In 2023, I was almost hit by a car walking home from work, on the phone trying to convince a customer to work with us. That was my wake-up call. Three years into building my own company, after walking away from a well-paying corporate job and a promising academic career to chase something that was actually mine, I remember thinking all of it had been for nothing, and that I was a failure.

I'd immigrated to Canada in 2008 for a PhD in quantum computing, then gone to Oxford in 2014 for a postdoc in one of the top labs in my field. I should have been thrilled, but something was missing: the work had prestige, not the impact I actually wanted. In 2015 I tried to build a quantum tech startup, but the market simply wasn't ready for it. It failed. In 2016, while I was preparing to leave academia for industry, I came across the idea of applying AI to natural language for the first time, and fell for it immediately. As a physicist I was already comfortable with code and data, but the idea that you could apply computation to language itself felt different, and I remember thinking: what if this could work on knowledge-intensive work, like scientific research? That question is what eventually became my startup. Thinking that I needed some savings and business experience, in 2017 I started a corporate data science job at one of the largest banks in Canada. The paychecks and promotions kept climbing, and every raise made the golden handcuffs tighter. But my desire for autonomy and impact never actually left. In 2018 I started a community, partly to stay current, mostly as my own way of chasing that question. In 2019 I turned down a big promotion: thank you, but I've been thinking about going part-time to work on some of my ideas; by 2020 I'd left corporate work entirely. Then the pandemic hit, and it took almost every in-person plan I had with it. We had to rebuild online instead, managed to raise a small amount of funding, and kept going. None of that was something I chose. COVID didn't ask me first, and neither did the moment AI models suddenly got good enough, in 2022, to change everything overnight. Both just happened, the same way a layoff happens to someone. What I was left holding underneath all of it was years of anxiety, with depleted savings, and no other financial safety net behind me. That's what put me on that call, on that street, in 2023.

It took the better part of two years to find my footing again. What I eventually understood was that the disruption itself wasn't what broke me. It was that I'd put my entire identity and every plan I had into one single objective, so when that objective got disrupted, I had nothing else standing under me. If you tie all of who you are to one job, one company, or one title, corporate or startup, without ever figuring out what you're actually chasing underneath it, you're exposed the moment something outside your control takes it away. I was. The fix wasn't a more conservative objective, like going back to corporate. It was a wider one: a deeper understanding of what actually drives me, and a whole range of interests and identities I valued enough that no single disruption could take all of me down with it.

That's what I actually help people build now, at the innovation hubs where I advise, at the university where I teach, and at Agentic Buildcamp itself. Yes, I teach them the engineering side of AI, but I also show them how to reclaim their autonomy, critical thinking, and control over their future.

Whether it was a choice you made or something that just happened to you, if it took away the identity you'd built your life around, you don't need another single thing to replace it with. You need a wider foundation, a place to build on it while it's still under construction, and a community to build it with. That's what this program actually is: a cognitive gym.