.
Of course, we had our fair-share of fun too (c’mon, I graduate in 7 weeks!). Shoutout to our new friend from UMD, who is an incredible advocate in the education space, teaching young women how to program. We enjoyed the stroll through SoHo and especially our trip to Kith Treats. We were also able to catch our hometown Washington Wizards defeat the Knicks at an NBA preseason game at Madison Square Garden. Albeit a preseason game, I am more confident in the Wizard’s ability to compete this year.
Overall, it was invigorating to meet people working on solving current problems with advances in AI and Hardware. With each of these events, I become more hopeful for our future that the makers will solve problems and allow everyone to live more creative, loving, and fulfilling lives.