Inworlder Spotlight: Nathan Yu, Product Lead

Wondering what it’s like to work at Inworld? In our Inworlder Spotlights, we give you an inside look at our company culture and the dynamic group of engineers, creative technologists, scientists, and nerds building the future of AI characters with Inworld. Check out our open roles.

‍Name: Nathan Yu

Title: Product Lead

What are two fun facts we should know about you?

I enjoy everything outdoors like snowboarding, rock climbing, and hiking. I enjoy more risky hikes as I like exposed scrambling which is an activity kind of between hiking and climbing. Recently, I got scuba dive certified.

My favorite video game is Ori and the Blind Forest. It has a very good storyline, beautiful art, and beautiful music. I like the game mechanics a lot.

Why did you choose to work at Inworld? 

Inworld is a very exciting startup with an incredible impact opportunity. Being on the cutting edge of AI machine learning is super exciting because it's unlocking a lot of use cases, regardless of the domain.

What’s the culture like at Inworld?

Inworld is a very collaborative team environment. Everyone here is very intelligent. We have a lot of subject matter experts from the ML side, the platform development side, and the product side. There are a lot of early pioneers and seasoned leaders in the domains that they work on here. It's great to learn from them and work with them. 

What’s a day in your work life like? 

It's spread across a lot of different things. First, I have partner meetings with strategic partners that we're already working with and new partners that are interested in our solutions. Next, I spend some focused time on writing out product requirements, and documents, and thinking through areas of product improvement. Finally, a lot of my day is spent diving deep with the character creation team and the ML team on how to solve the complex problems that exist and how to build out the actual use cases for our partners.

What’s your team like? 

It's very adaptable. We juggle all the balls across products and we're very nimble. If there's a pressing need, we're very hands-on and work with the other teams to identify potential solutions and iterate toward improvement.

What’s an accomplishment you’re proud of from your time at Inworld?

I guided the initial product launch of the studio platform and made sure that the product works end-to-end in how our users need it to work. I ensured that the studio was intuitive so a new user could onboard and immediately create characters. I'd say that's probably my biggest accomplishment so far. 

What’s the most unique part about working here?

The unique thing is just the sheer scale of scope and ownership you could take on just because of the nature of a lot of the work we do and our company stage. If you have ideas and if you're a creative person, you can run with all sorts of things. 

How have you grown professionally at Inworld?

I've built the muscle of knowing how to prioritize what’s the most important thing for me to do at this time and moment and figuring out what are things that we can either delegate or postpone timeline-wise. That's a hard skill to figure out because everything can seem urgent but you can’t do it all. 

How are you empowered at Inworld to do your best work?   

I feel very empowered by working with a superstar team that’s always open to exploring alternative solutions. I love that we have a very open team and all ideas are heard.

What’s your favorite Inworld character?

Sean! He’s an academic tutor from a made-up University we called Metaversity. You can roleplay as a student and he’ll tell you why VR learning is going to take over the world.

Want to join our team? We’d love to hear from you. We have a number of roles open – including product roles. Apply here!