About

Job

I'm working full-time as the CEO & co-founder of Heptabase to create a world where anyone can effectively establish a deep understanding of anything.

Heptabase is backed by Y Combinator, HOF Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Moving Capital, Tonic Fund, and other investors, including the founders of Socialcam, Triplebyte, Codementor, and more.

Feel free to reach out: alan@heptabase.com

Education

I have received one year of training in Mathematics and Physics at National Taiwan University. During my time at NTU, I've finished a senior project and several graduate courses, and my academic performance ranked the top three in the whole department. However, NTU couldn't meet my learning needs and desires. I decided to voluntarily drop out after freshman year (2017).

After two years of personal exploration, extensive reading, and working, I attended Minerva University with students from more than 70 countries, focusing on learning and applying cross-disciplinary mental models in a real-world setting. I majored in Computational Science, but decided to voluntarily drop out after freshman year (2020) to start my startup.

Goal

My current goal is to accelerate the speed of the human's intellectual and technological progress by unlocking the full potential of the computer as a medium and building a contextualized knowledge internet on top of a truly universal Open Hyperdocument System. (Recommended Reading: My Vision: The Roadmap)

My medium-term goal is to understand the mind, intelligence, and life, and develop a humane way of integrating our mind and body with technology to help humanity reach a higher level of intelligence, capabilities, and life form.

My long-term goal is to ensure that the order of the observable universe will not come to an end in the future because of Physics limitations and that the order will continue and evolve forever.

Strength

I specialize in self-learning, synthesizing, and managing cross-disciplinary knowledge. I have been practicing knowledge management for six years, with over 5000 pages of notes. I use the Zettelkasten method to develop and organize my networked thoughts.

I am a consistent writer. I have been writing one article per month since 2013, with more than 1 million views on my Ghost + Blogger + Medium blogs. I am skilled at synthesizing my notes to write long essays and provide a comprehensive analysis of the topic I have chosen.

I can self-learn anything fast and deep. I ranked 10th place in the National Selection of the International Physics Olympiad after self-learning college Physics for 18 months during high school (2015). I got my first job as a software engineer after self-learning web development for six months during freshman year in college (2017).

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