The first time I was deeply drawn into a project was in my second year at university. I took a module on The Economics of Networks because its tutorials taught Python.

A network is a set of nodes (points) connected by edges (lines). The edges can have a value and a direction. We can represent a network in matrix form, each row is where an edge starts and each column is where it ends.

I was also taking a module on Economic Philosophy, which made you question: What exactly is the economy?

Aha! A is, say, a person who makes shoes, B is a person who makes plants. So A exchanges 4 shoes for 5 plants. The economy is just a (very complex) network!

The course was graded through a research paper on a topic of your choice. So I thought: why not write a Python program that simulates an economy as a network?

The project had a profound impact on me. It fuelled my curiosity, passion and drive towards finding and investigating interesting and beautiful ideas.

After thinking about what the economy is, a natural next step is to ask: what is the best economic system we can design?

I came to the question through a tangent: do advances in computation make socialism feasible? I went down this rabbit hole for my bachelor’s thesis.

The answer I found was: computation could solve some of socialism’s problems, but it couldn’t make it feasible, because it couldn’t come up with new innovations, which require competition and the profit incentive.

I came to the problem through my fascination with technology, and ended up concluding that technology was the most important part of the economy.

Once again, I came to my master’s thesis question through my fascination with technology: with all the data there is about individuals, why aren’t prices more personalised?

Imagine one bakery and two customers: a rich one who can pay 15 for bread, and a poor one who can pay 5. With a single price, the bakery earns more by selling only to the rich at 15 than by selling to both at 5.

There is a Pareto inefficiency: if the bakery could also sell to the poor at 5, it would earn 20 instead of 15, and no one would be worse off.

For the thesis, I wrote a Python program that simulated what would happen to different market structures if there were more price discrimination, and concluded that some markets would become less competitive.

For a while I worked as a research assistant for Prof. Sanchez-Pages while I decided whether to do a PhD.

Then one day I woke up thinking: why not turn my master’s thesis into a startup?

I loved coding and technology, but I didn’t know anyone who had founded a startup, nor had I even considered it a possible career path.