I'm writing this post for three reasons:

1. To document my thought process for future Aamir
2. To give a perspective to anyone thinking about their own career change
3. To share with you where I've chosen to go next so you can cheer me on and give me flowers

I'm going to share my thinking, my mistakes, and my strategy. Let's get into it.

After selling Agentboard last year and taking a well-deserved rest, I began contemplating what to focus on next. I knew that my decision would have a big impact on the next few years of my life, so I wanted to choose carefully.

Autonomous vehicles?

To ground myself, I looked back at my career so far. I'd spent the previous five years working in the autonomous vehicles industry. Maybe I could go back to that space.

When I first chose to focus on this space as a sophomore in college in 2016, it was filled with ambitious, small startups working on the hardest problems in computer vision. This was exciting and compelling to me.

But by early 2024, the players had changed. They had mostly consolidated into well-capitalized behemoths that could afford to take on the extreme costs of machine learning & hardware development with zero revenue. And despite their resources, many of them were failing (see Cruise, Argo, Uber ATG).

Furthermore, when applying the bitter lesson of AI research to autonomous vehicles, it became clear to me that Tesla was going to win, and it wouldn't even be close. So if I were to focus on autonomous vehicles again, I'd want to join Tesla.

But joining a big company meant prioritizing salary and stability over learning and growth. While stagnation may be less of a concern at a place like Tesla, thankfully, I still had the risk appetite for new projects.

So, self-driving cars were off the table.

Wow.

Realizing this was scary as a passion-driven person. It meant that I had some soul-searching to do, because I'd be aiming to find the level of passion I had (and still have, to this day) for self-driving cars. A high bar.

Looking beyond self-driving cars

I briefly considered fintech. My father's recent journey into the world of banking and finance taught me that money is oxygen to the living, breathing ecosystem that is our capitalistic economy. And there's no better place in the world than New York City to build a fintech business.

But I had no passion for this space. It just didn't speak to me. Off the table.

I took a look at my skills - I'm a solid engineer, have a good amount of experience and skill in AI, I could go try to work at a great research lab! But, also no. Deep down I knew I wouldn't be competitive in pure AI. But... I could make a helluva lot more impact applying AI to a field I care about.

So no OpenAI/Google/etc.

At this point, you're thinking that I'm being picky. Yes, I was. This has been, and hopefully always will be, my approach to a career. Pick something I care about so that when I enter it, I already have an energy advantage over everyone else. Targeted shots over a shotgun spray.

So I asked myself: What am I schizo about? What do I constantly watch YouTube videos on? What constantly fills my Twitter timeline? What newsletters have I subscribed to? What do I spend all of my disposable income on? What will I not shut up about to anyone who would listen?

The answer came gradually. Dealing with sleep apnea. My various physical injuries. Eating healthy. Intermittent fasting. Cardiovascular endurance. Don't die. My long list of purchases and even longer wishlist of various health-optimizing devices. My aging parents and relatives.

It finally hit me. Health! Health. I should explore health.. and AI? Healthtech? Biotech? Something in that space. I was gonna find out.

Validating and exploring healthtech

I began consuming as much media on health, healthtech, and biotech as I could: books, YouTube videos, Twitter accounts, blogposts, textbooks, and more. The more I read, the more fascinated I became. I had always written off biology as a field of study because of a bad experience in 9th grade with Mrs. Mukherjee (a story feat. a stuffed animal for another time). But learning health & biology now, at this stage of life, from the perspective of a computer scientist, led me to a deep appreciation for the complexity, effectiveness, and efficiency of biological lifeforms. It led to absolute dismay at the state of health in the world, which fueled my interest harder. It led to respect for a field I had written off.

I also traveled to the magical Edge Esmeralda in Healdsburg, CA for their longevity week, and the chaotic Vitalia City (now Infinita City) on the island of Roatan in Honduras to explore what the pioneers of bioengineering were focused on. I ordered a bioengineering 101 kit that I never finished, and tried starting a nutritional supplement business that never got off the ground.

But despite my wandering, through all of these experiences, I consolidated the following ideas that absolutely convinced me I was headed in the right direction. These ideas essentially form the thesis for a career in this field:

• We die slowly, over decades, from mostly preventable diseases. This is absurd when considering that we live in the richest and most prosperous society of all of human history. This is solvable. We should solve it.
• Health should take zero effort to maintain. We should automate health. We should never worry about it again. Something so basic and fundamental to the experience of life should be built into our technology, culture, and society. It should be part of our infrastructure, just like food, water, shelter, and peace. Anything that we are required to do for health should be most enjoyable and take zero cycles of brainpower. Maximum health on autopilot.
• Health is the great filter. When we have it, we don't think about it; when we don't have it, it's all we can think about. If we can solve this part of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, just like we solved food, shelter, and water, we can ascend to building Dyson spheres, exploring the galaxy, healing the planet, discovering the laws of quantum physics, making incredible art, deepening human connection, and more of the infinite wonderful things life and our universe has to offer.
• Improving our health is the closest thing we have to a time machine. If we push back the end date of our healthy lives through better choices and better technology, we are effectively traveling backwards in time, generating more of our most precious resource in the universe.
• I want to work in atoms or cells, not bits. I'll have longer to master the field before AI automates it completely and I'm out of a job.
• Just don't die. We have no idea how much progress will occur over the next century. We should stay alive to see it, and we should help as many people as possible who want to see it, see it.
• To simplify an extremely complex intersection of fields, we are learning to represent the chaos and randomness of biology through AI. In other words, biology & health is a field I would be valuable in with my background in AI.

Each of the sentences in this section could be their own blog post, and maybe they will. But to keep things short - by the time I got to this point, I was hooked, I was set, I was ready: healthtech it was.

Deciding to look for a job

For most of the first half of 2024, I was still hoping to start a business. But after writing Slowing Down to Speed Up, realizing I wanted to pivot to a completely different field, the solo journey beginning to wear me out, and money being stretched thin, I came to the ego-killing yet strangely relieving conclusion that it was time to look for a job.

It took me three painful days on a highly abbreviated trip to Florence (a story, featuring betrayal and paninis, for another time) to fully accept that the goal of "starting a business" hadn't materialized in the way I wanted. It was time to suck it up, build a network and credibility in a new industry, re-evaluate entrepreneurship in the future when I was ready for it, and look for a gah-damn job.

How it turned out

This post is getting long already, so I'll save how I conducted the job search for another post (let me know if you're interested in reading that).

In the end, it all worked out. I'm very happy to report that I landed a role at Function Health in their product organization!

I was and still am beyond grateful for everyone who helped me get there, that I'm growing and learning something new every day, and that I get to work with extremely competent, smart, and passionate people who are all as schizo about health and the state of healthcare as I am. My kinda nerds.

Beyond that, having a steady job allowed me to stabilize many other parts of my life, including becoming more emotionally stable, resuming healthy habits, and the mental space to begin publishing on this blog more often.

So yeah. That's how I did it. I'm also very excited to begin sharing what I'm learning about at the bleeding edge of human health optimization, so look out for that in future posts.

Get in losers, let's build ourselves f*cking time machines!