PhD Drop-out, Palantir & Upsolve (YC W24). Meet Ka Ling.

Currently: Co-founder @ Upsolve AI (YC W24) Studies: Civil Engineering PhD (Drop-out) @ EPFL ‘15-’18, MSc Fluid Sciences @ Brown ‘14-’15, BSc Civil Engineering @ Brown ‘10-’14 Experiences: Product Lead @ Palantir, Swiss Women’s National Rugby Team Player Origin: Hong Kong Links: LinkedIn, Twitter

Upsolve AI is hiring talented software engineers! Apply through their website or reach out to Ka Ling directly!

Supported by Founderful Campus! They run the VC Academy program, selecting top students from Swiss universities that invest in the hottest university startups.

Growing up in Hong Kong & interest in sports

What was your childhood like growing up in Hong Kong? What were your interests?

I was born and raised in Hong Kong. As a kid, I was quite athletic - I fenced really well and also played table tennis at a high level. Sports has been a big part of my life, even into adulthood.

Academically, I was really good at math, physics, and chemistry - basically anything that required logical and analytical thinking. From Hong Kong, I went to study at a high school called United World College, which is part of a special high school movement. There are probably around 20 schools around the world. The whole idea is to make schools like mini United Nations where you get folks from very different, diverse backgrounds and countries to all study in a boarding school together. So I was studying abroad in Hong Kong for two years, did my IB, and then I moved to the States for university. I studied at Brown University before going to Switzerland for my PhD.

What got you started in sports? Was it a push from parents or your own interest?

I think probably my mom played some role in it. She liked to bring me around to learn different random things. So I did kung fu, ballet as a kid, and then tennis, table tennis, fencing as I mentioned. I just got quite good at it, and because of that, the periphery of sports that I touched just kind of expanded from there.

Are you a competitive person by nature?

Let's say I'm competitive in the sense that I love winning, but if I lose, I hate the type of losing which is when I did not prepare enough and I go in and lose, because that essentially means I could have prepared better.

But if I prepared to the best possible extent and I also perform 100%, 110%, and if I lose, then it just means someone else is better. And sometimes, you know, it's also good to lose because then you know someone else is better than you and then you can catch up on that one as well.

So I'd say I'm competitive and I don't like losing if I felt like I'm under-prepared, that's kind of bumming.

Studying Mechanical Engineering at Brown University

How did you end up going to Brown University in the US?

One of the things is that the Hong Kong education system, at least back then (I don't know now), was quite spoon-fed. So it was one of those where I wanted to find somewhere that is more interactive, let's say not as spoon-fed, not as old school.

In my United World College, it's just very popular for folks to end up either going to UK or US to study. I chose Brown because it's the most liberal arts college in the world, and you get to even make up your own major or make your own concentration. So it always been a bit of a dream school for me. I applied, got in, and decided to go there.

How was your experience at Brown? What did you focus on there?

I studied civil engineering there and then went into mechanical engineering, specializing in fluid and thermal sciences. That's actually the reason why I ended up going to EPFL for my PhD because I was studying computational fluid dynamics.

But one thing I enjoyed the most is the fact that since it's a liberal arts college, there wasn't really a major concept until maybe your third or fourth year at uni. What happened there is you ended up making friends from people who could study all these random things as well. And that was the special thing because I felt like I just learned so much even just by having conversations with my friends at a lunch or dinner table. So that was the unique special thing there.

Did you find peers in high school and college who had the same "grind" mindset as you?

I think so. For example, my high school typically attracts people who, at a young stage, let's say 14-15, dare to dream. Because it's modeled as a mini UN, a lot of my friends actually flew across the world to live in Hong Kong. That kind of means you just have some dream or some belief that you want to pursue. And I think that essentially extends into grittiness in a way.

And I think Brown as well - it wasn't an easy school to get in, and they put focus on someone's development being well-rounded. So I think that typically also attracts driven people, people who just have aspirations, who are willing to work hard as well.

How was the experience moving from Hong Kong to the US as an immigrant?

It was fun, with a lot of differences there as well. I think the first month or two I was just lost. I didn't watch as much American TV growing up, so sometimes I'd sit down and all my friends would be talking about people that everyone seemed to know. I was like, "Who are these people? Why haven't I met them on campus?" Then I realized they were talking about some TV characters!

So there were definitely some differences there. But difference is great - you get to learn from it as well.

PhD studies in Switzerland and decision to drop out

What brought you to EPFL for your PhD studies?

