Why we care

I'm a refugee from Ukraine. I came to Australia at 13. Alone. No family. No English.

I remember sitting in classes understanding nothing. Just sounds. I'd copy whatever the person next to me was writing, hoping it meant something.

I learned. Taught myself web design in school, found local businesses, built them websites. By graduation, top 3% nationally. In a language I'd learned from zero.

Got into a CS degree on scholarship. During it, self-taught a year of graduate AI material. Then the war escalated. My parents couldn't help with fees anymore. My visa became uncertain. There was a real possibility I'd have to drop out, go back to Ukraine. To fight.

Full courseload with hard CS, math, statistics. Teaching 150 university students in the evenings. Delivered Uber Eats until 2am. Sometimes I'd teach students in the afternoon, and deliver their food that evening. One bad grade meant deportation to the frontlines.

Graduated. Led a team of 5 at Francisco Partners where I shipped valuable research. Built agents and trained GPTs from scratch. At Westpac, led R&D to deliver a Machine Learning framework that systematically improves models touching hundreds of billions in exposures.

All of it cost me more than it seemed to cost anyone else. I never knew why. Then I got diagnosed with ADHD as an adult, and it all made sense at once. The first 13 years I spent as the class clown, learning nothing. And every year after it.

Once I understood that, I left my job right before promotion to work on this. Two projects since, both social impact work in the neurodivergent space. Now focusing on giving every child on earth access to elite level education. We are starting from young Australian neurodivergent kids who do homeschooling or find their homework hard.

Today there is a kid at a kitchen table at 9pm, working on a worksheet that should have taken twenty minutes. His mum has been sitting next to him for three hours. She has tried everything. Tomorrow they do it again. Another kid can't walk into school at all, learning at home from a parent who never trained for this.