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Grace Woo
Grace Woo
01:05

Grace Woo

Pixels.IO

San Francisco, CA USA

"Challenges, whether or not you succeed or fail, are what develop your identity."

Career Roadmap

Grace's work combines: Entrepreneurship, Technology, and Accomplishing Goals

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Day In The Life

Founder

I am an electrical engineer that developed a technology that can turn any screen into an interactive experience.

My Day to Day

Most of my day recently has been consumed by trying to figure out how to run a business. There are a lot of things around building my company and dealing with a startup that have nothing to do with what I am trained in. There are many points where I have no idea what I'm doing, but you just go with it. My daily goal with my work is to make VR codes an industry standard.

Skills & Education

Advice for getting started

Nothing about starting my own company relates to what I've done before or what I am trained to do. It's a whole new experience and there are times where I feel like I don't know what I'm doing, but I'm just going with the flow.

Here's the path I took:

  • High School

  • Bachelor's Degree

    Electrical and Electronics Engineering

    University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

  • Graduate Degree

    Liberal Arts and Sciences/Liberal Studies

    Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  • Doctorate

    Electrical and Electronics Engineering

    Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  • Doctorate

    Computer Science

    Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Life & Career Milestones

My path in life has been direct

  • 1.

    When she was a kid, they didn’t have many toys, so she’d save boxes and toilet paper rolls and build her own toys.

  • 2.

    But at the end of each day, her mom would throw away all her “toys”; she thinks this taught her an important lesson about having to build something new from scratch everyday.

  • 3.

    When she was 19, she graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign with a degree in electrical engineering and a minor in mathematics.

  • 4.

    She went to MIT for grad school, earning a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science, but she studied in the Media Arts & Sciences Program.

  • 5.

    While working on her doctorate, she developed a new technology that acts as an alternative to QR codes; she eventually developed that technology into Pixels.IO.

  • 6.

    Unlike QR codes, her video response codes are embedded in videos and undetectable to the human eye.

  • 7.

    Users can hold their phones up to videos that have her codes embedded within them and enter into an interactive experience on their phones.

  • 8.

    Says, “when in doubt, learn some skill”; she especially urges every young adult to at least learn the basics of how to code, a skill she believes will be crucial to have in the future.

Defining Moments

How I responded to discouragement

  • THE NOISE

    Messages from Myself:

    I can't run my own company.

  • How I responded:

    Nothing about starting my own company relates to what I've done before or what I am trained to do. It's a whole new experience and there are times where I feel like I don't know what I'm doing, but I'm just going with the flow.