Eden Full Goh has never been afraid to build bold solutions. When she arrived at Shad’s Trent University campus in 2008, she was eager to roll up her sleeves and dive into the experience. Shad gave her a space to test her engineering mindset and problem-solving skills. It also taught her what it takes to be an effective leader and work collaboratively to generate solutions to complex challenges. Those lessons continue to guide her today as the Founder and CEO of Mobot, a technology platform that uses AI, computer vision, and mechanical robots to validate and monitor mobile and physical product experiences.
“For a kid like me growing up in Calgary, getting to go to Peterborough, Ontario, and live with other high school students and interact with them — going to talks, lectures, and group projects — was such a new experience. It gave me a first taste of independence and showed me that growth can be exciting and challenging at the same time.”
At Shad, Eden gained the confidence to lead projects, the discipline to finish them, and the resilience to keep iterating when ideas fell short. Exposure to mentors and speakers from diverse industries expanded her view of how engineering, entrepreneurship, and community impact intersect and cemented her belief that technical skills, empathy, and leadership together drive meaningful change.
Shad’s Design Challenge proved especially transformative. Working with other students who shared her curiosity, Eden learned to appreciate the value of collective ideation, compromise, and engineering resilience.
“When you’re 16, you’re not always great at being flexible in group settings. I had to learn to compromise and understand that no one was going to get everything they wanted. Those lessons — how to collaborate, adapt, and problem-solve — are skills you can apply in every aspect of work and life.”
That growth propelled Eden to Princeton University, where she began studying Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science in 2009. Thrilled to join an Ivy League institution after years of hard work, she excelled but soon felt a stronger pull toward entrepreneurship. She decided to apply to be a part of the Thiel Fellowship, a prestigious two-year program that gives young people under 23 a $100,000 grant plus mentorship and resources to skip or leave college and focus full-time on building a company, nonprofit, or project.
“It was 2011, the first year of the Thiel Fellowship, and they were asking students to leave university and pursue projects they were passionate about. I thought, ‘Why not?’ and applied, just like I had for Shad and Princeton. It felt like a once in a lifetime opportunity.”
The experience gave Eden her first opportunity to build a company from scratch. She was passionate about solar energy and created SunSaluter, a solar-panel rotator operating on gravity and a water clock that allows panels to passively track the sun. The innovation boosts energy output by 30% and produces four litres of clean drinking water per day.
“It was an incredible experience starting a nonprofit that’s impacted communities in more than 17 countries. I learned to design and scale technology in the field, hire a team, and fundraise. Those were all core skills for an engineer-entrepreneur.”
After the fellowship, Eden moved to New York, where she honed her skills in product development and management at technology companies. Her work in these roles revealed a universal problem: the difficulty for humans performing manual testing on real physical devices.
“Unlike web apps, where you can automate in a browser, testing on phones, smartwatches, kiosks, or automotive head units is really hard to replicate at scale and is a slow process when done by humans. I experienced firsthand how time-consuming manual testing could be.”
That insight became the seed of Mobot. To solve this problem, Eden envisioned a “robot fleet in the cloud” that could handle physical device testing automatically. She and her team built exactly that: mechanical robots, powered by AI and computer vision, that interact with devices as a human would — tapping screens, connecting peripherals, and capturing data on user experience.
“At Mobot, we build and operate our own robots as infrastructure-as-a-service. Using AI to program and guide them, we can communicate with the robots in natural language, asking them to perform specific tasks and replicate real-world use cases.”
Today Mobot services a wide range of clients, including Best Buy Health, whose software runs in hundreds of hospitals worldwide. By pinpointing experience flaws and ensuring top-quality performance, Mobot helps companies ship better, safer products faster.
“Ultimately, my motivation is to help teams create and ship better products to their end users. Knowing our work supports organizations making a positive impact, like healthcare providers, is deeply rewarding.”
For Eden, impact takes many forms, an important lesson she took away from her time at Shad. She loves that she has been able to deploy her skillset in different ways to have a meaningful impact in the lives of those who interact with the companies she’s built. She hopes to continue to innovate in service of a better future for everyone.
“At the end of the day, I want to do work that helps others do their work better. I love touching so many different industries because I learn constantly, and that informs what I might build next. You never max out on things to learn or challenges to solve. Each day is a new opportunity to innovate.”
