Work on everything, everywhere, all at once

The first thing you notice after hanging out with Olivia for a bit is that everything is a lab.

I met her at her office Tuesday morning and was greeted by a Lotus Elise parked in a warehouse full of lumber, surrounded by vacuum chambers and other scientific instruments. Further in, I met her biologist Jesse in their wet lab, who quickly started explaining the experiment he was running to make ice-nucleating proteins i.e. particles used to control the rain.

"We just got this office last week. You should see our other one."

The other office was an industrial space that incubated a bunch of hardware companies. It made Walter White’s lab under the laundromat look like a high school chemistry classroom. It had about a thousand different tools and machines that could electrify, burn, or cut me in half if I wasn’t careful, and a snack collection better than any big tech campus. It was run by Richard^[1], who I describe as philanthropist Tony Stark. At the time, Richard was 3D printing freezer backpacks to transport food and medicine in Kenya, while also helping run every company in the lab except Olivia’s.

The next day, I brought a friend to Olivia’s house.

"Is this your office or do you live here?" he asked her.

"Both. I wanted a personal lab and it’s not that much more than a regular apartment. Plus, I dunno, isn’t it so cool?" she replied.

Walking into her house you’ll see chest freezers, a bike with a gas motor her roommate is building, plastic bins filled with hardware parts, a workbench and an iron staircase leading upstairs to an open area filled with desks, monitors, and a massive white blimp used to gather weather data. We kept our shoes on the entire time even though everyone who lives there is Asian.

"Motivation is fleeting. You have to be ready to work on your ideas right away."

For the past year, she’s been working on Recast Systems. They're a company that makes AI models to predict the weather as accurately as possible, and also blimps that inject tiny particles into clouds to make it rain on-demand. The whole process is called cloud seeding and it’s been around since the 50s. A bunch of problems like toxic rain and inaccurate modeling make its use relatively limited, which is what she's trying to solve.

I caught her during Christmas break, which is the one week Olivia takes off all year. At her office, Olivia asked me if I wanted to go on a bender.

"Like shots and cigarettes?" I asked.

"Oh no, a bender is when I take two Adderalls^[2] and we just work for three nights without sleeping."

Even though it was a break, Olivia has a million things she wants to bring into the world at any given moment. Since her startup takes up 95% of her time, this was the only week she had to make massive progress on projects that she could hand off to someone else to run.

I thought I’d just be shadowing her like a fly on the wall, but Olivia was determined to integrate me into everything she was doing. I was her lab rat for the week.

She asked what I’m good at.

"I’m pretty good at negotiating if you have anything."

She handed me her phone where she’s trying to buy a broken Tesla Roadster. She found a Reddit post about how it was abandoned, found the seller, and assembled a team that was excited to fix it up. All she needed to do was act as the catalyst by buying it and getting everyone excited by proxy. We secured it for $10k, $20k below asking.

Next she explained to me how she was making a desktop particle accelerator at home while we helped Jesse with his experiment growing fluorescent nanoparticles. As I pipetted particles into a beaker and was lectured about cyclotrons, I thought about how many more scientists we'd have in the world if every high school was allowed to take a field trip to Olivia's lab.

The second thing you’ll notice is time bends around Olivia. It takes ten seconds to go from speculating on how a machine works to it being taken apart on the table in front of her. I mentioned I like making ice cream and a minute later she texted her landlord about borrowing his industrial churner so we can make some and sell it.

For me, it was the most I’ve seen someone do in just four days. For her, it was a week of vacation. I realized the time dilation when she checked the time and said "It’s already 4?"

Internally I thought, "It’s only 4?" Again, motivation is fleeting. Act quickly or it’s gone.

Olivia’s a person with a lot of ideas, but prefers to focus on one thing at a time.

"Ideally someone else should just do my ideas. Like I’d rather they run it and I’ll just help unblock."

That week, Olivia was thinking deeply about how to get people invested in taking over what she wanted to work on. A few months ago, she got a friend interested in running Human Food: a food delivery service she started that makes nutritionally complete high protein meals. Originally started by her thinking, "If dogs can have so much nutrition in little pellets, why can’t humans?"

She was trying to pitch me on raccoon domestication. They’re ideal candidates because of their intelligence and dexterity, and Olivia estimates it’d only take about six generations of selective breeding, max.

I thought it was cool, but not cool enough for me to give up funemployment for. What was the difference between me and her friend Steve doing Human Food? Even I was much more excited to work on that than raccoon domestication.

We realized it boiled down to the fact that the types of people willing to run ambitious projects can only get excited about othe people's ideas if they’re already real. I wanted to work on everything Olivia was already doing instead of what she wanted me to do. Anyone can come up with ideas, but seeing something epic happening with or without you makes you badly want to hop on the train rather than risk missing it entirely.

She got a whole team to help her fix the Roadster, but they were only fully committed after she bought it. She got Steve for Human Food after packing and selling 500 bags. After seeing the Recast team launch a weather balloon that'll last for years, I found it impossible to not think about dropping whatever I was doing to help control the weather.

The third thing you’ll notice is she’s a pusher.

"I’ll never sit on a couch. I’m not capable of just hanging out. We’ve gotta be doing something. The people I get along with best, we’re always working on something together. Or separately but we’re both so excited that our excitement feeds into each other and keeps us going."

I mentioned I don’t think I’m the type of person to start a company.

