🍀June, July, and August 2024
San Francisco, Ireland, and Battery packs
👋Hey, I’m Sasha :)
I’m a 16 year old based near Toronto who’s super interested in battery tech and electronics. I’m currently diving deeper into climate! Outside of this, I love to go running and biking, especially as the weather gets sunnier. Welcome to the past few months of my life :D
Highlights:
Spending some time in SF!
Travelling to Dublin for the Emergent Ventures summit + getting exposed to the European “tech” scene
Building a battery pack with 18650 cells
My first Sprint triathlon
🏍️Running a pilot in Moshi, Tanzania
, , and I built a project to bring motorbikes to rural Tanzania in May (learn more here!). At the beginning of July, we hired Patrik to collect data for us about the state of transportation in 6 villages surrounding Moshi. We are still deciding how to move forward with the project, but the pictures are fun!
🌉Thoughts on SF after a second visit
The first time I went to San Francisco, I was starstuck. I had romanticized the city after seeing it in media throughout my life, and from hearing all of the massive tech-related stories that originated there.
Don’t get me wrong, I had a great time. But I turned a blind eye to a lot of what’s happening in the city. On my most recent visit, I think I got a more accurate picture of what SF is like (shoutout Mason for letting me stay with him!)
The other thing is that San Francisco is touted as this amazing city you should go to if you want to “start a startup,” with the idea being that you’ll work extra hard there. But the thing is, there are WAY too many events for that to happen.
I was there for 2 full days, and I think I went to about 4 different events - my entire day was “tech” meetups. Which, again, were super fun - but if I was trying to build something, they would have been the exact opposite of what I should have been doing.
For me at least, I don’t think you should go to SF to build. I think you should go there if you want to have a good time, or if you want to raise money from VCs. I wanted to have a good time, and so I did. Here’s some pictures :)
🍁1517 Summit in Toronto
There was a lot of bouncing from place to place this summer - which I was super lucky to be able to do! But it did make for a crazy summer XD
If you’re building something and need a little bit of money, I’d highly recommend applying for 1517’s grant program - you can get 1k no strings attached. AND you get an amazing community of other builders, many whom were at this summit. Super awesome to meet people building cool projects outside of TKS and Toronto (Shoutout to Ryan and Andrew!)
🍀Attending the Emergent Ventures Summit in Ireland
Next I hopped on a flight to the other side of the world - off to Dublin! I was super excited for this for a few reasons:
I adore Europe
I’m part Irish, but not very in touch with the culture
EV people rock
I was not disappointed, I had a blast. Perhaps the best thing was getting exposed to the European “tech” scene. I put that in quotations because I met so many people at the summit who aren’t working exclusively on tech, but something just as interesting! That again gave me a greater appreciation for all of the non-technical aspects to life.
For example, we’ve got Amos, who writes an amazing substack (that everyone should go read 👀). Oh, and if you don’t know what Emergent Ventures is, he wrote about that too ;)
I also met Tom, who is the founder of Patch, an accelerator program in Dublin. It seemed that everyone I met was from Patch - it’s literally the coolest thing ever.
Some of my favourite people I met from Patch were Tomás (working on carbon capture), Rosheen (building batteries), and Brian (building in healthtech).
Waterloo, Canada is cited as an “unknown hotbed for talent,” by the 1517 Fund in particular. I might put Ireland in that category too. Did you know that Stripe was founded in Ireland? The Collision Brothers (founders of Collision conference, one of the largest tech conferences in the world) are also Irish.
As to why this is the case, from what I can tell, Patch is definitely a huge part. But the Irish school system also has some things going for it, namely BT Young Scientist. It’s essentially a science fair on steroids - and it’s a super big deal all over the country. This, along with a few other things I won’t get into specifics on, encourages elementary and high school kids to build something and to follow their interests - something that doesn’t seem to be common (at least in Canada).
I’ve heard the craziest early project stories. Seeing what these guys did without a lot of the scaffolding I was lucky enough to have from TKS is super inspiring. It’s motivated me to work a heck of a lot harder.
Something I realized about the source of this motivation is that it stems from admiration, not competition. I think this perfectly encapsulates the type of people I seek to surround myself with.
The final thing I will note is that if you are surrounded by the right people, any experience can become incredible. I arrived to Dublin a day before the conference started (timezones), and while I wasn’t miserable, that day pales in comparison to the days I spent surrounded by the amazing people from Emergent Ventures.
On that note, I’d like to say a massive thank you to everyone at Emergent Ventures, along with Tyler Cowen and the rest of the staff, for an amazing time - and for flying me out to Dublin :)
😤Building a battery pack with 18650 cells!
Didn’t start any fires, don’t worry. I learned a lot about electrical engineering, how to spot weld, and battery pack design. This was the most hardware-intense project I’ve built yet, and can I just say: I’m so grateful Amazon and Perplexity.ai are a thing 🙏
If you’re interested in learning more about the project, check out my youtube video :)
🏃Triathlon
On literally the last day of August, I did my first sprint triathlon! I’m quite happy with how this one went, it felt smooth and I didn’t die at the end :)
I think I enjoy training for triathlons, rather than just training for a pure running event. So it appears there may be more of these in the future 👀
📖What I’ve been reading:
(thanks to Tomás for the recommendations!)
Small Things like These by Claire Keegan
How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner
The Martian by Andy Weir (Also a movie!)
Zero to One by Peter Thiel
📸Photo Collection
🗓️What’s next:
College applications (This is my final year of high school!)
Travelling to San Francisco in October for 2E part deux (Hosted by the 1517 Fund!)
Cross country
And finally, Brooke’s tweet perfectly encapsulates the feeling I want to replicate throughout the next few months.
Thanks so much for reading, I’ll see you in the next one 🫶
— Sasha