Describing Interact No. 1
Interact's Fellowship as told by Molly Mielke, Saffron Huang, Omar Rizwan, Conrad Kramer, and Kesava Kirupa Dinakaran.
It can be tough to pin Interact’s Fellowship down. And as the years roll by, we’ve found that there is a lot of virtue in that ambiguity. But one thing we can say for sure is that Interact’s Fellowship is exactly that: a fellowship, where the primary thing you gain in joining is your own experience belonging to the deeply-linked, ever-new, social-professional technology phenomenon that is “Interact”.
With 2024 Fellowship admissions almost at a close, we thought it would be fun to share takes from the source. Maybe they will influence a few people’s admission choices; maybe not. In any case, we hope hearing these fellows “Describing Interact” gives you a glimpse of the fellowship for yourself.
2024 Fellowship Interviews by 2018 Fellow Ava Huang.
When did you join Interact and what was your life like then?
[SAFFRON]: I joined the fellowship in 2020. My life was err very locked-down, it was early COVID, I was supposed to be finishing up college but I was at my parents’ in New Zealand interacting with everyone over the Internet. It was very surreal. As college was ending, I found myself gravitating towards Interact as a community whose themes really resonated with me; my early interactions were full of hope and excitement.
[MOLLY]: I was a lost little intern at Figma on the brink of leaving tech when I joined Interact. It was COVID times and my interview with Sashank was one of the best chats I’d had in a long time — wide-ranging, empathetic, curious, and left with the feeling that there was so much more to explore. I remember thinking “There are people like that in this world?? Maybe tech could have a place for me after all.” Everything that followed confirmed that to greater and greater degrees.
[OMAR]: I joined Interact as part of the summer residency in Brooklyn back in 2022. That was sort of an odd experimental program, which was perfect for me – I had just moved to New York at the start of the year and was trying to start a new independent physical computing project – it was very useful to have some (non-job/post-job) dedicated structure and physical space for my work.
[CONRAD]: I joined Interact in 2014, when I was 17 and a senior in high school. I had heard about Interact from my hackathon friends and applied. I was trying to figure out what was next for me, and it was very world-opening to meet older people who worked in tech. I looked up to and still look up to a lot of the people I met in Interact.
[KESAVA]: I joined Interact’s Fellowship at the end of 2019 / early 2020. I was a 19 year old immigrant who had just shown up to the US with almost no friends, no network, or even proper space to live in. I was living in a hacker house with a few other to-be founders. Very naive, ambitious, and excited to integrate into community in Silicon Valley.
Describe your fellow Interact fellows in one sentence.
[SAFFRON]: Curious, spirited, easy to rabbit hole with, often have great taste.
[MOLLY]: Bright lights of unusual hues.
[CONRAD]: Thoughtful, optimistic, gracious, humble, funny
[KESAVA]: Interact is the place where some of the most ambitious, but also deeply compassionate humans connect and create.
Who’s your favorite person you met through Interact?
[SAFFRON]: What! So hard. I’d say all of Austin, Maran and Matthew (in alphabetical order) but I have met so many people I adore for various reasons.
[MOLLY]: Fiona Leng! VC co-conspirator and good friend — we hit it off instantly in part because we shared so much context/had a ridiculous amount of mutual friends through Interact.
[KESAVA]: Too many to list, but some of my closest friendships have come through the Fellowship: Tiago, Erin, Raffi, Ben, Alex etc.
Describe the impact Interact has had on your friendships.
[OMAR]: I think something powerful that people miss from school is the sense of being part of a specific bounded cohort, where you all have this common context, and you run into people without always having to make explicit plans to see them. Especially as someone who had recently moved and left a job, the Interact residency was really nice for making (and maintaining) friendships – having that cohort & having a summer space where events were happening and people were coming by all the time.
Interact is also just this institution, like a school or shared hometown, that gives you a potential point of connection and history with people.
[CONRAD]: I moved to SF in 2014 at the same time as a lot of other folks in Interact, so I had a strong community to start with – Ari, Fouad, Hallie, Nick, etc. The retreats provided invaluable quality time to hang out with everyone in a new and fun environment.
[MOLLY]: Interact has been formative in my development of the skill of relationship-building. Being immersed into such a dense network of talented individuals and then watching how they moved, related to each other, and made things happen taught me a lot about the function friendship serves in this corner of technology, as well as what goes into the strong relationships I consider Interact to be known for.
[SAFFRON]: Interact has significantly shaped my social life, and every time I think about it I’m surprised about how much it has without me noticing. I just like people I meet in Interact, it’s not like I’m consciously attending Interact events all the time. My default sources of friendship are Interact and college, sort of; many of my college friends I’ve fallen out of regular contact with, while Interact still feels like a generative / active source of new and closer friendships (especially now that I’ve moved to SF!). It also has me meeting a broader distribution of people than I would’ve otherwise, whether it be age, field, interests, etc… e.g. I love being friends who have a lot more personal history with tech than I do (e.g. moved to SF in early-mid 10s).
