Yurui Zi - Follow Dreams, Not Arbitrary Rules

It’s impossible to top the state in high school AND be involved with startups & accelerators simultaneously.?

Well, unless your name is Yurui Zi .

He state ranked Software Design in Year 10 (against year 12s), whilst coding his own productivity platform used by over 10, 000 people.?

As the youngest Startmate fellow, youngest Next Chapter hire and intern #1 at Kindling. , he’ll soon begin his university studies in the same hallways once graced by Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Barack Obama.

Harvard.

It’s because he’s chosen to follow his dreams, rather than arbitrary rules.??

At just 18 years old now, you may be wondering, “How the h*ll did Yurui develop this mindset?”.?

To answer that, we’ll have to go back to his very first dream.

Birth of a dream

At three years young, Yurui dreamed of becoming a train driver.

But it wasn't long before he traded railway jargon for the elements, as he learned to recite the entire periodic table in Year 5. Why? He wanted to be a chemistry professor.?

At 13, he taught himself to code, and with a couple mates from his highschool, James Ruse, he started developing a productivity platform. There's a contagious energy at selective schools that makes you work harder, whether it’s for, or against your peers. But Yurui saw a chance for them all to work smarter, and in 2020, RuseKronos was launched.

News began to spread like wildfire amongst Ruse, and soon neighbouring selective schools as well. Yurui was just 14 at the time, and soon enough, his productivity platform had reached 10, 000 users.

The following year, Yurui state ranked in software, though he was competing with students two grades above him.?

Family, friends, and teachers all congratulated him. His cheeks glowed red from all the grinning, yet he still felt something missing inside.?

“Wasn’t this what I wanted all along?”, Yurui asked himself.

As the elation of achieving “success” subsided, he began to search for answers.

Like stars aligning, his mother just happened to give him a copy of The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness, by Eric Jorgenson. It was eye-opening. Yurui couldn’t stop re-reading the second half of the book on happiness, with his biggest takeaway that,

“Everyone is running their own race, and at the end of the day, no one really gives a shit what you have actually accomplished.”

It spoke to his soul. It illuminated the path to overcoming his imposter syndrome and the reason he didn’t feel fulfilled. Because everything he did, everything he accomplished - he had done for others, or in comparison to others.?

It was time to start pursuing his own dreams.

All that stands between you and your next mentor is an email.

Yurui now knew that he had to discover what drove him internally. Traversing the internet, he came across a Reddit thread titled, “Should I study CS (Computer Science) or Med?”. One of the replies came from Chris Chiu, a resident doctor turned AI engineer.?

"Medical Doctor here. Wish I did CS or Finance instead."

Like Yurui, Chris had spent his educational trajectory on what he thought he should do, rather than what he actually wanted to do. By the time you become a registered doctor, you’ve already spent six years of study and one year of interning. Not many people pivot after that.?

Somehow, Chris still had the energy. Somehow, he reinvented himself at Harrison.ai. Yurui admired his unrelenting drive, and messaged Chris for a coffee chat. They quickly hit it off and Chris became both a friend and mentor.

Now, Yurui had always been open-minded, but with Naval’s sharp words in his armoury, he was filled with bold curiosity.

This led him towards a blog post titled “Why I Dropped Law After Coming First In Law” by Max Marchione.?

Although his classmates would kill to get into Sydney’s top law school and come first, Yurui was more intrigued by the first half of the title.

A sentence stuck with Yurui…

“There is a romanticised view of law broadening your horizons — "It shows you are smart ... It teaches you to think … It looks good on the resume" the law evangelists proselytise.”

This person on the other side of the computer screen genuinely understood Yurui’s dilemma. And he seemed to have figured it out. Without hesitation, Yurui messaged him for a chat. One of the first things Max asked on the call was,

“I assumed you messaged me because you want to build something one day?”.

Like a splash of icy water, these words sprung Yurui awake. It wasn’t winning awards, getting law/medicine university offers, or praise from teachers and parents that Yurui craved. It was to build something. Something that would “make a dent in the world”.?

