Building the screen made me ask why the price moved

Context

During the same gap year, alongside the tutoring business, I interned at KASA, a real estate investment platform. The idea is that individuals can own fractions of buildings and trade those stakes the way they would trade shares, with the price moving as the building’s value changes.

I started as a software engineering intern on the trading-screen team. My job was building the screens people used to trade: views that had to show complex, constantly changing information clearly enough that someone could act on it.

The problem

The longer I built the screens, the more I wanted to know what was behind the numbers on them. Why did a price move? What made one building’s stake more valuable than another’s? How did a new offering come together in the first place?

Those weren’t questions the trading-screen team needed me to answer. They were questions about the business itself. And they interested me more than the screen did.

What I did

• Moved toward the questions. I moved from the trading-screen team to the CEO’s office, where the work was research across the business rather than one piece of the product.
• Looked at the whole system. Instead of how a number was displayed, I was now looking at what drove it: how prices moved, and how offerings were put together.

What I learned

I enjoy building a piece of something. I enjoy seeing how the whole thing works more.

That sounds small, but it shaped the next two years. It’s why, when I got to NYU, I went looking for the place where people are trained to see whole businesses at once, which at the time I thought was finance. Some of that turned out to be right and some of it didn’t. But the question that started it was the one I asked at KASA: not “how do I build this screen,” but “why does this number move?”