The lab I was in aligned with my area of interest - it was in wind energy and numerical simulations. But I actually dropped out after three years, so I never finished my PhD.

What led to your decision to drop out of the PhD program?

It was multiple factors, but one of the main drivers was that academia was incredibly slow. During my time there, I wrote a paper as a first author on discovering a physical phenomenon, and it basically took two years for industry to start reading the paper and talking about it. It's good that people eventually talked about it, but I prefer somewhere where things are a lot more fast-paced and outcome-oriented - where I do something and I can instantly see it impacting someone or some part of the world.

The years weren't strictly defined, so I actually don't know how many more years I would have needed. But the main thing for me back then was that I already had a first-author paper and some other second and third-author papers. It was diminishing returns for the amount of time I was putting in. I knew I did not want to be a PI or professor, so time is my most valuable capital. I didn't want to spend it pursuing the doctor title which meant almost nothing to me. There was no point in continuing.

How did you come to the realization that the degree itself wasn't important? Did you get pushback from others about dropping out?

I mean, it's just really thinking about what is my most precious capital. It's time. I can never buy back my time. I wasn't growing at the pace I wanted to be. What I proved I could do in a PhD - continuing would just be doing more repetitions of the same thing. So what does that really mean?

That piece of paper really did not mean anything to me, because partially I also felt I didn't need it. And actually, I think in tech it's way cooler to tell people you're a PhD dropout than that you have a PhD.

What's funny is my parents were like, "Why are you doing your PhD?" It's a very Chinese parents mindset - PhD is not really a thing for Hong Kong parents. The most common professions they expect are banker, lawyer, or doctor. They were like, "Do something practical! Why are you still in school?"

So dropping out actually wasn't hard at all. I was quite self-independent from an early stage - I told my parents I wanted to go to school in the States and got almost a full ride to study abroad. So they trusted me. When I told them I wasn't happy and wasn't feeling the impact I wanted to have for the time I was spending, they were very open to it. It also helped that I told them I had a job lined up at Palantir - they were like, "What's that?" I tried to explain, and they said, "Well, it seems like a cool thing that you're excited about, so why not?"

Competing in Swiss National Women's Rugby team

You played rugby at a high level in Switzerland while working. How did you find time to balance that level of sport with work?

As I mentioned earlier, I was always a sportive kid when I was young, so the training just kept going as I was growing up. I actually started playing rugby back in the States. I'm a sprinter so I run fast, and I just got picked by the coach and started from there.

When I was younger, I fenced and played table tennis, and I was pretty high-level. It was to the point where I was going to attempt to be a professional athlete, trying to find a spot on the Hong Kong national fencing team. If that was the path, in a few years it would have been Olympics and all of that. So for me, playing for Switzerland's rugby team was kind of like a parallel universe - it wasn't shocking, it was just like, "Okay, cool."

I just prioritize my time a lot. I think when people say they don't have time to train or exercise, it's often excuses. For me, even now, my calendar has exercise blocks and people know it's sacred. No one dares to schedule something during those times, and I don't compromise by moving them.

At the end of the day, it's just about what's important. Again, similar to time, health is something that once it's gone, it's gone. There's no amount of money in the world you can pay to get health back. So I try to prioritize that as well as time with my family and friends.

Joining Palantir

How did you find out about Palantir (it's not super well-known in Europe yet) and what made you interested in joining the company?

I think I didn't realize this until maybe two years after working at Palantir, but because I studied in the States, Palantir by then was not small there - it was pretty well-known. I actually realized that in my first year of college I had applied there for an internship, though I don't think I ever heard back from them (partially because I was not American back then).

I had quite a few friends from Brown that ended up working there, so I'd heard a bit about what they do. The opportunity came up because one of their recruiters reached out to me when I was thinking about quitting my PhD. I said, "Yeah, let's have a call," and the recruiter explained what they do.

I realized it was actually something that would have interested me even if I had finished my PhD. The reason I did my PhD was because I always wanted to be at the intersection between business and engineering/tech. The PhD was a way for me to get extremely technical, so that when looking for more business-oriented roles, I could say, "Hey, I have this technical skillset" and then pick up the business skills.

What Palantir offered was a relatively technical role but with a lot of touchpoints with users and business as well. So it was a really good fit for me - even if I had finished my PhD, I probably would have considered the same role.

Palantir is known for producing many future founders. Why do you think that is?

