Catching Up With Katie Watson '17

What are you up to now, Katie?
I'm a founder and VP of a venture-backed semiconductor startup currently aiming to reinvent the credit card with cutting-edge advances in hardware. With more powerful cryptography, custom apps, and ultra-high security, we aim for our technology to power cryptocurrency hardware wallets, new financial technologies, and the entire banking ecosystem. As part of this role, I ensure we can develop the code for the chip on our credit cards to turn our hardware into a complete, functional product. This includes developing the software that runs on the card, designing tools that allow engineers to build apps, and working with hardware engineers to jointly make high-level decisions.

What's the most important thing you learned at OES?
The most important thing OES taught me was clear, concise communication. When running a startup, rapidly and effectively communicating issues and changes in status is crucial to success. The classes I took at OES were critical in laying the foundation for these skills. Moreover, OES enabled me to explore my excitement for mathematics in ways that enabled me to eventually launch my startup.

What is something you achieved because of your experience at OES?
Because of my time at OES, I was able to earn the credentials I needed to be admitted to college, where my co-founders and I conceived of our company. At OES, I also had the space to work on science projects that gave me direct footholds into internships which both furthered my experience and gave me invaluable personal connections.

I love that my work is both fundamentally interdisciplinary and addresses unsolved problems. I get to work with individuals of all kinds of technical backgrounds, and as a founder I get to interact with many more aspects of running a tech company than I might otherwise. Also, the fact that our work pushes the edges of what's considered possible in several respects is deeply exciting to me.

What's your advice to current students at OES?
What I would say to current students is:

Don't worry too much. Even if it doesn't feel like it, most of your choices won't make or break anything, but they will add up in aggregate. Chase something you find exciting and eventually your choices will sum to what you want.

Choose who you are. This is a choice every single morning that either you decide, or else someone else decides for you. I grew up saddled with depression and religious guilt because I told myself I was the good, high-achieving Mormon boy that others wanted. Only after years of prodding by concerned friends could I finally free myself from that self-conception. After that, the dominoes quickly fell and I was soon making choices that made the real me happy.

Follow your nose. As a kid, I liked video games, so I looked up how to program one. In middle school, I thought robotics was cool, so I used my experience programming to try making robots instead. In high school, I thought AI was cool, so I used my past experiences to try AI experiments. In college, I decided I preferred pure math, so I took all the math I'd learned from those experiences and switched majors. Every one of these steps made it easier to try something new.

Check your ego. While a desire to be the best can be a great motivator, life is messy, and tying yourself up in your performance can make you brittle and less willing to explore. Teach yourself to decouple your work from your sense of worth, and focus on finding the pure joy of exploration. Embrace incompleteness.

Leap into the unknown. At many points in my life, I've stood on the precipice of making a major change in my life but felt tempted to step back. Staying put gives certainty; remaining the same means your experiences will too. Change offers no such assurance. Yet, every time I've felt a nagging, consistent need for change—be it leaving my childhood religion, switching majors, or transitioning—making the jump into the unknown was, in hindsight, unequivocally the right choice.