My name is Sonny Young. But around the internet, you’ll often find me as
Sonny Giovanni.
There’s a story behind that name.
Growing up, one of the most influential people in my life was my Italian mentor.
He started out teaching me about cars and automotive engineering, but somewhere
along the way, the lessons became much bigger than cars. He taught me about
resilience, about how to carry yourself, and perhaps most importantly, about
not giving up when things get difficult.
Through him, I also fell in love with Italian culture — the food, the cars,
the history, the stories (yes, including quite a few about the Mafia), and
especially the importance Italians place on family. Those ideas stayed with me.
Eventually, I gave myself an Italian name:
Giovanni.
So Sonny Giovanni isn’t really an alter ego. It’s a small tribute to a teacher,
a culture, and a set of values that helped shape who I became.
I’m also a 1.5-generation Asian American, which means I’ve spent much of my life
somewhere between cultures. I studied Social Sciences at UCLA and built my career
across the United States and Asia. Professionally, I’ve spent the past decade
working across Web3, venture capital, digital assets, and financial infrastructure —
building companies, working with founders and investors, and watching new industries
go through the messy process of becoming real ones.
These days, I spend a lot of time thinking about
AI and capital markets.
Not just models and apps, but what sits underneath them: chips, data centers,
energy, land, financing, and the enormous amounts of capital required to build
the next technological era. I tend to see technology not simply as products,
but as systems of capital, incentives, people, and power.
Outside of work, two obsessions have followed me for most of my life:
cars and food.
I’ve loved cars and motorsports since I was a kid. What began as an obsession
with racing eventually became an interest in engineering, driving, and the
strange satisfaction of finding another fraction of a second around a racetrack.
I can probably talk about cars for much longer than anyone actually wants me to.
And then there’s food.
I’ve been cooking for about
23 years.
Long enough to learn that following a recipe and knowing how to cook are two
completely different things. I love restaurants, experimenting in the kitchen,
and learning about people and cultures through what they eat. Food, to me, is
also about something I learned from Italian culture a long time ago:
bringing people you care about around the same table.
This website is where all of these different parts of my life meet.
I mostly write about AI, capital markets, technology, and Web3. But I have no
intention of turning this into another perfectly optimized “thought leadership”
website. Sometimes I’ll write about cars. Sometimes food. Maybe travel, culture,
investing, or something completely unrelated that I couldn’t stop thinking about.
Consider this my corner of the internet —
part research notebook, part personal archive, and part collection of
ideas, stories, and things I genuinely care about.
