Hi, I’m Jacky.

Where I come from

I grew up in Arizona, the oldest of five kids. My parents came to the US as teenagers with very little, then each started a business, a Chinese fast-food restaurant and a salon, and worked seventy to ninety hours a week for much of my childhood. Helping raise my siblings gave me a lot of my confidence early on.

In third grade I decided I would become an inventor. It took me a while to learn that the job title is “engineer.” Somewhere in there I also started making videos, and eventually founded my high school’s Media Productions club.

For a long time I believed in what I later called an “unbreakable law”: that the best schools, and the bigger version of a life, weren’t meant for kids like me. Junior year of high school I stopped believing it. I sent two cameras to near-space on a weather balloon, got rejected from seven of eight colleges, appealed, and ended up studying electrical and computer engineering at USC, where I also marched with the Trojan Marching Band.

What I’ve worked on

Since graduating in 2016, I’ve started out at Cisco, built microservices at NVXL, drone flight-authorization tools at Airbus UTM, lab systems at Invitae, and an app for more thoughtful interactions at Sonder Social, a startup I founded. Most recently I spent four years at Amazon as a tech lead, building an AI document-processing service and the evaluation framework around it.

In 2026 I left Amazon to build Saga full-time. It’s the first job that uses all of me at once: the engineer, the kid making videos, and the person who once hosted a party for eighty-plus friends.

What I care about

AI safety, and how we navigate to an abundant future for all. Storytelling, and what makes a memory worth keeping. The Chinese diaspora and families like mine. Health span, and noticing small changes early, a habit I picked up from taking care of a lot of house plants. Building things with my hands, especially things that light up.

And treating people as if their lives are as vivid and complicated as my own, because they are. There’s a word for that: sonder. It’s been my handle for years.

The longer, earlier versions of all this live in the archive, in my own words from 2009 onward.