Yurui began reflecting on RuseKronos. Though not conscious of it at the time, he suddenly realised that deep down, he’d always wanted to build great things to service those around him.

As their call came to a close, Max mentioned a strategy and growth internship opening up at Next Chapter - his co-founded club for young founders, investors and changemakers. Thus, what Yurui thought would be a conversion of learning, actually blossomed into a door-opening opportunity.

Yurui grabbed it with both hands. Through joining the internal team, he wasn’t just exposed to remarkable, young individuals changing the world. He was spearheading initiatives to bring these people together.?

Reflecting on the most eye-opening experiences within Next Chapter, Yurui says,

“Every time I meet someone from Next Chapter, I'm filled to the brim with excitement at what a person can accomplish. After all, it's only when you genuinely interact with these forces of nature that you can learn from their habits first hand.”

Never too early to start, mate.

Whilst in the process of joining Next Chapter, Yurui was also exploring the rabbit hole of startups and venture capital. Soon, he came across an opportunity linked with Blackbird.

Startmate.

What caught his eye was the Startmate Fellowship, which was a competitive internship for ambitious young individuals wanting to become founders or enter the startup world.?

However, it was only for university students or older.

“Don’t let arbitrary rules stop you from pursuing what you want”.?

These were the words echoing in Yurui’s mind as he shook off the initial disappointment, and proceeded to draft up his application.?

As he was typing up the final sentence, a sense of calm washed over.?

“What’s the worst that could happen?”.

And with that, he pressed submit.

A few months later, at just 16 years old, Yurui officially became Startmate’s “youngest Student Fellow of all time”.

Still, there was something holding him back. It caused his heart to beat a little faster, his breaths to huff a little louder, and it heightened every time he was about to take a leap.

The classic, fear of rejection.

Become numb to your greatest weakness.

During a summer camp in Melbourne the following year, Yurui decided to get rejected as much as possible, until he was completely numb to it.?

“I’ll never see these people again anyways,” he joked to himself.

First, he spent an entire day approaching strangers on the street and asking, “Hi, how ya going?” to each of them. Though ninety percent of the passers-by brushed him off, the ten percent that did respond delved into a brief, yet heartwarming conversation with him.

He returned to camp the next day radiating confidence, to the extent that his mates wouldn’t stop badgering him about what had happened the previous night. After explaining, Yurui and his mates chalked up a plan to sing in the streets of Melbourne that night. And so, as the sun dipped under the horizon, Yurui and Co. marched out of camp bellowing an unrehearsed, yet uncompromisingly passionate rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody (Galileo’s and all).?

The collective were met with a few scorns, a few laughs and a few cheers. None of it mattered though. What really counted, was what they’d built within themselves.

Impenetrable skin.

HSC is your entire world… not.

Picture a single white door in the middle of an endless field of green, not attached to any wall or roof. Whilst closed, you can walk circles around the door and see only green foliage. But when opened, an entirely different world is revealed within its frame. Somehow, no one really dares to push it open. That’s how it feels to live in the fever dream world of selective schools during Year 11 and 12.?

The door, of course, is the Higher School Certificate (HSC).

After HSC results are released in December, every student walks through the white door and forgets the field of green.?

Yurui’s journey was a little different, though. He did in fact peek beyond the white door, and dipped his toe in the other world. Whilst on the study grind, he also had his sights set on the top US colleges and internships at venture capital firms.

In fact, in Year 10 he had scored in the 99th percentile in the SATs.

He had also sent countless cold emails to interesting companies, and one day, at the top of his email inbox was a reply from…??

A partner at Blackbird.

With no university degree yet and no paid work experience in any related industry, Blackbird was still open to chatting with Yurui about an internship - following their motto, “backing the hungry, not the proven.” Unfortunately, after a couple of chats, the leading Australian VC decided that they couldn’t find scope for a gig, but were seriously impressed by Yurui’s hustle.

