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, against the 7,000+ other private schools across the world.
I wanted no part in that cesspool of tutoring. My time was instead spent online, in competitive games, or on BB Code forums. I write more about this along with my experiences in crypto here, but this all served to introduce me to my first startup. 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, joined RevisionDojo. I worked alongside two-ish other engineers as we scaled from 3,000 to almost 200,000 students; 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. In a way, we killed tutoring. 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.