SOPHIA
VELASTEGUI
June/July 2018 73
any appreciation for what I had done. While I was thinking,
‘Look! I made this remote!’ they were thinking, ‘This kid has
destroyed our remotes!’ ”
When her parents went out and bought three new remotes,
Velastegui insisted on using only her retooled universal remote.
“And I was all the cooler for it,” she says.
While annoyed, her parents were also quite curious about how
their daughter was able to create this new device. She told them
she had simply gone to the library to learn how to do it. Velastegui,
growing up pre-Internet, went to the library often to answer
questions that puzzled her, such as terms she had heard on one of
her favorite shows, Star Trek.
“I’d go in there and ask, ‘Do you know what this Heisenberg
Uncertainty Principle is?’ ” she recalls with a laugh. “They’d have
