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TLDR

Hi! I’m Ashna, a 22 y/o VC dividing my time between Amsterdam, London and Paris. Before starting my venture capital career, I studied computational cognitive science, interned in B2B sales, software engineering and product management roles, and had a crack at building my own startup.

I’m interested in science-backed ways to empower humans to make more creative, informed and impactful decisions. I spend a lot of time thinking about how to question assumptions about social organisation and build societies that enable us to lead fulfilling lives, despite - or perhaps because of - shifting material and technological grounds. I see this as the natural continuation of a childhood spent writing stories and attending protest rallies - and broadly, this is why I am a VC now.

I’m always up for a chat on Discord (chiapuddingg), LinkedIn, or email if you’re old school. Alternatively, you can see all my availabilities/schedule an online or in-person meeting here.

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In 2016, Guardian columnists and middle-class GCSE 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. Though my aspiring revolutionary teenage self would probably never have predicted where I am now, I retain many of the same motivations that fuelled me back then. I seek out intellectually and technically demanding work with the potential to change the world; I resist pigeonholing, and thrive in environments where I can use my linguistic, interpersonal and technical skills all at once.

Here a few of my main interests:

  • Computational cognitive modelling - using computational structures, such as artificial neural networks, to model neurocognitive processes. This was of course my undergraduate thesis area, and I would be very interested in pursuing further research in this area.
  • Empowering autodidacts. I’m self-taught in several of the skills I’m most proud of, from natural languages to programming ones, and have been deeply dissatisfied with dominant approaches to education ever since my teenage activism days. I want to contribute to making learning experiences inclusive, bespoke, scientifically sound, and not confined to institutions.
  • Policy and legislative responses to the development of A(G??)I. I’m interested in how a coalition of people with fundamentally different assumptions about human behaviour and society will develop the common understanding and adaptability required to effectively address this question (and currently not very optimistic!).
  • A related concept that fascinates me is the evolution of the notions of ownership and authorship throughout social history, which to me seem on the cusp of another dramatic redefinition. My literature PhD student alter ego would definitely have written a paper on this.
  • ‘Blended’ experiences and augmented reality – combining the best aspects of in-person and online interaction. Like many people, before the pandemic, I believed that the ‘realness’ of in-person experiences was unattainable online. I now believe that too many people refuse to question this assumption.
  • Ethical consumerism – which I firmly believe is not a contradiction. I’m excited by the high standards to which my generation is holding companies, and looking forward to the impact this will make. More generally, I consider myself a ‘pro-growth environmentalist’, and I think the key to fighting climate change and other threats lies in democratised technological advancement. I’m a big fan of open-source for this very reason.
  • Intercultural communication. As a result of my irrational fear of being ’that loud British tourist expecting everyone to speak English’, I now speak 5 languages and have lived in 3 countries, and only want this to continue!
  • Dance, theatre, literature, creative writing and visual arts - these keep me human after a few too many monitor-lit all-nighters.

If you’ve made it this far, do consider dropping me a line! I always love talking to potential collaborators, or even just people who are doing cool stuff.