my life’s mission: be an enabler

the thread behind everything I do, and why I do it

I’ve always had a hard time distilling what I do into one line. I love doing a ton of different things - being a creative, working as an engineer, investing in ideas, writing, and bringing people together through community. Every time someone asks what I do, it would either be a 30-minute ramble or picking one of these labels, which never tells the full story.

I think 2019 Mathu was on to something with my little resume by-line: “Enabler of people, products, and ideas”. I’ve scrapped that line since replacing it with “product-oriented engineer” and “design-focused engineer”, but often your past selves connect the dots to your future self more than you think. And I realized being an enabler is exactly how I’d describe my life’s mission.

excerpt from my first-year resume

early beginnings

I’ve found that your core purpose can often be extrapolated from the things you enjoyed doing at a young age. For me, being an enabler is something I learned from my mom - she’s the biggest enabler that I know. She ran a tutoring business out of our basement to support raising my sister and me. After school, I’d sit beside her and help kids - often the ones overlooked by the school system - learn how to read and do math for the first time. I watched their eyes light up when they solved their first problem or read their first sentence. Teaching these core skills unlocked their ability to do whatever they set their mind to.

code as a tool for enablement

That same feeling followed when I learned how to code. Code became another tool for enablement, one that helped bring ideas to life and made information much more accessible. In elementary school, I turned our messy Google Drive and class announcements into a website so all the information could be found in one place. In high school, I trekked downtown every weekend to attend coding workshops. Eventually, I started teaching those workshops at my high school and spent a summer teaching a game-making camp in Seattle to help elementary school kids build games for the first time.

systems design engineering, building the foundation for enablers

From that moment, I knew I wanted to be in tech in some form. But coding was only one part of it - I was curious about all the different building blocks involved with building products. I wanted to learn hard engineering skills that I couldn’t easily teach myself, and broad enough to support any path I wanted to pursue.

I ultimately chose Systems Design Engineering (SYDE) at Waterloo because it builds the foundation for enablers. It teaches you how the world works - through science, engineering, systems thinking - and how to make it better through empathy and design. While there, I helped scale a mentorship program that connected new students with upper years, and helped in the early days of Socratica, hosting coworking sessions to enable friends to work on their creative pursuits.

some snippets from syde at waterloo

enabling startups

My curiosity later led me to startups and learning how I could enable teams working on the early innings of new ideas. I volunteered at Envision Accelerator, where we provided non-dilutive grants and mentorship to underrepresented founders, and I also interned as an engineer at a few startups like Replit and CommandAI. Now I continue to support founders as a scout, investing in around 13 companies over the past year and a half. I’ve somehow found a niche within my design engineer hybrid world to support founders, especially those building in creative design/dev tooling, AI, and consumer.

enabling exploratory ideas through design engineering

For my career, I was hyper-focused on finding a role that let me do what I loved most - being an enabler. As a design engineer, I work closely with design, product, research, and engineering to bring their ideas to life through coded prototypes. Prototypes often help us test innovative and novel interface ideas that you can’t communicate with just a memo or static design. They tell stories, influence decisions, enable us to test new feature ideas with real members, and make ideas feel much more tangible.

some prototypes I’ve worked on that are now released to members! read about them here and here

enabling people through community

I also love bringing people together. It takes a village to win, and the synergy and inspiration of other people are often the biggest motivators to learn and grow. I helped start Women Who Lift a year ago, where we run a monthly workout event and brunch for women in the city. I leave every event feeling stronger and with more girl friends in SF. Some friends and I started Rabbitholeathon, where we host weekend retreats for curious individuals to dive down rabbitholes and share their learnings with each other. It’s led to some of my closest friendships and sparked countless serendipitous connections. My latest endeavor has been rallying together design engineers in this intersection of design, code, and curiosity.

parting words

I realized that being an enabler is a core ethos behind what I do. Having this north star has helped me make sense of my past, but also provided clarity on what to continue focusing on. Life is much more meaningful with purpose, and it’s made me intentional in doing the type of work that aligns with this mission.

If this resonated with you and you’d want to collaborate in any capacity, please reach out! If this inspires you to write your own personal manifesto, I’d love to read it.

~ Mathu