"How do you know if you haven’t even tried?"

I talked about how I really love cooking.

"If anything you did had a 100% success rate, what would you do?"

"I’d probably start a restaurant. But that makes no money, so I’d rather sell some sort of high protein low calorie healthy dessert. Y’know, for the former fat kid in me."

A moment later I was ordering artificial sweeteners, beef gelatin, and plastic deli containers and enlisted a friend to experiment with making healthy ice cream and protein jello next week.

Part of working on everything means getting her friends involved as much as possible.

"I could do it alone, but it would take me so much longer than if I had someone else with me. I guess I just have to get it started first so people can see the vision."

Me: "Plus it’s a lot more fun working with a friend."

"Yeah, true."

I get the feeling that her agreement wasn’t fully sincere. The fun for her is in bringing the project to life, not the social experience.

It’s hard to be around Olivia for more than 20 minutes and not be excited. Her mind is a lab and every active project is an experiment. We went to a dinner party where Olivia talked about her plans for raccoon domestication. People reacted to her with some combination of "Oh cool, haha!" and "Wait, you’re actually going to do that?"

What separates Olivia from other people is the level of seriousness she gives her ideas. That same dinner party, we ran into someone who’d read a book on domestication and was incredibly excited by Olivia’s plans. Yet even though they both had equal knowledge, the dinner party guest had absolutely zero domestication plans, whereas Olivia contacted ten breeders right after dinner.

Intelligence is all around but action is in short supply. I thought I knew what could get done in a day, or that I was skilled enough to do until I saw Olivia. Like her friend Richard incubating hardware companies in his massive lab, being in Olivia's vicinity means being a potential lab rat to carry forward a scheme the two of you can get excited about. Whatever it is, she'll help it feel real, and then let you carry it forward.

"There’s no such thing as making something bad. Because if you really care about it existing, you’ll make it good. So making it at all forces you to make it good."

Her idea of good is very strong. I was particularly interested in Human Food given my love of cooking. I could taste the potential, which unfortunately tastes like dog food, so I badly wanted to improve the product's taste and texture so it was good enough for me to eat regularly. I suggested raising the price so the product could be better.

"We can just make it better and stay the same price. It has to be four dollars. Five dollars is fine and people might pay for it, but at four dollars people will think 'How did they get it that cheap?!'"

I suggested raising the price so there could be a marketing budget for running ads.

Olivia: "There’s nothing exciting about ads. I can’t get behind it. Like imagine a billboard that says ‘Human Food. $4/serving’ Like that’s so cool. People would stop and look at that. The product just needs to be so good that people tell their friends. I don’t care about making more money, I’ll do it at a loss."

Me: "But you can keep the same margin, just more people will know about and order it if you market it. Word of mouth can only go so far. What’s the use in making the best product ever if no one knows about it? Think about Apple."

Olivia: "Yeah, the iPhone is amazing, everyone has one. That’s exactly my point. It’s so good that it’s part of culture and everyone talks about it."

Me: "But Apple also does world-class marketing for it. It can be the best product and be shown off in the best way possible."

Olivia remained unconvinced and unexcited about marketing. We quickly moved on to making creatine Jello, because that’s super cool and we’d both eat that. I also whipped up a batch of Human Food with added garlic, seasoning and cheese that inspired Olivia to raise her bar for what it could be.

I came in with an air of indifference yet Olivia’s excitement had me experimenting for hours with food unlike anything I'd done before, and I’ve been cooking since I was eight. Somehow we began forming plans to sell curry out of the back of a truck while driving around the city. I’ll admit; it was a lot more fun than any usual couch hangout.

For Olivia, it seems like it’s easier to do hard things because hard things are often worth caring about more. Her downtime is in the same spirit as her uptime. She’s always starting some sh*t she wants to see in the world. If you’re around her, you’ll probably get roped into doing the same, and be better off for it.

The last thing you’ll notice about her is she’s a hater.

She has no respect for people who work in investment banking.

"Why would you just move money around instead of building anything? It’s so frustrating how much work the smartest people put into it instead of doing something good for the world."

She asked me who I respect the most. After I listed some, she said:

"I can’t respect anyone who’s content with their life." She admitted that came out wrong, but I got the point.

The people Olivia respects the most are those who want the most out of this life, no matter how much they already have. She doesn't respect people who use their intelligence and will for anything other than what they’re passionate about. Moving money around will never be as cool to her because that’s not what people dream of doing as little kids. Nothing is as fundamental a joy as making stuff, and hanging out with anyone that doesn’t feed into her excitement is a waste of time. If she’s not feeling the energy, she’ll just leave.

Most people don’t take their passions seriously, which Olivia has no time for. She's an enabler but only for things that are genuinely exciting. Most people will see something cool and think "I like that, but I could never do it myself, I'll just stick to what I know". Olivia doesn't let her knowledge be the limiting reagent but rather her energy. She's a college dropout turned ML Engineer and scientist, and hates when anyone artificially limits their ambition by settling for whatever path they're on.

As Olivia left to see her family for a few days, all I could think was, "I can't believe that was just her Christmas break." If she works at even half as hard on her company, she'll probably control the weather perfectly come next winter.

You can find Olivia here. DM her and tell him I sent you.

Notes

1. [1]

   Name altered for anonymity.

2. [2]

   Prescribed of course.