Balance week

I’m not sure where time has gone but I feel like I got back on my computer for the first time in awhile and I’ve been home in San Francisco for 10 days now. Time seems to be moving faster and faster nowadays as I feel like I’ve been running around either doing things with or for the family or chasing Colin.

So far, it’s been an overall good trip with a lot of highs and some annoyances as well.

It’s been really nice seeing family. Having my sister back for the last week has made things a lot more fun. I was sad to see her go this morning and I felt like she literally just got here. A week goes by quickly when you have lots of things to do.

Of course, family isn’t perfect and being anywhere with your broader family for an extended period is always going to be tough to a certain degree. Seeing how my family functions gives me anxiety and even makes me sad at times.

Being stuck in my Dad’s house without your things also adds to the stress levels, especially with a kid. We’re all going a bit stir crazy after being here for 10 days with 7 more days to go. If the first part of my trip was about family, I need to make sure the last part of the trip is for Sophia and I.

I hope to have a bit more balance in this next week. I want to make sure to get more rest and start to feel better overall after an up and down week. I also want to make sure that Sophia and I take advantage of being back here and actually go out and do things both by ourselves and with Colin. This opportunity to be home for an extended period of time won’t happen often for better or worse, so we need to enjoy our time here.

Not everything is a sprint

I’m loving being home in San Francisco right now. Life has slowed down quite a bit the last few days that we’ve been here and it feels great to relax a bit. Everything is just a lot slower in San Francisco which has been a great change of pace. In addition, having the extra hands at home to help with Colin has been awesome.

My work has slowed down and at this point, I’ve got my remaining 7 things I need to get done before I can not think about work much. In classic fashion, I’ve got some weird anxiety about those items and I keep finding ways to stress about it. But for the most part, I have the next week or so to tackle them and get it done, and I’ll definitely have a lot more downtime in the next week.

I need to relax a bit and remember that not everything is a sprint, especially at this point. The most important thing for me right now is to just enjoy the slower lifestyle and embrace doing more of nothing.

Home

It’s our last day in New York and we’re headed home to San Francisco tomorrow for the next 2 weeks. I am excited for a couple reasons.

First, I really need a break after a long year and going to my parent’s in San Francisco will be a home away from home in a sense. I’m hoping it’ll be like a vacation feel with all the comforts of home.

Second, I’m excited to see all my family and friends again. Admittedly, it’s a long time at my Dad’s house and I’d imagine there’s going to be a point where we regret being away from home that long. But the reality is that the years go by quick. Colin is growing quickly and our family and friends that live across the country do not get to see or spend much time with him anymore.

As sad it sounds, the reality is that if we’re lucky, we’ll have maybe 15 Christmases with my Dad. Perspective really changes when you look at life that way. While some may not want to have that thought, I’ve decided to really embrace our impermanence on this planet to ensure that I’m maximizing the time I have with the people I love. That’s what the holidays are about for me.

Personal finances

I’ve spent most of my free time the last couple nights working through my family’s finances to figure out our new healthcare elections. My wife is switching jobs and we needed to figure out whose health plan was better and where Colin would go, and whether we should we should put the entire family on one plan.

Of course, part of this was figuring out our personal plans for next year and also doing a sense check on cash flows for next year. I used to update my family’s balance sheet monthly, and then it went to quarterly, and now it’s more on an as-needed basis usually 2-3 time a year. This exercise helps me check in on our plan and keep things in check.

We are fortunate that I don’t need to run the exercise nearly as often as I used to. It’s a fairly cumbersome exercise all done via Excel. I’ve tried various platforms and tools, and there just isn’t anything that has the flexibility that I need or want. I do suspect that as our net worth grows to a certain point, we’ll be more inclined to focus on the bigger picture and no longer need the flexibility in Excel.

Even for someone like myself who is very knowledgeable in the financial world and works in finance for a living, it’s a tedious task. Figuring out which insurance plan(s) to pick and how to best allocate between the members of our family including HSAs, FSAs, etc. can get a bit complex with thousands of dollars of tax implications.

I’m lucky to work in this world and be able to run the numbers fairly easily, and that still took hours out of my evenings the last couple days. ChatGPT helped, but was clearly still riddled with errors and provided a recommendation that was impossible.

If I’m perhaps in the 1% of people that is qualified to handle these financial matters, and it still took me this long, then it’s evident to me that the 99% out there likely need a ton of help still. This is why financial advisors exist and the industry is booming. There is still a ton of room for improvement in this industry and AI is going to be the catalyst that helps serve the masses.

