(Dec 2025)
This has been a pretty crazy year to say the least for me. Career wise: I’ve transferred schools from a small state school to a top 20 target school. I’ve started and failed my first startup. I had my first “real” internship. I’ve changed my major from mechanical engineering to computer engineering, and I’ve had about a million different career aspirations since starting. Additionally, I went all in on my new found passion: filmmaking. I’ve completed all of this under the same mentality of building in public, and that itself has had it’s own ups and downs.
To start, I want to conceptualize and rationalize the idea of building in public. What does that even mean? For me, it’s posting my successes, failures, and overall journey, both in my career and across my projects, on social media.
I’ve been posting consistently on Instagram and LinkedIn for the past year, roughly 5–10 times each per month (more on Instagram). I use LinkedIn for startup, tech, and engineering-related content, and Instagram for film and creative work. I’m actively working on cross-posting to Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok, but I haven’t seen the same level of success there (likely because I haven’t invested nearly as much time into those platforms). I firmly believe that sharing your journey, building an audience, and connecting online is one of the most influential factors in shaping your career, if you do it correctly.
Social media is deceiving. You can see one hundred, one thousand, or even ten-thousand views, and it still doesn’t feel like you’ve made much of an impression. Once I started chasing virality, seeing “1k” views felt like a failure. But one thousand people viewing your work means a lot more when you actually break it down.
For example, on Instagram at the beginning of the semester, I was posting whatever came to mind, from being stressed about classes to getting cut from every club at UMich. Even if a post only gets one hundred views, that’s still one hundred people forming a split-second opinion about you with almost no context. I’m guilty of this myself: when I see a post online, I instantly generate an opinion and move on. This ties into a psychological phenomenon called the Illusory Truth Effect, where repeated exposure shapes perception over time. Those impressions stick, especially the negative ones.
Recently, I’ve started to mentally disassociate myself from my online presence, and it’s been one of the most beneficial decisions I’ve made for my mental health. At the end of the day, even if what you post online doesn’t accurately reflect who you are as a person, if it’s tied to your name, people will still construct a narrative around you.
A few examples come to mind. Roy Lee, founder of Cluely, deliberately amplifies an eccentric persona online to shape how people perceive both him and his product. John Legere built a loud, unfiltered, anti-corporate presence on social media that permanently reframed how people viewed T-Mobile as a brand.
All of this is to say: be mindful of what you post online, and draw a clear line between your social media persona and who you are in real life. I’d consider myself relatively tame online, but I’ve still posted content that created false narratives and negatively affected me.
However, posting consistently and building my personal brand has opened doors that I wouldn’t have had access to otherwise. As mentioned above, Roy Lee and John Legere quite literally built their products and companies through their online presence. Marketing online is an incredibly powerful tool, especially in the startup world, and if you can do it well, you become a massive asset in the tech ecosystem.
This brings me to my next topic: my first app.
Back in February, I entered a hackathon with my friends Kieran Llarena, Albert Chen, and Irwin Patcharaput. We had the idea of making “Dress to Impress” (a popular Roblox game) in VR, and ended up creating OOTD, a social media app that gamified outfit checks. We won the hackathon and went on with our days, but after receiving multiple DMs from people asking where they could access the app, we decided to go all in. We ended up recruiting Justin Lagman to be the Head of Design along with Aimee Wu (Design), David Huang (Development), Mya Smith (Marketing), and Tanith Llarena (Marketing). I can only speak to my own experience with this startup on the marketing side, but if you want to read about the product from my co-founder, Kieran Llarena, click here.
The first few months flew by. At the time, I treated OOTD as a small side project I could work on with friends. Over time, I naturally found my role as Head of Growth, and started investing 10-15 hours into OOTD per week. This primarily consisted of outreach and hosting events, producing content, and directing photoshoots and films (areas I was completely new to).
Looking back on the early stages, my biggest mistake was recruiting too many people too quickly. I initially thought more people would mean more content, but without a fleshed-out vision for our marketing or the app itself, more people actually meant more complications. At one point, I was trying to manage five different people for content, which in hindsight was a huge mistake. Trying to tell others what to market and how to market our product when I hadn’t figured it out myself didn’t make sense. Alignment around a shared vision makes or breaks a startup, and adding more people makes that exponentially harder.
Another major issue was that we were marketing ourselves as a brand rather than a product. I hosted photoshoot events, we created fashion content, and we even made hoodies. All of this helped promote our name and build an audience, but it became a problem when people started referring to OOTD as a clothing brand instead of a consumer app. It sounds obvious in hindsight: if you’re trying to sell an app, you should promote the app. But in reality, our vision for what OOTD was became blurred. This created a disconnect between the brand and the product.
Because we saw so much success with brand-based content (over 300k views on instagram and 3M across all platforms), we started to second-guess whether we could achieve the same success with the product itself. In doing so, we built an audience that wasn’t actually interested in using the app. I believe this directly contributed to our high acquisition but low retention rates (over 300 initial downloads, but no one actively using it today lol). That said, some of this likely also ties back to product issues as well.
The final topic I wanted to cover was my experience transferring from Wayne State University to the University of Michigan.
At Wayne State, I was extremely dialed in on school. I took around 37 credits total (19 my first semester and 18 my second) and was on track to graduate in 2026. Academically, things felt very manageable. More recently, during my first semester at UMich, I took 11 credits, and thought these 3 classes were absolutely hell compared to the 11 classes I took at Wayne.
Throughout the semester, I constantly found myself looking back and comparing the two experiences. Maintaining a 4.0 GPA at Wayne and staying near the top of my class felt straightforward. Now, I’m struggling just to stay around the average within UMich EECS. Some of that is certainly due to the increased rigor of the coursework. Another major difference this time around was workload outside of class. Alongside my coursework, I was also working around 20 hours per week as a software engineer at Yazaki. I think an even bigger factor is the sheer number of distractions, and I use that word lightly, that exist at UMich.
I was first introduced to the idea of “rushing” and the value of the professional fraternities and clubs this fall. Suddenly, success didn’t just feel academic. It felt social and institutional. Coming from a school where most organizations were open, non-competitive, and recreational, the culture shock was immense.
Having previously been rejected from UMich, I already had complicated feelings about exclusivity in higher education. Experiencing even more layers of exclusivity within an already selective institution made those feelings harder to ignore. The idea of people assigning value and status based on what college or organization they belonged to genuinely unsettled me.
At the same time, being surrounded by this culture was confusing, especially when many of my friends were deeply invested in it. Part of me wanted to rationalize it away as a byproduct of Western society or capitalism. Another part of me strongly rejected it, yet couldn’t ignore the reality that conventional success often seems correlated with participating in these systems.
I even tried to start a club centered around non-exclusivity, but it quickly became clear that this is far easier said than done. I’m still conflicted about it all. Moving forward, I’m trying to break things down and identify what I truly value, rather than defaulting to what’s rewarded around me.
That clarity shows up most in my filmmaking. My goal there has always been simple: to help amplify people’s voices through video. Prestige and hierarchy matter far less to me than impact. I think that’s also why I’m drawn to startups. The idea that a small, aligned team can break through a corporate-driven society by building something meaningful feels far more authentic than chasing status for its own sake.
That’s all I have the bandwidth to write about today. When it’s all said and done, I’m extremely grateful for what this year has brought me. I’ve met so many amazing people and worked on so many amazing projects. Having the platform to share my journey has been monumental for my growth, and I’m excited to keep learning. If anyone found any points in this to be interesting or has seen any of my work and wants to learn more, please reach out. I’m always open to a call or even grabbing a coffee if you’re near Ann Arbor.