CHRONICLES

What the Y Combinator application and interview actually select for, written from the position of someone who was rejected once with a software company and accepted later with a fish company

The transferable half of going through Y Combinator with a hardware company: what a weekly cadence does to a business with lead times, how to pick a metric nobody can argue upward, and what the batch is genuinely good for when you cannot ship daily.

Navigating co-founder relationships, finding complementary skills, and building a strong founding team for your startup.

Why the milestones a hardware company can honestly show are shaped differently from software ones, what non-dilutive grants and accelerators actually buy, and what investors need to see when the product stands in a wet room.

Walking a fish farm layer by layer the way you would read an architecture diagram: what is actually measured today, how, where it breaks, and which layers are tractable to automate now

Water is part of the optical path, not the backdrop. What scattering, specularity and a deformable subject actually do to a vision pipeline, measured on our own captures.

What it actually felt like to run a hardware and computer vision company through the Y Combinator Winter 2026 batch, when your customers are fish farms and your timelines belong to biology

Autonomy is a loop: measure, decide, act. Aquaculture is stuck on the first step, and the reason is the physical world, not the model.

My journey through CMU's Computer Vision program, exploring cutting-edge techniques in image processing, deep learning, and visual perception.

Jumping into Ccnsulting, what got me interested and my experience preparing for the interviews

My journey through CMU's world renowned Intro to Deep Learning class, focused on unraveling the black box and exploring a techniques in deep learning, and model training best practices.

What I learned from designing and building T-Bone, a bio-inspired fish robot - from CFD simulations to real-world aquatic testing.

The unique challenges of building a robotics startup compared to pure software - from manufacturing and supply chains to iteration cycles and fundraising.

The vast untapped potential of ocean technology - why more founders should be building for the 70% of Earth we've barely explored.

How to know when a side project is ready to become a real company - the signs, the risks, and the decision-making process.

A unique experience of being interviewed twice by Y Combinator in the same batch (S24), with different startups and different outcomes.

A detailed breakdown of how I started my freelancing journey and successfully earned $50,000 in additional income during the first half of 2024.

A critical analysis of software engineering rotational programs and why they often serve more political purposes than developmental ones.

A comprehensive guide on transitioning from mechanical engineering to software engineering internships, based on personal experience and practical strategies.