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
See more careers and stories that connect to your interests.
Take Roadmap QuizSkills & 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.