I'll start off by saying I'm 20 years old. I have nothing to show for myself on paper, but boy do I have a story to tell my kids one day.
~12 months ago I was lying in a hospital bed after blowing a 0.78 BAC (~40 drinks in 1.5 hours), and 90 days after that I was standing on stage at NVIDIA GTC holding a signed RTX 5080 from Jensen Huang (CEO of NVIDIA).
This is the story of how that happened.
5437 Miles From Everyone I Knew
In fall 2023, I moved from London to California for college. Which is 5437 miles away from everyone I knew, from my friends in high school to my family and everyone in between. The people that knew me before I had anything to prove to the world.
I'd be lying if I said I wasn't homesick, but I never told anybody that. I did what any reasonable 18 year old would do, which is just faking it. I "stayed busy" by going out, making friends, doing stupid shit that 18 year olds do when they're trying to convince themselves they're fine.
The benefit (or downside) of being over 5000 miles away from home is that nobody knows who you were before. Which is liberating in some sense, but also it means nobody is there to call you out on your bs when you're slacking. Everyone needs a homie that can say stuff like: "this isn't you bro, chill".
So I decided to safely build a new version of myself. I rushed a fraternity (I didn't even know what a frat was at the time). I started going out multiple times a week, got a girlfriend and took life less seriously. But the worst decision of all was that I had settled. I had settled for a very very average college life.
The biggest factor was my girlfriend. I was with her ~24/7. We went to the gym together, watched shows together, ate together, studied together, basically did everything together. Which is obviously incredibly stupid now looking back at it. But at the time my entire identity became wrapped up in this relationship and this social life that I had constructed to avoid growth.
In the professional world I wasn't thinking about internships, I didn't know what YC was either (crazy because I live in the bay), and worst of all I had no ambition beyond the next weekend, or the next time I could distract myself from the fact that I had no idea what I was doing with my life.
If I could go back in time I would probably wind up the biggest jaw breaking punch I could to wake myself up, but in reality I was extremely comfortable. And comfort is the most dangerous, disgusting toxin you could ever consume in your life, especially when you're 18 and have your entire life ahead of you. I was too naive to know this then (at least I'm aware of it now though)
The First Crack
After a year of living in peace and comfort, and some time of being in an extremely satisfied relationship, I had found out that my loving girlfriend had been cheating on me.
Kinda crazy to think that the first person I had thought I was going to build a family with would do something so gut wrenching to me. But the real thought was realizing that I had built my entire identity around her, and that disappeared literally overnight.
I think the majority of the audience knows what betrayal feels like, but if you don't, then I promise you it's worse than you might think. I genuinely didn't know who I was looking at in the mirror anymore because I had become so consumed by her. I went back to campus for the winter quarter with literally nothing. I was burned out, lost, and didn't really care about my classes. (as evidenced by my grades)
Rock Bottom Has a Hospital Bed
Post break-up, pre-lock in. After golf training, a friend who was a senior invited me to her house party that she was having as a little reunion post break. I agreed, thinking that it was good for me to get out, see people and pretend I was chill (spoiler, I was not chill).
Fast forward a couple hours, and I woke up at 3:30 AM in a hospital bed, with an IV drip in my arm. When a nurse was passing by she looked mortified that I had woken up. The doctors told me I had consumed 1.75 liters of vodka in roughly 1.5 hours, blowing a humble 0.78 BAC. For context, 0.40 is where most people die, yet I was nearly double that. I was borderline gone for a few minutes.
I don't remember any of that night, apart from getting to the house. Even when I woke up at first I thought I was living in candy land and maybe it was one bad dream, but no, everything was real, including the bruises on my arms and legs from falling. I remember the doctor explaining what had happened with this tone that was somewhere between clinical and concerned. My first instinct was to check my phone to see if I had missed any important phone calls, only to discover that I had no phone anymore (it was at the house).
I had two pieces of news. The bad news was a massive American hospital bill. The good news was that I was alive. Yet even after I got my phone (I walked back to campus ~4 miles), I couldn't bring myself to tell my parents. I couldn't pick up the phone and explain to my mom that her son, who she sent 5,000 miles away to get an education and build a future, had nearly killed himself drinking at a house party because he couldn't cope with a breakup.
So I paid off the entire debt with my own money and never mentioned it.
Mom, Dad, if you're reading this, I'm sorry, and I promise I'm fine now. I promise the person writing this isn't the same person who ended up in that hospital bed.
But here's what I realized lying in that bed: everything I had done to get to that point was coping, rather than living. The partying, the girlfriend, the fraternity, the going out every weekend, all of it was just pointless noise. I had dug myself a hole so deep that I couldn't get out, and so I just kept digging, because I was so afraid that I didn't know what to do with my life.
The Lock-In
Something shifted after that night (thankfully). It started with dropping the fraternity and outlining what I stand for. I stopped going out and trying to impress others, and I started the generational lock-in of 2025.
It was unhealthy at first, mostly because I was still coping. But as opposed to coping with nearly killing myself, I would work, often working 20+ hours a day. I'd have ChatGPT open and would just talk to it for hours on end about the most random topics, how to get rich, how to think smarter, how to find purpose and everything that you can think of. I even got it to tell me how to hotwire a car through variable exploitation (don't ask).
That's when I started using AI for "information farming". I would start asking super niched questions about certain domains (surprisingly know a lot more about robotics now). But like in any situation, there was a tradeoff - I'd start missing some classes. The bigger problem was that I had no goal - I was simply curious.
