Writing

We live in a world where I can’t help but question, what is our definition of public benefit? I frequently see new accounts popping up on LinkedIn, Instagram, anywhere digital presence can reside. New non profits for all walks of life, starting the summer before senior year in high school, and fading once winter rolls in. And I don’t think that’s a character flaw. What’s actually happening is we’ve built a reward system that pays out at launch and nothing after. Ask anyone why this problem, and what results is a shrug and a carefully and emotionally crafted story that, after a while, fades into the same dialogue.

My founding journey doesn’t have an emotional sob story or cookie cutter start. I started building an oral cancer screening tool in eighth grade. I read that people die of a cancer you can see with your eyes, and that seemed stupid to me, and I had a laptop. That’s the whole reason. At first, it felt overly ambitious, let me try something out as a fun project and see how it goes. After all, a majority of the world lacks the resources that I, living in the west, take for granted. Little me had limited technical knowledge, after all this was before the big AI boom that followed in upcoming years. Designing wireframes from scratch, writing every line of code thoughtfully was difficult, really difficult. Sure, it was too much and I could have, and from an outside perspective, should have moved on from. But I found myself keep coming back to it, month after month, and in the coming years. At a certain point, my skills had reached a level where I felt guilty to leave it collecting dust, and along with some friends, we set sail on OCRadar. I only realized years later what worth it had. A combination of drive, luck, and what truly was being at the right place at the right time brought it to where we see it now. After years of building under the radar (pun not intended), a scoreboard appeared.

Here’s what a scoreboard does. It shouldn’t, but oftentimes does change who people are. It makes us legible. It rewards what can be seen: the product, niche statistics, the sheer idea. But, drains what can’t. Nobody watches you spend weeks fixing a bug by hand. Nobody is there to cheer you on when you speak to some of the greatest minds in the space. What everyone sees now are the numerous news articles, online videos, and media buzz: “Sixteen Years Old and Solving World Problems: High School Juniors Tackle Oral Cancer Challenge.” All that is remembered is the semi-viral Instagram clip of me pitching the app as a random kid who snuck into an 18+ tech event.

And none of what came next was a result of how it looked. OCRadar at its core couldn’t have gotten to where it is without that pitch. I, a big fan of the Tech Roast Show, was thrilled to have gotten a ticket as a 16 year old. I spoke in front of more people than ever before in my life, and by chance met someone after the show who was working with my school district’s superintendent. With a quiet chain of emails, I was called to my principal’s office in the middle of class. My heart sank, I had never been in one before, what could have possibly happened? As it turns out, the school district was so excited to hear that this was happening and wanted to make it known. Many interviews later, OCRadar became a smash hit, pre-release. We had gotten in touch with cancer survivors, medical professionals, and people we couldn’t have dreamt of who had helped us develop it into what we have today. The survivors and the doctors are what really mattered, not for the product, but because they voiced what was needed and let us build it. When looking back, we realize that walking away costs someone other than ourselves.

And so, as a graduated high school student, I watch every wave of new projects and non profits. I don’t think they’re insincere, just unfinished and misdirected. They don’t get to the point where the cost is something bigger, so an exit is near nothing. And that’s the economically logical response to a scoreboard that stops keeping track after November 1st. I, personally, made it through with stubbornness and a lot of luck.

So to define what we’ve pondered about through this essay, public benefit is not a category of projects, a status symbol, or another tick on a list. It’s duration, the point where quitting is an exit greater than yourself. Nobody starts with a reason good enough. Which means the question was never why you started, but whether anyone is waiting on you yet.