Victor G.

About Victor G.

When I was 13 years old, I lost my childhood best friend, Imani Zuri, to leukemia. Imani wasn’t just my best friend, he was my partner in every dream we crafted as kids. Imani had a dream far beyond most people’s imagination — to explore the entirety of world. I can’t tell you how many times he was called crazy; where we came from, that dream felt impossible. We were both products of immigrant parents, first-generation kids, raised in the community of South Central Los Angeles where travel wasn’t a reality for people like us, just a distant fantasy for the wealthy, or so people wanted us to believe. Our own parents couldn’t even leave the country, so how could we? Growing up, we’d ride our bikes to a spot near LAX, where we would sit on the hood of an abandoned old car to watch planes take off and land. To us, it wasn’t just about the planes themselves, it was the choreography of it all: the speed, the timing, the sheer magnitude of everything working together, but most intriguingly, the chaos. As kids, Imani and I were obsessed with chaos, with sensitivity, the mathematics behind it all. We were fascinated by the endless stories that unfolded at airports, each person living a life so different from our own, yet intersecting briefly in that shared space. It made us wonder: in all their movement and purpose, were they truly living, or just moving through the motions of life? Could the art of living be found in the journey, or had it been lost in the rush to simply get somewhere? Imani once told me, “We have to figure out a way to do it, whether we have a million bucks or just our backpacks, and when we do, we have to bring others with us. We’ll build our own plane if we have to.” Imani and I called this idea the “cheat code” to life. We planned extensively for months in pursuit of this dream. But life, as it often does, had other plans. On April 8th, 2017, Imani passed away before we could ever figure it out together. In 2023, I created Optimile, a tribute to the dream Imani and I once shared. Optimile is a deep learning–driven platform that manages the complexities of global travel optimization. What would take an agency hours to strategically analyze and accommodate — from award redemptions and travel preferences to financial constraints — can now be completed in seconds using AI. We are a diverse team of engineers, travelers, and institutions with one mission: to democratize a world that many feel is out of reach. To make exploration accessible, not exclusive, because everyone deserves to see the world, not just the privileged few.

Experience

1. Quantitative Trader

   Jane Street

   Jan 2025 — Present

Education

• University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business

  Bachelor of Business Administration - BBA

  2021 — 2023