I would spend 6 hours going down a rabbit hole about how language models handle context windows, then the next 4 hours trying to break the safety filters. Then I'd get into asking it about human consciousness and before I knew it it was 3 am and I had to wake up at 7:45 to get to my 8 am.
But none of this was productive in any traditional sense, because I wasn't building a startup, and I wasn't doing anything that would look good on a resume. What was productive though was my curiosity. The skills, opportunities, wins, all of that came wayyyy later. But it only came because I was obsessed with being stupidly curious.
The difference between people who figure things out and people who stay stuck isn't intelligence, or luck, but curiosity. It's the willingness to sit with something for hours when you don't know what you're doing and keep going anyway.
Losing Was The Best Thing That Happened
Somewhere in the middle of all that tinkering, I entered into my first NVIDIA hackathon. I didn't even know what a hackathon was a few months before that, but still thought "why not give it a shot". Obviously I lost, since Claude Opus 4.5 wasn't released back then. But on the bright side, my housemate won.
And honestly, I was genuinely happy for him, bro cooked up a crazy agentic voice-controlled tool that could control v0 (competitor to lovable), and he 100% deserved it. So I thought to myself: "What do I need to do to win next time?" and so I walked up to him and went "do you wanna do the next one together?"
He said yes.
My first hackathon win
Fast forward a couple weeks, and our college was hosting a hackathon. We assembled a team of 5 engineers and one ops guy (the ops guy is genuinely underrated). I honestly had no idea what we were going to build going into it, but when we came up with the idea I think I scoffed because I deemed it impossible. Yet 22 hours later and we had a product that we could've turned into a startup.
We used the Google Maps API to capture 6 static screenshots of a singular location, passed them through a 3D Gaussian splatting renderer to generate AI-generated drone flyover views, ran those through a custom-trained YOLO model for object detection, and used Gemini to analyze measurements like handrail distances and door widths for disability accessibility compliance. Pretty nuts for a guy who was just tinkering with AI a couple of weeks before that.
The end product was an automated report telling businesses whether their location was disability-friendly based on physical measurements extracted from AI-generated 3D reconstructions. I think even reading the description you can guess what happened (we won).
But this was a team of 6, not 2. So after this win, my housemate wanted to see what we could do as just a duo. So we signed up for the NVIDIA hackathon at GTC in March.
March 2025: NVIDIA GTC
Conveniently (or not), this was during finals week, and tickets were going $975. To make matters worse, this hackathon was invite only, and limited to 200 people. I didn't have that kind of money lying around, so I did what any reasonable broke college student would do: I hassled my university until they agreed to sponsor me.
We drove to the event on Thursday night, despite both of us having finals at 8 AM the following morning. We came up with the idea in the car on the way there, while reading a PhD paper. (neither of us have PHD's).
The concept was straightforward: an architecture pipeline for generating ground-truth, physics-based synthetic data using a world foundation model. We called it the World Model Portal. The idea was that you could use it to generate AI videos that were physically accurate, with real-world physics, and then use those videos to generalize robots to different synthetic environments via NVIDIA Cosmos.
Basically: generate fake but physically real training data for robots without needing actual physical environments. We thought we had smashed it out of the park until our judge came up, looked at our project, sighed and walked away without saying a word.
My housemates visibly deflated. There were 5 finalists, and we hadn't been called up by number 4, so he pulled out his phone and called an Uber. I told him to have some faith, and in about 2 minutes we were called as the fifth and final finalist.
The demo went insanely smooth - everything was loading, running like butter and the audience was left speechless for the right reasons (or at least I hope). After about 40 minutes of judging, we won first place.
I walked out of that building holding a signed RTX 5080 from Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA, the night before my 8 AM final, roughly 90 days after I was lying in a hospital bed wondering what the hell I was doing with my life.
90 days. That's how fast everything can change.
Fear Almost Won
After that win I got multiple job offers, and even got asked to drop out to pursue those opportunities. But I wasn't as reckless as I was before, so I kindly rejected most of them, even though they were incredibly attractive. I could lie and say the main reason I rejected them was because I wanted to finish my education, but the real reason was because I was scared of my growth potential.
It took me another two months to realize that being fearful is normal and you just have to face it. So I stopped assuming every opportunity was a mistake or that people would realize I wasn't actually that impressive, and I stopped running away.
Now I'm the head of marketing for an AI company, with no background in the industry. I'm 20 years old and I'm running marketing for a company that builds enterprise AI systems, and being able to say those sentences feels surreal on its own, yet here we are.
I'm not smarter than you, I'm just slightly above average at telling stories and being relentlessly curious about how things work.
In my first week of "work", the content I created hit 6.2 million views. So I'd say that I'm doing something that's going in the right direction, yet I still have so much to do.
Why I Wrote This
I'm not writing this to brag, as I have nothing to brag about. I'm 20, and still figuring life out. But rather I want this text to serve as inspiration if you're a mess in your life and you want to lock in. I promise you that if I was able to do it, you are too. All you gotta do is give it your all.
In 90 days I went from having the fire department wrap me in a foil blanket because my body couldn't produce enough heat to sustain my heart pumping to one of the biggest tech conferences in the world and winning on the grand stage. All because I locked in.
Your life can change that fast. All you gotta do is lock in for 90 days.