Amy Jain
On a quest to learn everything.
I have always been hungry to learn.
I grew up at the Neilson Hays Library — the only English-language library in Thailand. I read everything I could carry home. Clifford, then Nancy Drew, then Feynman. The world kept getting larger.
What I learned, I used. The day I learned 5 + 5 = 10 I held my first auction — stones I'd sanded down into paperweights, 10 baht each, sold to my family. The money was nothing. Being proud of it was everything. Then loom bands. Then perler beads. Every trend that passed through the cafeteria.
I figured out early that the fastest way to learn anything is to ship it. A company doesn't let you skip the parts you don't like. You learn everything, end to end, or it doesn't work. The loop never closes. That's the appeal.
- At 8, ran my first auction.
- At 16, the youngest TEDx speaker in Southeast Asia.
- At 20, founded a nonprofit, raised over $70k, and received a UN award for the work.
Then a company in women's health. Venture at Pear VC. Product at JP Morgan Chase. Product at a startup in San Francisco. Now building again.
Same loop as the paperweights. Higher stakes each year.
Outside of work: philosophy, eating well, and how good products get built. That is the underlying ethos.
Studied Cognitive Science and Computer Science at UC Berkeley. The fuller version lives on LinkedIn.