Involvement

Where I show up.

Communities and orgs I'm part of.

buildpurdue

Sep 2025 - Present

Co-President & Co-Founder · Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN

Founder-led, peer-to-peer density for student builders at Purdue.

What it is

buildpurdue is a founder-led, peer-to-peer community for student builders at Purdue. The core identity is density and agency: the more active founders there are in the same room, building alongside each other, the faster everyone compounds. Progress comes from proximity, not from programming.

It isn't a top-down accelerator that hands founders a curriculum and waits for them to graduate. It's a dense group of people already shipping, giving each other real feedback, and pulling in operators and investors when the group needs them.

My role

I'm Co-President and co-founded the current iteration of buildpurdue. I shape the operational framework the org runs on. I lead the build of the internal software platform that manages it. And I spend a lot of my time making sure the room stays dense with people who are actually shipping.

Contributions

Operational framework: Shaped the playbook for how buildpurdue selects its cohort, runs its cadence, and keeps the community peer-to-peer rather than lecture-driven. The framework protects founder agency: founders set their own goals and use the group as leverage, not as a gate.
Operating platform: Led the build of buildpurdue's internal platform in Next.js and TypeScript on Supabase / PostgreSQL, with RBAC pipelines for cohort tracking, alumni management, mentor matching, and event logistics. Primary contributor on the codebase, working alongside the rest of the team.
Partnerships & events: Forged partnerships with VC firms and recruited a rotating bench of industry mentors. Organizes on-campus sessions where operators give student founders direct feedback, and workshops on topics like finding a first paying customer and co-founder selection.
Density & agency: Deliberately optimizes buildpurdue for density of active founders in the room. The best advice a student founder gets usually comes from another student founder who is two months ahead of them. Making sure that conversation actually happens, and happens often, is the whole point.

Why it matters

Most startups don't fail because of bad ideas. They fail because of unknown unknowns that only experience can teach you. buildpurdue exists to compress that experience gap for student founders before they burn two years on a dead thesis.

There's a sharp difference between campus feedback and operator feedback. Campus feedback is pattern-matched from people who have read about startups. Operator feedback comes from people who have bet, lost, and adjusted. Student founders need the second kind, and most campus orgs can't deliver it.

The most progress comes from density. A student founder two months ahead of you is more useful than a curriculum and more honest than a lecture. buildpurdue is designed around that: peer-to-peer, founder-led, and built to keep the room full of people who are actually shipping.

Running buildpurdue is the clearest version of my "founder-engineer first" identity. I co-designed the org, led the build of its software, and I recruit the people who make the room worth being in. It's an operation I'm running.