pick up the pencil
a talk to asian business students at mays about flipping the cultural script. in the AI era you don't wait for a seat at the table, you pick up the pencil and build one.
first time ever at an abs meeting and honestly i was shocked... walking in and seeing that many people in one room, our community showing up like that, it hit different.
i opened with a culture connect, because i think a lot of us grew up with the same script. get the 4.0, graduate, land the stable job, become the best member of the company. for years that path trained us to be the most elite followers anyone could ask for. then one day the script flipped, and the thing that flipped it was AI.
the whole talk hung on a pencil. one culture invents the pencil. another adds the eraser. another adds color. another makes it mechanical. nobody reinvented the wheel, they just picked up what was already there and had the courage to write the next part of the story. that's the point: we're holding the AI era pencil right now. don't wait to be seated at a table. build the table with your pencil and invite people to it.
i walked through my own path to make it real... senior manager at the texas cyber range, MIS major in the AI business minor, co-founder and CEO of engenium, paramount last summer in nyc, incoming systems engineer intern at palo alto. none of it started polished. i got hired first day of freshman year as a technical support engineer and worked my way up.
then i got into why i'm building engenium. at the cyber range we run 100% turnover because we're all students, so institutional knowledge walks out the door every single year. when a "dave" leaves, he takes the why and the how of every critical system with him, and the next person inherits a pile of static docs that don't actually explain anything. engenium is a passive institutional memory engine. it captures context from the tools people already work in (github, slack, email, teams), flags knowledge that's about to leave before it does, and answers the why, how, and what instantly instead of making you dig.
i closed on the part i care about most: why we need more asian founders. for years we've been the ones who listen and execute beautifully. but if they can do it, why can't we? stop waiting for a seat. build the table and bring people with you.
what i took away: the room wanted this. people came up after, the energy was real, and it reminded me the script flip isn't some abstract idea. it's just picking up the pencil.