2324T2 Silicon Valley/Participant Information/Akeela Darryl Fattha
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About A. Darryl
SMU email: akeelaf.2022@scis.smu.edu.sg
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/akeela-darryl
Academic Year: Year 2 (2023)
Degree: BSc Information Systems (Major in Digitalisation and Cloud Solutions)
Why TSM?
- What motivates you to join TSM?
This opportunity is great to learn more about the inner workings of small, and big tech companies. It would really help for me to understand the priorities of companies in different stages since its inception, and how they manoeuvre such a fast-paced industry. Notwithstanding knowledge related to companies, meeting fellow software developers and being more familiar with the environment, attitude and values of people in a coveted location is a necessary experience for succeeding in either finding potential entrepreneurial partners or simply working together with talented people.
Of course successful companies also have met their fair-share of failures and we cannot only narrow-sightedly celebrate their successes. In that regard, it's imperative to delve into their failures to understand what has gone wrong and why, as this knowledge can surely provide valuable lessons to avoid similar or related pitfalls. In addition to how they reacted to failures, it would also be interesting to learn whether some decisions that were made without comparatively much thought, have become an underrated and invaluable action that it could conceivably have strongly contributed to their success in hindsight.
- Where would you like to visit?
Unequivocally, I would like to visit the Big Tech's HQs, especially Apple's donut-shaped main building. I admire the level of architecture and design that went into building a marvel, however, more intriguingly for me is how they incorporate technology into these buildings. Do they take advantage of proximity to/from certain areas to trigger certain tasks? How do they test and prototype their products? In general, I'm curious how have they utilised their position in the bleeding edge of tech to make their employees lives easier, in terms of campus design.
Aside from the companies themselves, it would be great to experience Stanford's Entrepreneurship programs, or their equivalent of SMU's Greenhouse, to find out whether there's any major differences between how the 2 operates, thrives and churns out brilliant companies.
Starting a business
- What types of business interest you?
I'm interested in businesses that try to revamp or drastically improve the way we do our everyday BAU work, like clearing emails, consuming news, or in communication. In a very mature space in business, where lots of standards have taken root already, figuring out a niche, validating the necessity of tackling that niche and executing on that niche successfully takes an excessively innovative idea and massive balls to do it. A great example would be SuperHuman, where they try to revamp the email experience, and in an elegant way as well.
- What plans do you have in starting a business?
I do have plans to attempt to run a business, specifically in that type aforementioned, some time after I've gained some corporate working experience. While I have been collating some ideas over the past few years on plausible business ventures, I have yet to execute on any in light of the lack of knowledge, technical, business and resource-acquisition wise, so I'm eager to fill in the gaps with any opportunity available.
Past Experiences
Internships:
Shopee - Business Intelligence Analyst (Apr 22 - July 22)
CCA & Other Activities:
SMUX Euphorux HR/Admin Director
SMU Fencing (Epee)
