I am usually the youngest person in the room, and I have stopped treating that as a problem to solve.

I grew up between Surrey, British Columbia and Redmond, Washington, in a family where work was never abstract. My father owns a small business; my mother went back to school and finished a degree while raising us. For six weeks each summer through high school I kept the books at the family repair shop in Bellingham — reconciling months, building cash-flow models in Excel, and watching my father spend evenings digging for answers his own records should have given him in minutes.

That is the origin of most of what I have built. Finlo AI exists because that problem was specific and personal. XChange existed because five other teenagers and I could not find anyone teaching people our age how money works. Horizon and YPSF pulled me in for the same reason as each other: both give young people a real platform rather than a symbolic one.

My faith and my family have shaped how I hold all of it. I was raised in a community where service is not a line on a resume but a standing expectation, and where you are measured less by what you achieve than by how you treat the people who cannot do anything for you. I try to keep that in view, especially in seasons where the work is going well.

Academically I have taken every AP course my school could timetable, then moved into dual enrollment at Simon Fraser University. When the school could not offer AP English this year, I chose to study for the exam independently rather than drop the subject. My friends would tell you that none of this makes me particularly serious in person — they joke that I probably have a board meeting after lunch, and that humour has kept me more grounded than any award has.