I spent most of college doing what I believed I should be doing as opposed to what I wanted to do. Obsessing over grades, filling my life with noise, thinking I needed a good job to be happy. Then I let go of that. I went to Barcelona and somewhere along the way my perception of success changed and how I felt before no longer made any sense.
I got to see my lifelong club Barça play at the Camp Nou, speak with amazing new people in Greek, Spanish, English, and very poorly in Catalan, and more unexpectedly but most importantly, I spent so much time alone. I was forced into looking at my life and understanding not only what I want from it, but what it means to live a good one, and I came back to Rice with a completely different idea of how I want to live.
I'm a junior computer science major at Rice from Boston, but what I study is not what I care about. I'm writing movies, books, and philosophy, and building technology as a means to help people know themselves and live well. I grew up watching my parents build Veson Nautical from the ground up and I learned young how to build software, talk with people, and understand problems. I don't want that to be my entire life, but I'm grateful to have those skills to help me live the life I want to and to help others do so too.
I hope this website gives you a window into my life, and if anything interests you, ask about it or reach out if you want to talk more. Iron sharpens iron.
Experience
Software Engineering InternSWE Intern
Incoming Software Engineering Intern on the Gmail iOS team in the Sunnyvale office, working on the AI inbox feature.
FounderFounder
Building toward a Public Benefit Corporation dedicated to helping people flourish across every medium that can reach them: technology, writing, film, and anything else that fits. The mission is improving self-knowledge, and a big part of the work is the continuous discovery of what helps people do that, how it can be done well, and what gets in the way.
Software Engineering InternSWE Intern
Incoming Software Engineering Intern on the Gmail iOS team in the Sunnyvale office, working on the AI inbox feature.
FounderFounder
Building toward a Public Benefit Corporation dedicated to helping people flourish across every medium that can reach them: technology, writing, film, and anything else that fits. The mission is improving self-knowledge, and a big part of the work is the continuous discovery of what helps people do that, how it can be done well, and what gets in the way.
Software Engineer InternSWE Intern
Learned C# and .NET on the job, shipped production features for Air Force infrastructure systems within weeks, and got a return offer.
Software Engineering Intern (Automation)SWE Intern
Built a document parsing system in one week that turned a three day manual process into eight minutes, earning a long term strategic partnership.
Data Science InternData Science Intern
Built NLP pipelines that turned 600k+ messy prospect data into a clean, searchable system and cut the sales team's outreach cycle by 70%.
Software Engineer in ResidenceSWE in Residence
Embedded in Rice's startup ecosystem doing user research, prototyping, and helping shape what the entrepreneurship program could become.
Software Development Intern (Mobile)SWE Intern (Mobile)
One of three iOS devs building how Veson's enterprise clients experienced mobile, from initial app to React platform transition.
Projects
Iris Mobile
A native iOS thinking partner that connects to my Apollo vault on the go. Voice-first via Wispr Flow. Same intelligence as Apollo Terminal, just in my pocket.
Iris Mobile
A native iOS thinking partner that connects to my Apollo vault on the go. Voice-first via Wispr Flow. Same intelligence as Apollo Terminal, just in my pocket.
The system I use and build everything from. A claudesidian-style vault (built on the open-source claudesidian project by Noah Brier / Alephic) that combines Claude Code with careful prompting to help me learn and know myself, organize everything in my life, and remove the frictional barriers to getting things done. Continuously improves as I use it. Public to download if you want to try!
The Lantern
A book inspired by How I Met Your Mother that names the patterns people face from their late teens to mid-thirties: relationships, decisions, traps. Split into Rules and Theories. Volume 2 published, Volume 3 in progress; distributed to ~20 readers whose feedback shapes each edition.
Media
research, reactions, and thinking, all connected through a blog on mikeveson.com.
Written for my freshman-year entrepreneurship class. I reflect on the spiral in my life caused by the intersection of my family's legacy and my own personal drive for innovation and technology.
research, reactions, and thinking, all connected through a blog on mikeveson.com.
Written for my freshman-year entrepreneurship class. I reflect on the spiral in my life caused by the intersection of my family's legacy and my own personal drive for innovation and technology.
Blueprints
The Tavern
BlueprintI love the vibes of taverns. Inspired by McLaren's from How I Met Your Mother, Greek kafeneia, and European pubs, I'm designing the tavern I want to have someday. Custom drinks named after my friends, my favorite foods, a spot to hang out with your friends and have a good time.
The Green Room
BlueprintMy environment is super important for being creative and having ideas, so I'm designing the Green Room: a space of things that help me be creative. Since I move around a lot, I try to create a Green Room wherever I'm staying with specific things that remind me of myself and help me think. Even having a couch matters because I tend to have more creative ideas lying down, which there's research on.
The Tavern
BlueprintI love the vibes of taverns. Inspired by McLaren's from How I Met Your Mother, Greek kafeneia, and European pubs, I'm designing the tavern I want to have someday. Custom drinks named after my friends, my favorite foods, a spot to hang out with your friends and have a good time.
The Green Room
BlueprintMy environment is super important for being creative and having ideas, so I'm designing the Green Room: a space of things that help me be creative. Since I move around a lot, I try to create a Green Room wherever I'm staying with specific things that remind me of myself and help me think. Even having a couch matters because I tend to have more creative ideas lying down, which there's research on.