[KESAVA]: I think I felt very out of place for the first ~20 years of my life; Interact was one of the first places where I felt like I could be my true self and be loved for it. It has helped me understand how deep my friendships can be.
How has Interact shaped your relationship to technology?
[CONRAD]: It made space for me to consider how the world could work differently if it was built by people more aligned with my values. It gives me peace of mind to know that an organization is working on teaching the next generation of technologists good values.
[MOLLY]: The exposure Interact gave me to all the different shapes being a “technologist” can take helped me find my own place in this ecosystem and discover what my relationship to technology is without feeling the need to fit into any one box.
[SAFFRON]: The Moral Philosophies of Technology Circle I did with Maran, Matthew, Jasmine, Tammy and Anna was incredibly formative for me — it was right before I started my first full-time job in tech, and I found it invaluable to spend some time really thinking hard for myself about what technology actually is and what it’s for. I was genuinely obsessed with and delighted by finding niche papers and interesting readings about the philosophy of technology during this time. I’m familiar with so much more thinking on this than I would’ve been otherwise, and I think it gave me a far more nuanced view on technology broadly, as well as on specific technologies, than I had before.
Describe the impact Interact has had on your work.
[OMAR]: It helped me a lot that I could make the work my main priority at the initial Interact residency, and I was surrounded by other people who were also starting new projects, and I had a clear timeframe (the summer) and audience (showing it off at the end of the summer). (That level of seriousness made me want to find funding to continue the work after the summer, which then led to where I am now.)
It's also been nice to continue to share the work at Interact events since then; it feels like people in Interact often have deep context about my work in a way that makes it more fulfilling to share.
[CONRAD]: It has had a huge effect on my work! My first office was shared at various points between Ishaan, Zain, Michael and Maran, all of whom I met through Interact.
[SAFFRON]: The thing that pushed me to bite the bullet and quit DeepMind was having the offer of joining the 2022 summer residency. It gave me a landing pad, people, time and space to explore what was next, which directly led to me starting CIP with Divya – that’s been so transformative and fulfilling. I also got my O-1 visa through Lisa’s new company after we met at the residency, so it also let me immigrate to the US :) I would say that most of my Interact friends are not directly work-relevant on a day-to-day basis, but I often need a lot of one-off advice / connections that Interact has been extremely helpful with. Also, Interact shapes a great deal of my approach to work and my intellectual interests (see answer to above question), and kind of makes me feel like I can be a technologist vs. just an AI researcher.
What’s your favorite Interact memory?
[OMAR]: There was one night when a bunch of us watched "The Wind Rises" in the basement of the residency house in Brooklyn. We watched the movie (which was really good and emotional) and then Divya got us to watch this video about Heidegger and Studio Ghibli and philosophy of technology and we all talked about those themes for a while. I still think about that a lot; it felt like something wholesome from family or college or high school; I hadn't had an experience like that in a long time.
[CONRAD]: Swimming in South Lake Tahoe at midnight and warming around the bonfire, Shipping a version of our app from the beach of Lake Tahoe, wandering through Miami late at night in conversation, waking up after blacking out for the first time in Austin – so many!
[SAFFRON]: Getting on Zoom calls with Maran, Matthew, Jasmine, Tammy and Anna just hanging out but also puzzling through the philosophy of technology, and eventually writing the “Letters to a Young Technologist” essay series together – this was such a light in the middle of COVID.
[KESAVA]: Hiking through the woods at one of the retreats from 11pm to 3am, coming back and having marshmallows till sunrise, and feeling like I still had 100% of the energy to do it all over again the next night.
What do you want technologists to talk more about?
[OMAR]: I'm always interested in the interplay of very specific technical details (of how computers or operating systems or networks or programming languages work) and how people end up using that technology, what kinds of things they do or make with it.
I think that "grain" of the technologies we use is really important, and technologists have a unique role in that they can understand and shape that grain (what things are easy to make in a phone app? or in a 3D graphics pipeline? or on a network? what things are excluded because the current nature of the technology limits your imagination?)
[CONRAD]: A lot of things. I think first and foremost: craft. I want engineers, designers, product managers, writers, everyone to have space to discuss their creative endeavors with each other and share work more. I think the default is to build alone, but that is lonely. Right behind that is technology history: I think it is extremely under-studied and has provided me countless insights about the current day.
[SAFFRON]: How technology constitutes and is constituted by society — in a non-lazy way. Also, talking about and clarifying what their goals / visions are for the world.