tldr;

grew up country-hopping with two humanitarian parents → got hooked on remote everything

loved numbers & computers as much as indiana jones reruns → spent teen years bouncing between math olympiads and action movies

tested my tech-for-good theory across energy, health, and fast-food data gigs → learned impact ≠ corporate comfort

a failed quant-trading interview + a summer in senegal watching migrant boats launched → forced a hard pivot

realized nature is the ultimate playground for nerdy problem-solving → booked a one-way ticket to the congo basin

that’s the prologue - the “what i’m actually building out here” drops in part 2

prelude: the itch that never left

I grew up in the margins of the map.

Diplomatic passports, dusty Land Cruisers, and a stack of well-thumbed National Geographic magazines were my normal. My parents were humanitarians first, diplomats later, and perpetual nomads always. We hopped on occasional village clinics in West Africa to embassy housing in OUA the way most families move between suburbs.

Every new posting came with its own smell: diesel, mango, rain-on-red-clay. And every night, when the generator coughed itself to sleep, I’d crack open a flashlight and re-watch Indiana Jones on a scratched DVD. Somewhere between the boulder chase and the snake pit I decided that “grown-up me” would also live in places where GPS drops to zero bars. That conviction stuck - even when life tried to drag me toward polished glass towers and corporate cafeterias.

quest #1: numbers over noise

There was just one problem: I wasn’t built to dig up relics or wield a machete.

What lit me up were patterns - the sneaky symmetries of an equation, the elegance of a proof. By fourteen I was skipping recess to grind Math Olympiad problems, convinced that a medal would unlock some secret club of geniuses. Spoiler: I never made the finals. Turns out improvising brand-new methods under a ticking clock is a terrible tournament strategy. (did come second in Informatics tho.)

But the failures did two things:
Confirmed my north star. Win or lose, math felt like home.
Taught me the cost of winging it. Good intentions don’t beat deliberate practice.

Those lessons keep boomeranging back in this story.

when boats & borders rewired the mission

Covid gave me a gap year, chasing the Mediterranean migration crisis. 4 long years in Europe and all I wanted was to go back to the mud. In Senegal I watched homemade canoes push off before dawn, stuffed with kids my age betting their lives on Europe. Later, on rescue skiffs with a group I met in high school, I realized the opposition had drones, frigates, four engines for every one of ours. Out-spent, out-muscled… it was the first time “impact” felt like a math problem with brutal constraints.

Lesson etched in bone: money isn’t evil - it’s fuel. Humanitarian dreams without a revenue engine stall at the dock. Startups, for all their hype, at least play by the rules of cash flow.

quest #2: the four-summer experiment

University arrived. I carved out a personal rule: treat every summer as a lab to test one of the big four survival systems - energy, health, food, nature. The theory was simple: if I could blend hard tech with one of those pillars, I’d eventually stumble onto work that mattered and scratched my Mr. Jones itch.

Summer 1 – Wind & kilowatts
Paris professors, wind-farm telemetry, regression models. My first real data set. I learned Python the way sailors learn storms: by nearly sinking the ship.

Summer 2 – Lungs & machine vision
INSERM lab benches, CT scans of asthmatic patients, hours lost inside NumPy. Here I tasted full autonomy - defining the objective and the method. I’d trade a chunk of salary for that feeling any day.

Summer 3 – Burgers & big-mac data
Nepotism break: a friend of Mom’s ran the McDonald’s franchise network on Réunion Island. I dove into time-series sales, campaign lift, and the uncanny overlaps between a Big Mac and a cheeseburger’s bill of materials. Corporate life suddenly seemed… cozy. Too cozy.

Later that summer – Quant, code, chaos
The “let’s-try-everything” end of summer: quant-trading drills with my brother, LeetCode marathons, big-tech interviews. He landed a desk on a trading floor; I collected rejection emails and an existential crisis. Perfect.

the inner tug-of-war

By graduation I was split between two personas:

The Analyst - happiest in a terminal window, optimizing SQL queries.

The Adventurer - craving remote field camps and problems you can’t debug from WeWork.

Corporate recruiters loved the first guy. Thirteen-year-old me kept whispering about lost temples and endangered forests. I tried ignoring him; he refused.

pattern recognition: the jungle keeps calling

Late-night journal review:
remote childhood ➜ comfort in isolation
movie obsessions ➜ appetite for risk
math + code ➜ leverage in data-dense domains
humanitarian backdrop ➜ intolerance for performative impact

Plug those variables into any greedy algorithm and the output blinks CONSERVATION TECH.

Protecting ecosystems is a puzzle stitched from biology, logistics, and edge-AI - exactly the sort of interdisciplinary my brain likes to wrestle. More importantly, the field is starving for engineers who can wrangle datasets as easily as they trek through swamp.

the decision

So I stopped refreshing LinkedIn, booked a one-way ticket to Kinshasa, and drafted a two-page plan titled “Starlink and AI give us live Into the Wild.” VCs in SF called it reckless; for the first time in years my gut called it aligned.

epilogue (for now)

I’m writing these words a few clicks south of the equator, where the night sky feels illegally bright and the nearest café Wi-Fi is a two-day pirogue ride away. The work itself - the hardware mishaps, the bonobo trackers, the elephant footprints, the why behind all this madness - that’s a saga for part 2.

But if you’ve ever felt torn between spreadsheets and skylines, between comfort and conviction, maybe my breadcrumb trail helps. Sometimes the map you’re supposed to draw looks less like a straight line and more like vines looped around an old ruin.

See you deeper in the jungle.