ep #1 — why i’m creating a substack
I talk to a lot of interesting people.
Like, a genuinely absurd number of interesting people. This morning I took a call with a VC right after power yoga (Stanford gives unit credits for that, by the way!), and somehow we ended up riffing on everything from wildfire-sensing radar to whether I should recruit for investment banking next year (verdict: unclear, but probably not). Last week, it was a postdoc who moved his entire family from England to commercialize LiDAR technology. The week before, a guy down the hall from my friend, who might drop out because he built a data extraction layer that’s 20x more efficient than anything on the market.
I love these conversations. I genuinely do. There’s something invigorating about sitting across from someone (or, more realistically, staring at their Zoom tile) who is so deeply passionate about what they’re working on that you can’t help but adopt the passion for yourself. At this point, my core operating principle has pretty much become to just be passionate about what other people are passionate about. I don’t really care if you’re in climate or medtech or semiconductors or whatever. If you care about what you’re working on, that’s what I care about too.
But here’s the problem: all of these conversations live in my head. Or in transcripts that I’ll never reread. Or in the vague residue of a Google Calendar event that says “[redacted] <> Carolyn | Intros”.
So I’m starting a Substack, and this is my attempt to explain why.
the synthesizer in me needs an outlet
I’ve always been a connector of things. In one of the essays I drafted for college, I wrote about how collaging — literally gluing maps and posters and photos to my bedroom walls — taught me to be a systems thinker. How do you match different sizes, places, colors? Balance visual load? The skills turned out to be oddly transferable: compiling evidence for speeches, performing casework during hackathons, finding the connective tissue between everything as long as you care deeply enough to look.
That’s what these conversations are to me. Every call I take is another piece of memorabilia for the wall. But unlike my bedroom collage, there’s no wall to put them on yet. No place where I can step back and see how the wildfire researcher connects to the data extraction dropout connects to the VC who told me to “just have a take on everything.”
This Substack is that wall. It’s where I get to synthesize what I’m hearing, distill the outputs of all my conversations, and actually make something out of the raw material of being a curious person at a university that’s bursting at the seams with innovation.
developing a take on everything
One of my close mentors told me something that’s been rattling around in my brain: any room you walk into, just have an opinion. Have a take. Doesn’t matter how flexible or rigid it is. Doesn’t matter if you end up changing it. Just have a take to begin with, and you can keep fine-tuning from there.
I think that’s what writing forces you to do. When something lives only as a conversation, it can stay comfortably ambiguous. But the moment you sit down to write about it, you have to commit. I’ve never been great with commitment, but at least I have conviction. You have to say: here’s what I think about academic researchers struggling to pitch VCs. Here’s what I think about the role of capital in scaling climate solutions. Here’s what I think about networking.
Oh — networking. Let me talk about networking for a second.
a brief aside on networking (and why i’m not on linkedin as much as i could be)
I have this mental model where I think about connections as a matrix with two axes. The x-axis is the quality of the connection itself — how genuine is it, how much do you actually care about this person, how much do you mutually want to see each other succeed. The y-axis is the quality of your connection’s connections — who do they know, what ecosystems are they plugged into, what doors could open from this one relationship.
Most “networking advice” optimizes exclusively for the y-axis. Add everyone on LinkedIn. Cast the widest net. Play the numbers game. But I think the magic happens when you’re high on both axes — when you genuinely care about someone and they happen to be embedded in a world that’s interesting to you.
That’s part of why I prefer this medium over LinkedIn. A Substack is self-selecting. If you’re reading this, it’s because something about what I’m writing resonated enough for you to click and stay. Or it’s because I’ve bugged you enough to read this and boom! Venus fly trap style, you’ve been sucked into the vortex of my brain. That’s a fundamentally different filtering mechanism than a connection request. And frankly, I like it better. My goal is for the people who show up here to be the people I actually want to be in conversation with.
It’s also, selfishly, a soft way to keep connections warm. Instead of the awkward “just checking in!” email three months after a call, I can just... write about what we talked about (with permission, obviously) and keep the thread alive.
the time capsule argument
Here’s something I think about a lot: I have no idea what I’m doing. Like, genuinely. I don’t know if I want to recruit for IB. I don’t know if I want to do product. I don’t know if VC is the thing or just a thing. I came to Stanford from a background in environmental data — wildfire ML models for NASA, pollution quantification for NJ’s Department of Environmental Protection, a print reduction initiative in high school (ironic, given the forest’s worth of paper currently on my bedroom walls). The throughline has always been this itch for impact, but the form that impact takes keeps shifting.
And I think that’s okay. But I also think Future MeTM is going to want to look back at this exact moment — this crossroads — and see what I was thinking about, who I was talking to, and how I was making sense of a world that felt very big and very open and very uncertain. This Substack is my time capsule. It’s a record of what I was exploring and how I was exploring it, written in real time by someone who is actively figuring it out.
utility for others (hopefully)
I really enjoy having these conversations. But ideally there should be some utility to them beyond my own entertainment. I’m a student at one of the most innovation-dense campuses in the country. I’m talking to researchers who don’t know how to pitch VCs, founders who are building in stealth, investors who are looking for deal flow in places they can’t easily access. There are gaps everywhere — between technically brilliant researchers and the language of venture, between people who have capital and people who need it, between someone who tried twice to raise funding and gave up because they had a grant to write.
If I can bridge even a small piece of that gap by writing about what I’m seeing, introducing people who should know each other, or just articulating problems that I keep hearing described “in different fonts” — then this is worth doing.
sharing how my mind works (and figuring out how it likes to work)
I think the most honest reason I’m doing this is the simplest one: I want to understand how I think. Writing is the closest thing I’ve found to seeing my own thought process from the outside. It’s like collaging, but for ideas instead of maps.
To be completely blunt, there will be days I plug my granola transcripts into claude and tell it to rip up a masterpiece for me. If the legwork has already been completed in real time, it’s only efficient to use the pieces that already exist. For the most part, though, I’m glad to have a place where the meandering parts of my mind can finally find rest.
I have two policies in life. One: you never stand anything to lose by being kind to someone else. Two: you never stand anything to lose by saying yes with intention.
The world is big and beautiful and the sun is shining and the birds are chirping. Might as well write about it.
Xx,
Carolyn