How a traveler wins $200K prize and becomes a Pioneer
Honestly, I don’t expect to win. Just giving myself another try and see how it goes.
It was late 2019. I was insanely flying between Europe, Asia, and North America to found a startup in healthcare and climate change. Before this, I worked on a design tool for AI/VR/AR and my first book.
Chapter Zero
It started with a visiting trip to Switzerland. I joined an international challenge. Upon arrival, I broke up with a teammate and played solo for three weeks with a project about climate change. My computer did not work, so I spent time on low-code tasks, talking to people, calling actions, and offering help. An interesting part is most of the people around me are innovators in the healthcare industry.
In the end, I suddenly mapped an old project to a problem of another participant and his cohort - white senior residents living in the mountains. This story led to an unexpected discovery about how vulnerable our economy and financial system are towards climate change. Accidentally, a big strike led by a Sweden teenager happened to evoke actions from political leaders for green new deals. At that moment, I was in Geneva, a location of UN. Honestly, the reaction was super underwhelming.
Climate change is a big topic, but it’s more like a story of sinking developing countries and polar bears. People know about it, but very few take action. In my opinion, skipping class and protest on the streets is not the right way. My young adulthood also has disappearances, but to join creative activities and organizations to build a solution. Somehow, that healthcare project looks super helpful to provide evidence-based context to send the right message. I decided to drop everything behind to build a Silicon Valley-style startup called BlueSkin. I hoped this wild optimism would help us find a repeatable and scalable model and shift disastrous projections in those insurance reports.
Chapter One
A few days later, I traveled to Paris. Interestingly I attended a lecture of an economist known for cultural learning. He shared his academic view about a new economy and AI. Being so immersed in climate change and healthcare, especially after taking an online course to learn it under awareness, I felt super frustrated after hearing his long silence about how politicians treat climate change. (Later, I found that he won the Nobel Prizes twice. One of them was Nobel Peace Prize for the first climate change report ). This lonely experience helped me return to Pioneer Tournament after a half year. (If you don’t know about Pioneer, check it out here.)
In the next few months, I traveled to talk to an insurance firm, raised funds, do research, and set up networks with top big tech companies and communities. However, this just led to more burnout and exhaustion due to an intensive traveling schedule. When I won a Pioneer Tournament, I lost a server and a domain once and almost run out of cash. However, it was not fast enough.
A month later, news of a bush fire sweeping Australia spread on the internet. When returning to my home country, an unknown deadly disease started to spread out in my region. Soon after that, an epidemic turned into a pandemic. I could not return to Valley.
2020 is a year of climate change and healthcare. We have never seen so many groundbreaking records about damage and loss. The world is torn apart with national lockdown and strict healthcare policies driven by CDC guidelines. There are more extreme and weird weathers. From Australia bush fires, it comes to California glass fire on the West Coast and stormy seasons on the East Coast (And early 2021: The historic blizzard in Texas!)
My original goal with BlueSkin is about evoking awareness to take action. It’s about prevention, protection, and early treatment as soon as possible.
Now, everything becomes obvious.
It is no longer an intellectual topic of scientists. It is no longer a story of faraway unknown locations or animals in developing countries. All residents in San Francisco Bay Area probably can’t forget the daily red alerts of hazardous air quality. People can smell and even taste how bad it is. Also, the orange sky with unknown fog or smoke makes us feel like living on Mars.
I do hope this experience will wake up more people to join a force of change. Everything happens faster than we can predict.
And we are running out of time.