A Bigger World Than I Ever Imagined

GRIP: KK Fund in Taiwan

Humanoid robot showcased at Intel’s booth.

There is a moment, somewhere between the third founder meeting of the day and the walk home through streets still warm from the afternoon, when a word you have used a hundred times stops meaning what it used to mean. This summer, that word was technology.

I had read about it, but reading about technology and sitting across from someone who has spent seven years of their life on a single problem — a battery chemistry, a chip architecture, a way of making machines perceive the physical world — are two entirely different experiences. One lets you understand the idea. The other lets you feel the weight of it.

Through GRIP, I am interning at KK Fund, a Taiwan and Asia-focused venture capital firm, where the work revolves around due diligence, investment memos, and founder meetings. My manager, Kuan, believes in learning by doing. He often gives us a problem with little instruction, lets us develop our own approach, and then challenges the assumptions, gaps, and blind spots in our thinking. Unlike school, where problems are often structured and the path forward is relatively clear, investing requires constant adaptation. Learning to navigate that uncertainty while making decisions with incomplete information has been one of the most valuable parts of the experience.

This summer coincided with some of Asia’s biggest tech conferences. At Computex, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang showcased the Vera CPU, Marvell CEO Matt Murphy spoke about connectivity as the next bottleneck in AI development, and NXP CEO Rafael Sotomayor discussed the rise of Physical AI. Many of the products being discussed had not yet been fully built, and some of the markets they were meant to serve did not even exist, underscoring how innovation often starts with a vision of the future before the future itself arrives.

At NextRise and InnoVEX, two of Asia’s major startup conferences, we had one-on-one meetings with founders, hearing about their companies and deciding whether to move forward with further diligence. Speaking with founders building brain-inspired computer chips, digital twins of semiconductor factories, and imaging systems capable of inspecting diaper defects, I realized how many ambitious ideas were focused on problems most people never think about. Each founder spent years obsessing over a small corner of the world, and perhaps innovation is often less about flashy new inventions and more about solving overlooked problems with extraordinary persistence.

Excitingly, our exploration also extended beyond conference halls. Visiting a compound semiconductor testing facility in Hsinchu, we saw firsthand the equipment and testing processes that underpin modern semiconductor development. Until then, semiconductors had existed mostly as abstractions to me—headlines about supply chains, geopolitical tensions, and company earnings reports. Seeing the industry up close suddenly made it feel tangible.

But the exploration this summer wasn’t confined to conference halls and meeting rooms. Taipei reveals itself in small moments. It is Longshan Temple in Wanhua, where the smell of incense drifts through the air as worshippers move quietly between lantern-lit halls. It is Dihua Street on a drizzly Sunday, with century-old shophouses, traditional medicine stores, and baskets of dried goods spilling onto the sidewalks. It is an afternoon in Yangmingshan National Park, where hot springs, dense forests, and rolling grasslands provide a rare sense of calm.

One evening, while wandering through Shilin Night Market, my co-intern Puraav (a dedicated Jensen Huang fan!) spotted him in the crowd and immediately sent a photo to our group chat. It was the highlight of his week, and the moment felt fitting for a city where centuries-old temples, night markets, and some of the world’s most influential technology companies coexist side by side.

The technology, the founders, the labs, the culture — the more I saw, the more I realized how much I hadn’t seen yet. It felt like the beginning of exploration.