hi there :)
Hi! I'm Ashna, a 24y/o founding engineer and the first employee at a Stockholm-based stealth fintech. Before this, I worked in venture capital for 2 years. I also studied computational cognitive science, interned in B2B sales, software engineering and product management, and had a crack at building my own startup. I like to code, write, meet new people, and understand how others think.
I'm always up for a chat on Discord (chiapuddingg), LinkedIn, or email if you're old school - and even more up for a fika in Stockholm, if you happen to be here!
In 2016, Guardian columnists and middle-class students alike were reeling from the Brexit shock, Sweden had done an excellent job of hosting Eurovision, and I heard the job title 'computational linguist' for the first time. Around this time, I was desperately trying to shake off my association with radical politics, which I had cultivated by hosting lunchtime sermons on communism in my leafy, suburban secondary school. My activism (and the writing that resulted) in my early teens had two main motivations: an intellectual fascination with politics, philosophy and social history, and a strong desire to be part of a revolution. I was left disillusioned by the bickering and splintering of leftist politics, and resolved to look absolutely everywhere else for that elusive combination of intellectual challenge and revolutionary impact.
To this end, I divided my last three years of high school roughly equally between learning languages and attempting maths olympiad problems, and dreaded the prospect of choosing between the two paths which these pastimes represented. When I found out that the application of computational techniques to human language processing was in fact a young, exciting and interdisciplinary field which had already facilitated several breakthroughs in AI, I immediately felt that it represented what I had been looking for.
In hindsight, it may have been a little premature to decide I wanted to pursue natural language processing as a 15-year-old who had never written so much as a Hello World. However, my determination to combine my linguistic and technical skills as much as possible throughout my studies has led me down a rather unique path. I started my university career as a French and Russian student, but planned to switch into the more narrow and specialised Linguistics course whenever I became fed up with studying literature - which eventually happened in Autumn 2020. As a Linguistics student, I mainly chose modules in computational linguistics and the psychology of language processing, which culminated in my undergraduate thesis and first ever machine learning project. Rather than optimising for naturalistic language output as an NLP model would do, my model aimed to simulate human processing of complex syntactic constituents, and to use the similarities between neural networks and their artificial cousins to find out what exactly makes a sentence difficult for the human brain to process.
Having got the bug (I really hate myself for that pun) for larger coding projects, I began studying for a master's degree in Computer Science - then promptly dropped out after achieving my dream 'job' offer, which was a place on the Entrepreneur First Graduate cohort in Paris. I was heavily involved in the startup world throughout my time at university; I worked continuously in sales roles at early-stage deeptech startups between July 2021 and March 2022, while studying for the final year of my degree. I completed 3 other internships at startups, across product management, business analyst and engineering functions, and so my operational experience is pretty much as versatile as it gets.
Since this nagging feeling that I wasn't doing anything with my life drove me to drop out, I've been lucky enough to do a number of different things with my life. I've lived in Paris, Amsterdam and Stockholm; the latter became an unexpected love affair which led to me acquiring a new language, a winter wardrobe and a crippling addiction to TV4 reality shows (is it still educational if I speak Swedish now?). Working in venture was the best 'first grown-up job' I could have asked for, and landing in Stockholm just as the startup scene went into overdrive was an endless source of inspiration. Above all, I will credit venture for teaching me the importance of giving - time, thoughts, recommendations, connections - without expecting anything in return, and also teaching me that humans are a lot worse than they think at making low-information decisions.
But after this brief taste of grown-up life, I think my aspiring revolutionary teenage self would be pleased to hear what I am doing now. I am returning to the occupation that sustained me through years of classroom boredom: getting scrappy and creative in service of a mission I believe in. Much more on this to come.