Her Story
About Serena
Serena Pei serves as co-founder and CTO of a startup in the current Y Combinator summer batch, where she focuses on developing AI video generation technology. A recent graduate of MIT with a degree in computer science and engineering, Pei has worked in the software industry since her college years and draws on multimodal research experience from her time at the university. She maintains professional affiliations with the Society of Women Engineers, Women in EECS, and ACM, and emphasizes the importance of risk-taking and authenticity in her approach to building technology that addresses real industry needs.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Serena
01What do you attribute your success to?
I would give a lot of credit to my parents for just my upbringing, because I think I'm honestly, when I think back on my childhood, I feel like such a spoiled child, because everyone like everything I needed was basically fed to me, and there wasn't really that much I needed to worry about besides, you know, just like going through school and learning a lot. So, I would say probably my parents are the biggest factor.
02What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
I think the main thing I notice is that a lot of people in this field are risk adverse, and they really like to take the linear path. But I would say, I would recommend people be a little more risk-taking. Especially if they're young, and just because the upside of taking these risks can be super high. And it would just really help you, no matter what happens, even if you fail, you can learn a lot from it as well. And if you succeed, obviously, that's a really good thing for you, too. So, either way, I think risk-taking is something that everyone should just lean into when they're in their early 20s.
03What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
In this field in general, I would say a lot of the industries that we're targeting are reluctant to trust AI completely, and for good reason, because it is a good a really significant change, and I know that a lot of people are a little bit more reluctant to change the way that they work completely. So, for example, if we target the marketing industries, we see that a lot of people do not trust AI completely to generate these videos, because they might question the quality of the videos, or maybe they just think that the aesthetic or branding is off. So, there's a lot to consider when trying to convince people that it's worth their time and effort to lean into this whole AI video generation.
04What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
Probably staying true to myself, because I think it's really easy to get hung up on maybe external factors or external motivations, like maybe trying to impress someone, or trying to reach a certain quantitative stats for your company, there's always just those externally motivated goals, which I think are also important, but at the same time, I really want to stay true to myself and really do what I enjoy doing.
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