Hello world! I’m Iris. I grew up across Beijing, D.C., Oregon, the Bay Area, San Luis Obispo, London, and NYC.

I’m a Stanford CS grad (BS and MS, AI track) who spent two years exploring the world beyond AI, as an investor and operator of private equity companies. As part of this, I served as a board observer to a data center maintenance company with $1B+ in revenue and a legal document management company.

This experience made me realize that, in the long run, innovation and upstarts will always win against incumbents, and that my life’s work is to dream up and build the future, rather than defend the status quo. More specifically, I want to leverage technology to uplift the baseline, especially in human health and learning, two areas where the basic quality of care/service is subpar for most around the world.

An engineer by training, I’ve shipped code at Meta, scaled developer infrastructure at Benchling, and built AR learning tools at the Stanford HCI lab. Before Stanford, I spearheaded growth at a YC-backed startup, published an introductory economics book, created content that gained 2.6M views on YouTube, and performed flute at Carnegie Hall.

Now, I am helping friends build awesome companies and taking time to discover my next grand adventure.

I’m always curious who finds this site, and how. If you are a fellow traveler on a good quest, or simply want to get in touch, you can do so here: