TKS Mafia

All the really interesting things that TKS alums have done to this day, presented in one place.

Last updated: Jul 24th, 2022

Toronto - (22) Jay Parthasarthy -- raised 1 mil to tackle climate change.

Toronto - (23) Ben Nashman -- raised 5 mil to develop non-invasive blood monitor.

Toronto - (21) Samarth Athreya -- raised 1 mil to develop next-gen biosensors.

Toronto - (21) Alexander Wu -- raised 23 mil to build an operating system for DAOs.

Toronto - (21) Liam Hinzman -- full-time software enginner at numerai.

Toronto - (20) Alishba Imran -- raised 1 mil to develop ML tools to test energy storage.

Toronto - (20) Shagun Meshawari -- raised 1 mil to develop ML tools to test energy storage.

Toronto - (23) Thayallan Srinathan -- raised 5.5 mil to make it easy to earn money playing videos games.

Toronto - (19) Sigil Wen -- raised 1.5 mil to tokenize storytelling for discoverability.

Las Vegas - (18) Valkyrie Holmes -- received 100k to explore fighting forest fires with drones.

Vancouver - (19) Jesse Pound -- received 100k to explore fighting forest fires with drones.

Toronto - (21) Michael Trinh -- founded biodojo to reach future biotech leaders at undergrad institutions

Ottawa - (18) Jelena Chaing

Ottawa - (19) Dickson Wu

Toronto - (22) Hannah Le

Toronto - (22) Nazra Nashouad

Toronto - (20) Izzy Grandic

Toronto - (21) Tanisha Bassan

Toronto - (20) Jack Ceroni

Toronto - (19) Adara Hagman

Toronto - (21) Luke Piette

Toronto - (21) Rikard Saqe

Toronto - (19) Brianna Gopaul

Toronto - (20) Ananya Chadha

Toronto - (18) Ayaan Esmail

Boston - (19) Mukundh Murthy

Toronto - (21) Simon Zirui Guo

Toronto - (20) Bonnie Li

Toronto - (19) Seyone Chithrananda

Montreal - (17) Tobias Grether-Murray

Toronto - (18) Jake Adler -- now a Thiel Fellow

Toronto - (18) Aleem Rehmtulla

Mexico - (18) Sofia Sanchez

So many people from Toronto lol!
Toronto doesn't mean these people are still in Toronto -- most have moved elsewhere. It means they did TKS in Toronto.
I might have gotten some of the ages wrong, since I'm just estimating.
I also might be forgetting people! Keep in mind this is just a snapshot from my POV.

TKS was very positive for me. I put in huge amounts of energy, and got a lot of value out of it (for example to learn how to code, I woke up at 5am and worked for 2h before going to school, for a period of 3 months).
The skills and mindsets taught were valuable, and I still reflect back on them to this day. But overwhelmingly the most value I got was from the community and environement. There's a famous saying "You're the average of your 5 closest friends" -- after joining TKS my 5 closest friends all became extremely ambitious, and that had an effect on me.
There's a subculture of maxmizing internships, speaking opportunities, etc., but personally I and many of the people above didn't care about this and focused on learning skills and building cool stuff instead.
Also, TKS students can be very cringy sometimes when interacting with professionals -- I did some reaallly cringy stuff too in hindsight. But the point is that this is how people learn -- and students learn very quickly that it's bad.
A very interesting thing to consider is that a large amount of TKS students end up returning to mediocrity after the program ends. During my year, there were 120 students, and of those, only ~15 are now on unconventional paths. This isn't a bad thing, just a curious thing to note.