Yurui’s biggest piece of advice from this?

“Just go for it. The worst thing they’ll say is no, but at least they’ll know your name now. Trusting in serendipity led me to have coffees with some amazing people from all over the Australian startup ecosystem. David Shein from OIF, James Cameron from Airtree, Mason Yates from Blackbird… it all came from sending those cold outreaches”.

Fast forward to this year, Yurui decided to put aside scholarships worth $100k and law school offers from the top Australian universities in order to take a gap year. Unlike the typical gap year that involves hitting up night clubs across the world, Yurui has been dedicating his time to “learning by experiencing, rather than reading”.

In March, Yurui felt an opportunity brewing at Kindling - a new company by podcast legends Sachin and Adam. Soon after, as their designated Content, Research, and Operations guy, Yurui had the opportunity to work closely with the founders, behind the scenes, during Kindling’s closing of their $500,000 pre-seed funding round.?

Over the next few months, Yurui described how he “wore many hats and was intellectually stimulated absolutely every day. I got exposure to the most interesting and powerful people in the world. They showed me what true personal success looks like, compared to conventional flashy success. With the Kindling team, I learnt what it meant to work for the soul rather than for the dollar. We also had the most amazing office chats - sometimes in a cold plunge, and evenings after work in the sauna.”

Whilst he was interning at Kindling, Yurui also attended Stanford ASES’ global entrepreneurship summit. Not only was he one of just 35 delegates selected from across the world, the summit was reserved exclusively for university students (that had never stopped him before, and wasn’t going to now either). This opportunity put him in the same room as legendary speakers from Silicon Valley, including the former CEO of Tesla (Michael Marks), billionaire founder of Zynga (Mark Pincus) and former interim CEO of Quizlet (Mark Selcow). Over the course of a week, he became friends with the brightest young minds around the world from Stanford, Oxford, LSE, Yale, Columbia and ETH Zurich.?

A couple months before the summit, Yurui had actually written a post about how Stanford rejected him. With complete transparency and bucketloads of courage, Yurui described how he was happy for all of the students admitted to their dream schools in the past few days, whilst thanking Stanford for “adding to the fire within.” From the experiences at Kindling to the ASES summit, the flame continued to grow - so it’s only fair that in June, Yurui received an email that warmed his heart.

“Congratulations! I am delighted to inform you that the Committee on Admissions has admitted you to the Harvard College Class of 2028. A transformative college experience awaits you...”?

He was over the moon. Last year, Harvard had only 35 Australian students in their entire undergraduate cohort. Yurui’s unrelenting nature and absolute lack of fear towards rejection had helped him usurp the odds once again.

So next semester, Yurui will begin studying computer science in the same rooms Bill Gates once did, and also learn philosophy in the halls previously graced by Henry David Thoreau.

In the meantime, he'll also continue to work on personal projects, like sharing his learnings in his blog. To describe it in one sentence, Yurui says,

“I have two younger brothers and write as if I’m giving advice to them as we begin our journeys through life.”

Through absorbing the wisdom of Naval’s Almanack and meeting mentors like Chris and Max, Yurui has completely transformed his source of motivation from external pressures to internal fulfilment. By reaching for self-actualisation, he’s on a journey against no one, and for no one, except himself.??

So what’s his big dream?

To improve access for other people wanting to fulfil their potential. Whether this involves making accelerators more accessible for future founders, or accelerating the path to self actualisation, Yurui will be spending the near future experiencing all that’s involved to better equip himself for building the solutions.

Now, at just 18 years old, Yurui has done more than most people twice his age.?

The scariest part??

He’s only getting started.

Thanks for reading my story with Yurui.

You can connect with Yurui here:?

• Yurui's LinkedIn

You can check out his website here:

• https://www.yuruizi.com/

If you enjoyed this read, click subscribe to get a Q&A with a founder, creator or gamechanger sent to you each Wednesday (AEST)!

And as always,

Keep dreamaking.