I grew up in a computer lab, but I spent most of my time pirating books onto my Kindle. I did well academically but I realized early on that - at least in my school - the risk to reward ratio of studying simply sucked. Almost a dozen of my friends placed either top in the world or top in Vietnam in their iGCSEs and that's against 7,000+ private schools across the world.
I wanted no part in that cesspool of tutoring and so my time was instead spent online in competitive games and BBCode forums. I write more about this along with my experiences in crypto here, but this all served to introduce me to startups. My sophomore year was spent catching stand-ups at midnight, pushing commits before exams, and teaching developers twice my age how to use our RPCs.
Junior year I started my IB diploma, and at the same time, worked on RevisionDojo. I worked alongside two-ish other engineers as we scaled from 3,000 to almost 200,000 students, and we also got into YC's F24 batch. This all coincided with the advent of GPT-4 and I'm pretty confident that we worked on some of the first AI-generated lessons ever. Hitting publish while sick on our off-site and seeing almost twenty thousand lessons created hours after release (during summer!) is still a core memory of mine.