Growing up in the Bay Area, my life has always been wrapped up in tech. When I was nine, I went to my first hackathon: OpportunityHack. Hosted by PayPal and packed with sweaty college students, I waddled in with my prepubescent chubbiness and, alongside some friends, built an app for the Silicon Valley Housing Trust. At the end of the weekend, we demoed it to a standing ovation—and I got my first hit of that addicting feeling: people loving something you built.

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Over the last nine years, I've built everything from LEGO robots to full-blown apps for nonprofits, to a logistics-heavy business in the restaurant space. Some of my projects won prizes at small hackathons that felt like sleepovers with laptops, while others—like my Congressional App Challenge-winning app—took me all the way to the U.S. Capitol. Now, at Casca, I get to keep building, but this time with real-world impact at scale: helping bankers across the country better serve the millions of small business owners who power our economy. Nine-year-old me would be proud.