Finishing strong

It’s the week before Christmas week and admittedly the main thing running through my mind is 2 weeks off back home in San Francisco. Myself and the rest of the team all deserve a much needed break after a successful but long year.

My hope is that we can all mostly take the next two weeks off save for minor clean-up and administrative work here and there. I would hope that none of us would have to work more than a few hours over the course of those two weeks.

With that goal in mind, this week is critical to make sure we stay on top of everything and get things done so we can indeed enjoy the holidays. I am proactively expediting as much as I can to this week and also pushing as much as I can back to January so we can focus on what’s needed.

Luckily, we are already at a very good quarter, but with a bit of a push, we can get it to an amazing quarter and really close out the year strong with great momentum heading into 2026. That’s going to take a bit of discipline and push this week with everything slowing down, but it’ll all be worth it when I’m at home in SF next week relaxing.

Camaraderie at work

We had our holiday party on Thursday and it was a blast. We had almost the entire US team in town and a couple folks from Amsterdam. It was the first night I went out and really stayed out late maybe this entire year. Getting home at 1am wasn’t intentional and I’m still recovering from it as I write this on Monday, but we all need these nights where we feel like we’re 25 again sometimes.

My colleagues and I had a ton of fun together. I’m not sure what’s normal anymore in this day and age of holiday parties, but we decided to have a night out like you would with your friends. That made things special in the sense that despite the fact that we work together, we actually want to hang out with each other. I can say confidently that is not always the case. And unfortunately, we’ve had times at Secfi where it felt like that wasn’t the case either.

I’m feeling grateful that the vibes are great at work again and we have a great thing going right now. I am convinced that there’s no company worth building if you aren’t having fun doing it and your colleagues are a huge part of that. I feel grateful that I have colleagues that I trust and like which makes my job easier and my enjoyable.

Secfi in New York

We have the US team here in New York for our annual holiday party. I always love when the team can get together. Obviously a big part of the trip is having fun and bonding with each other, but the amount of work that gets done in these few days together cannot be overlooked either.

Productivity goes through the roof and it feels like we get through things multitudes faster than we would over Zoom. It is a bit of a shame that we do not get together with the Amsterdam team more. Logistically, it is just a bit of a challenge and makes sense for why we don’t do that on the regular basis. But going into 2026, I do want to focus on doing more work in person and that may mean traveling much more than I did in 2025.

Baseline

It’s amazing how different I can feel from one day to another. I woke up this morning after a great night sleep feeling refreshed. I did a running class this morning and was at my desk with a positive attitude and energetic.

That was night and day from yesterday where I woke up feeling like shit and basically just trying to survive the day after a horrible night of sleep.

Of course, I know it’s impossible to have a great night of sleep every night and feel amazing all the time. Life and things happen and sometimes it’s unavoidable. Right now, it feels like my life is peaks and valleys.

I’d like to find a way to get back to standard baseline. The consistency will make things a lot easier on my life and happier overall.

The Monday sleep issue

One weird but consistent thing in my battle against sleep issues is insomnia on Monday nights. It doesn’t happen every week, but when I have trouble sleeping, it almost always falls on a Monday night. It happened yet again to me last night as I lay awake most of the night trying to sleep. It also happened again last week.

It’s something that’s been going on for years and I can’t explain it. I almost always sleep like a baby on Sunday night, but no matter how tired I am on Monday, I feel like I struggle to fall asleep. This includes good days where it’s a low stress day and I worked out, and had a nice meal.

By process of elimination, I have tried a lot of things to combat it. I have tested many theories that I felt could be the culprit including making sure I exercise on Monday, staying consistent on sleep schedule on the weekends, not drinking over the weekend, going to bed earlier, staying off the phone, etc.

At this point, my only thought is that it is just simply mental at this point. The idea of it being Monday makes me think it’ll be tough to fall asleep which gets in my head and becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I look forward to the day that I can put this behind me. Having a day of the week where I sleep terribly is not a great way to live.

The college football mess

Yesterday, Sophia and I hired a nanny so we could go to my friend’s birthday party at a bar in the late afternoon. This was a friend from college who I’ve known since freshman year, and it was a bit of a reunion of our college friends in New York.

It’s funny how much things have changed in the last few years. There were a handful of us that have kids and we mostly congregated with each other to talk about parenthood. The others without kids were all still talking about their epic weekends. One of my friends went out to 4am on both Friday and Saturday. That gave me a ton of anxiety just thinking about it, but at same time I do miss those days a bit.

