Bio Essays

David Mao

"Think of your life as a rainbow arcing across the horizon of this world. You appear, have a chance to blaze in the sky, then you disappear." - Steve Jobs

I left traditional high school at 16 to move from Philly to SF to build Symbal, a reinforcement learning company backed by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund.

All my life, I have been thinking in frameworks and underlying mental models. However, I only realized this around a year ago. I started this project on May 4th, 2026, to write down these mental models so I can reference them later. You can read all of them here.

What I'm doing now

  1. Building and scaling Symbal.
  2. First-principle-ing my own startup.
  3. Conducting ML research at Stanford University.

Links