I'm Mahmoud Selim, and I built Upwind.
I started recruiting for internships as a sophomore, double-majoring in finance and computer science at Rutgers. That combination opened up a strange, wide range of roles — deep finance, straight software engineering, and everything that sits between them: quant, fintech, software engineering inside a bank. I wanted to apply to all of it.
So I needed a way to track it. I started with a spreadsheet, the way everyone does. It got messy fast — not because spreadsheets are bad, but because keeping one honest takes constant upkeep, and upkeep is exactly what you don't have time for during recruiting season. A rejection would come in, an interview would get scheduled, and updating the spreadsheet was always the thing I'd do "later." Weeks later, I'd realize I'd interviewed with a company and couldn't remember who I'd talked to, or that a status I'd marked "pending" had gone cold a month earlier and I'd never noticed.
The applying itself was worse. Handshake open in one tab, LinkedIn in another, the actual application in a third. Dig up my resume. Read enough about the company that the cover letter didn't sound generic. Fill it all out. Then go back to the spreadsheet and log the company, the role, the location, by hand. One application, done properly, could take the better part of an hour — before I'd even learned whether the role was a real fit. If that sounds like six tabs, three folders, and a spreadsheet you update after every application — that's not a line I wrote for a landing page. That's what building Upwind actually started from.
By the time that cycle ended, I knew I wasn't doing it that way again. So over the summer, once I had my own offer, I started building what became Upwind — first just for myself, the tool I wished I'd had that fall.
It didn't stay mine for long. The more people I talked to, the clearer it got that this wasn't a me problem — it was everyone's problem, and nobody had actually fixed it. So I turned it into a real, live product, and I've kept building on it since.
Sailing upwind means you can't point straight at where you're going — you have to tack, again and again, making steady progress against something that's pushing back. That's what recruiting season actually feels like. Upwind is here to make the tacking a little easier.
Upwind is still early, and it's still just me building it. That's on purpose — I'd rather get the details right than move fast and get them wrong. The internship market keeps getting more competitive every year. I can't fix that. But the busywork around it — the tabs, the spreadsheet, the forgetting — I can. That's what this is for.
— Mahmoud