Inward

2020

My first startup attempt · An education project

Two friends and I started an education project during my master’s. We wanted to help students decide what to study and where to apply. We started by writing on WeChat, and parents began getting in touch for advice.

We stopped after two months. We were all studying, and the time differences made it hard to keep the project going. It was my first go at turning an idea into something useful, and it taught me how much work that takes.

2022–2026

What I learned working with startups

After graduating, I joined several startups as part of their founding teams. I worked on strategy, product and operations.

None of those projects grew much, though the reasons varied. Starting from scratch taught me things I’d have been less likely to learn at an established company. I learnt how to listen to users, find out whether there was a market, build a product from the ground up and figure out how to make a business out of it.

Working with different teams helped me form my own judgement. I wanted to understand why some ideas held up and others didn’t. I was also getting clearer about what I was good at and what I actually wanted to do.

2026

Starting again · AISKI

In the first half of 2026, I took a step back to think about the previous few years.

Why had some projects been so hard to keep going? Was it the market, the product or the team? What had I learnt, and what did I want to spend the next few years doing?

I came away with a clearer idea of what I wanted to do, what I could bring to it and where I could start.

That’s how I came to start AISKI. AI education and business consulting gave me a place to begin testing my ideas about how people work with AI and how that might change the way organisations work.