On another note, the news headlines dominating the sports world has been the college football playoff selection committee particularly around Notre Dame being snubbed out of a playoff spot. In addition, we have multiple teams opting out of playing bowl games and a coaching carousel controversy.

Despite a lot of calls for why college football is broken, we are actually in an interesting era where there is a ton more parity than ever before given the transfer portal era. We could be entering the golden ages where more teams can actually compete for the National Championship rather than the same 3-4 every year who previously bought their way to a title.

While I am actually excited about the future of college football, there does need to be some wholesale changes to the game I love to ensure that the system does not break. We need to fix the transfer portal and coaching carousel issues first and foremost.

There should be no reason that a team like Ole Miss in the playoffs has their head coach leave in the middle of the season. The transfer portal also needs to be AFTER the full season ends or else you risk a situation where players will leave contenders in the playoffs.

Finally, we need to some sort of regulation around NIL. We cannot turn this into a situation where the best team is the highest bidder always. That was the issue in the previous years of college football where teams in the SEC would pay their players and buy their rosters before it was legal. NIL becoming legalized paved the way for more parity, but we can quickly turning into a money war again as teams find ways to sidestep the rules.

The next few months will be interesting. I feel like we are at a bit of a fork in the road. We are either headed towards the golden age of college football or we are headed to a bad place that is unsustainable and will eventually hurt the sport.

Diversifying access or dumping on retail?

I just read this troubling article about YieldStreet which is a VC-backed platform play that looks to provide access to alternative assets such as real estate for retail investors. It turns out that up to 30% of the real estate investments that YieldStreet provided are in risk of default and the company is now rebranding to Willow Wealth alongside removing historical performance numbers.

In general, I’m fairly supportive of giving folks access. I would like to believe that the folks at YieldStreet had the right intentions in mind when they started the company. But when you go to retail, the risks are higher. These are everyday folks with jobs and families to support. Who knows how much of a person’s portfolio was put into these types of investments. The losses could be a material impact on one’s financial future.

I don’t know what went wrong with YieldStreet. I am not well-versed in the real estate space and I do not own any real estate at the moment. But I do know that there is a troubling trend right now with more and more platforms seeking out money from retail.

Audio tapes to live video to ?

I remember when I was a kid, I would often record audio tapes which we’d send to my Uncles and Aunts in Indonesia. I’m not that old so the phone did exist, but it was still a normal thing for audio tapes to be shared so loved ones could hear it.

It’s pretty crazy to think that just 30 years later, we are now doing live video calls from almost every corner of the globe at a price cheaper than it would take to record an audio tape. My son Colin is going to grow up being able to talk to any loved one with 2 clicks at any time and nearly anywhere.

At the pace technology is evolving, I wonder what Colin will have at his disposal. Is it that crazy to think that he may actually be able to go from San Francisco to Indonesia in an hour or two versus the nearly 24 hours now?

The future is fun and scary. There’s undoubtedly a lot of problems my generation and Colin’s generation will need to solve. But I think if there’s something to be excited about, it’s the prospect of technology making our lives better.

I’m glad I get to be in a job where part of my role is trying to predict what the future will hold.

Prediction markets

Fanatics announced that it was entering the prediction markets game today by launching in 24 states. It’s no surprise as Fanatics has been moving into gambling the last few years. But the big trend right now is these prediction markets which effectively utilizes a loophole to create legalized sports gambling.

Our current government does not seem that they are looking to regulate at all. As such, these startups like Kalshi and Polymarket now find themselves competing with the largest casinos of the world for their cut of the degenerate sports gambling market.

I don’t know how this will end up. I can only imagine that the casinos have these startups and this loophole in their cross hairs and they will spend billions of dollars trying to fight for their right to the market. It’ll be fun to watch from the sidelines.

What I do know that is that gambling is not going away. Whether it’s done through casinos, government regulated companies, offshore, whatever, people will find a way. There is too much of a demand for it.

I’ll do my best to limit my own willingness to sports gamble to vacations to Tahoe or Vegas. As anyone can tell, it’s incredibly addicting.

All quiet in the private markets?

It’s a bit of an interesting time right now in the private markets.

On the surface, you have the largest AI and AI adjacent companies raising round after round at large valuations. These companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Databricks, etc. dominate the headlines day after day. It feels like every other day there is a new mega round into one of these AI companies.

But what about the rest of the market? There are hundreds (thousands depending on how you see them today) of other “unicorns” sitting underneath the top names.

On the other end of the spectrum of the incredibly fast growing AI companies are the startups that have plateaued in the last few years. They may be profitable, and possibly growing but doing so slowly. Many of them are going to have to effectively reinvest themselves in order to get back in the race to an exit. I suspect what will happen is that many of them will just turn into self-sustaining SMBs over the years as they are left by the VC market.

