Wally Chang.
San Francisco · Cornell ‘23, ‘24 · still chasing summits and chew.
I’m a data scientist at Extend, where I work on pricing and risk models for extended warranties — deployed across Peloton, Oura, Sonos, Michaels, and Advance Auto Parts. Before that, nine months as a PE analyst at Carrick Capital covering cyber + GRC; before that, label-noise research with the AmEx team at Cornell; before that, three years on the Cornell Sprint Football roster as #87 (DB → WR), All-CSFL Academic as a senior.
On the side I run RodSmith, a knowledge-first marketplace for custom fishing rods I started in fall 2025, and a slowly-growing rotation of small hardware projects — doorpi being the loudest of them. I fish and build my own rods, so the founder voice on RodSmith isn’t “I noticed an opportunity” so much as “I lived the broken experience and built the system I wished existed.”
I bake bagels on Sunday mornings because the dough doesn’t care whether I had a good week.
This site is where all of those put themselves in the same room. It is not a résumé. If you are reading it to figure out whether to email me, the short answer is yes, and the address is at the bottom.
From sprint football to alpine starts.
I played three years of Cornell Sprint Football — the 178-lb-cap collegiate league only nine schools play. DB to WR; All-CSFL Academic as a senior. The line taught me what hard feels like when there are eleven other people in the room measuring it with you. That hard is a different shape than the alpine-start hard, which is silent and chemical and entirely yours.
Triathlon is the adult expression. In December 2024 I finished IRONMAN 70.3 Indian Wells; in July 2025 I summited Mount Whitney; in May 2026 I rode the Tioga Pass before the gate opened to cars. The pattern, in case it isn’t obvious, is that I keep picking events that are mostly about being awake for longer than is reasonable. The /endurance/ page documents the trophy days; this section is just the through-line.
Bagels are the trophy. Bread and pizza are practice.
I bake bagels because the dough doesn’t lie. There is no founder-bro shortcut in baking, which is, on reflection, why I needed baking.
The pizza is practice for the bagels, and the bread is practice for the pizza. Sourdough loaves are forgiving in a way no other format is — you can miss a fold, oven-spring the wrong way, and still get bread you can put butter on. The photos and bake notes live at /kitchen/; specifics drop in as I write them.