I think it's a mix of technical people getting exposure to the business side, but also because of the Forward Deployed Engineer role. Nowadays Forward Deployed Engineer as a concept is common, but back then no one thought it was cool. Everyone, even VCs, considered it just a consulting business.

But I think what makes a lot of Palantirians unique is that we flew all over the world, side-by-side with customers, working super closely with them. That's how you develop the skill of going from something ambiguous to building something concrete - a product that helps improve someone's life or workflow.

So that became a skillset that a lot of us got trained on for many years. I think that's definitely one of the reasons why there are so many founders who are former Palantirians who are doing quite well in general - we all went through the concept of Forward Deployed Engineering.

Co-founding Upsolve AI (YC W24)

How did you meet your co-founder and what made you want to start a company together?

We worked together very serendipitously at Palantir. We built a product from 0 to 1, which was fun. We led the team together and worked almost 3 years together. We just felt like we gelled really well - he finishes my sentences, I finish his thoughts.

When starting a company, the first thing for me wasn't the idea - it was the person I was going to build it with. I wanted to find someone I work really well with. Sergey is someone I built something with from 0 to 1 and then scaled it at really high speed. The way we work is just fun - like working is fun. And sometimes when things go wrong, I always tell him, "You know what? I'm glad we're in this together. It's fun even when things are bad."

How did you come up with the idea for Upsolve and find product-market fit?

We ended up thinking about potentially starting our company around the same time, so we started chatting together. Upsolve wasn't the original idea we explored. We actually wanted to get out of the data space because we dealt with data all these years - maybe we should try something else. We thought about a travel app, a language learning app, and other ideas.

But there was a certain gravity that pulled us back into the data world. At some point we just said, "You know what, founder-market fit is okay." So we started there.

The core thing was that AI is now becoming this core tool that people are really willing to adopt. We saw that many problems we'd seen at Palantir could have been automated with AI. So our exploration started from there.

The other core tenant or "secret sauce" that we felt like we saw Palantir do really well is using data to enable operational decisions and actions, particularly for Fortune 500 companies. We thought, "Well, what about for the smaller guys?"

The vision of the company is to be the conduit between data and decisions. From there we started talking to a lot of founders because we have many founder friends. The initial idea was using AI to automate internal analytics. As we did discovery calls, we had founders tell us it's great but they want it for their users. That's how we landed on embedded analytics.

So the idea evolved into embedded gen BI (Business Intelligence). We just actually launched our embedded BI two days ago through YC.

How were you able to work on an idea that wasn't originally what you planned to work on?

I feel like people tend to have a "hero" perspective of how ideas work. Like one day you wake up, you have this hero concept, and then you build it, and wow, suddenly you have a unicorn company.

But I think if you listen to a lot of YC stories about how companies came to be, some of the most successful companies did not start with their original idea. If you knew their alternatives, you would never guess this is the company they became.

So for me it was never a problem. It's more like, let's find a starting point, and then as you get more clues, more exploration, you seek the deeper truth, and from there you go on to the next step. It's kind of like an adventure - don't have a set endpoint, but the core tendency for us is being the conduit between data and decisions. And however that evolves - maybe we pivot at some point - that's fine too. Just having enough to start, and then the journey will follow.

Lessons learned and advice

You've prioritized your time intensely for many years to achieve a lot. Do you ever feel it takes a toll? How do you figure out what needs to be reprioritized?

Earlier I mentioned I prioritize health, my time, and time with family and friends. I think when I was younger I prioritized my family and friends less, but that's gotten better now as I've become older.

I think the other biggest change is fully knowing it's a marathon of sprints. Sometimes it's just okay if I end the night at 8pm. You don't need to work until 2-3am every day, because you need to make sure you can run that marathon for a very long time.

You went through Y Combinator - who would you NOT recommend YC to?

I would not recommend YC to people who aren't actually ready to take the jump, and they do it for the sake of recognition because YC is a good brand. They actually don't want to start up - they do it because all their friends do it and it's a "cool thing," if that makes sense.

I've seen people say, "I didn't get into YC so I'm not going to do my startup." And I was like, well, you should not have applied to YC to begin with. It should just be a decision, and YC is just an enabler. That's my opinion.

Editor notes:

Hey Arnie here - hope you enjoyed this blog!

Always happy to hear feedback, who should I bring next & what questions should I ask?

(Also super sorry about the my mic quality mistake (accidentally recorded with airpods mic instead of macbook mic), won’t happen again)

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