Somewhere in the middle, there’s a handful of these companies doing well albeit a bit more under the radar and much slower than what’s happening in those AI companies. These companies have been quietly growing towards an IPO and offering liquidity to their employees. The PR angle with these companies have seen to be to stay under the radar whether that’s by their choice or not.

For a fan of technology, the AI companies are the ones that I find interesting. It’s fun to learn about them and see how they are going to change the world.

From an investing standpoint, I’m more focused on the companies in the middle right now. There are a ton of great companies being built that are being overlooked. Joining the circus of the thousands of people chasing the top 15 names is something that does not make great business sense for us right now although that may change.

December

I had a fun but exhausting Thanksgiving. I went into the holiday week tired with a busy weekend before and some bad sleep early on in the week. Sophia, Colin, and I then pretty much made the trip to Baltimore and spent the next few days out and about.

It was anything but a relaxing week unfortunately. It’s once again, another adjustment that we’ll need to make in our new lives as parents. We just simply cannot handle overdoing things on these trips and we need to bake in more time to relax and recover.

On another note, it’s December and it’s crunch time. There’s a ton we need to get done at work in the next 2-3 weeks and there’s a ton I need to get done personally as well. My hope is that we can work hard to getting everything in a good spot in these next 2 weeks. Then we can spend one week of clean-up and wrap up the year casually before everyone takes off for the holidays.

It’s something that I have been preaching to the team. If we can work hard and take care of business these next 2-3 weeks, then we can have the full 2 weeks off at the end of the year to spend with our family and friends. It’s been a long year and I hope that everything goes to plan and we can get that much deserved break.

Going easy on myself

I slept like absolute shit last night. It had been awhile that I had a night of bad sleep that wasn’t a result of going out or a social event. It was a bit of a weird day and night as I was just tired from the weekend, and just felt a bit run down. My old friend anxiety kicked in when I got into bed, and next thing I know my alarm is going off at 6:00am and I felt like I never slept all night.

I always like to beat myself up after these nights. I hate feeling like shit during work and needing 3 coffees to stay awake is not really my ideal scenario. While bad nights of sleep happen to everyone, I probably have a bit of blame on myself for not getting enough rest over the weekend and doing too much.

At the same time, beating myself up over this and other small things is a big part of the cause of all my anxiety. It can be a vicious cycle and I need to do a better job of giving myself a bit of grace. That should probably start by getting a bit of rest today as we wrap up work for the holiday.

Personal investing

It’s been a good month or so at home, and my life has slowed down a bit which has been exactly what I needed. Thanksgiving is coming at a good time where I’m excited to make the short drive to Baltimore, and also get a little bit of a break before I go through the year-end rush.

On another note - I spent an hour or so going through my family’s finances and starting my year-end planning. That entails updating our personal balance sheet and portfolio to see if any adjustments need to be made.

While I don’t advocate for counting your cash too often, I think it’s an important exercise to ensure that you’re being smart with your money. I used to do this nearly every month. As life got busier, it went to quarterly, and now it’s at an as-needed basis.

I no longer have the time or interest to do a lot of investing myself. About 5+ years ago, I used to love researching companies and tracking the stock market, and even picking some individual stocks myself. That interest has waned over the years. I suspect a large part of it is that I spend my entire workday doing it on the private market side. Another part is that I just simply do not have the time to track things anymore.

Without the time or brain capacity to do so, I’m likely doing more harm than good by picking individual stocks versus just letting my financial advisors handle everything. I will likely shift a lot of that capital into my managed accounts and perhaps save a little bit to make angel investments in 2026. That is one area where I know well and can make better informed investment decisions with not much work.

Entry level jobs in 2025

I went into this morning thinking that I was going to try to wrap up early today and spend a few hours relaxing before daycare pickup. By the time I got into the office, I knew that hope was over. That is life and it being Friday, the work unfortunately takes precedent. This concept is ingrained in me especially as I spent my first five years at PwC where I had people breathing down my neck often.

For better or worse, the first years out of school were mostly 5 days in the office and sometimes even 6-7 days during busy times. While I don’t that should be the norm, it did teach me a good work ethic and that the job was optional. If I didn’t want to do it, there would be others that would.

Maybe I am getting old, but I am getting worried that this next generation may not be able to grasp this concept as things have gotten too cushy lately. So far we mostly have had good luck with younger Gen Z hires at Secfi.

However, I know others who haven’t been so lucky. I had drinks with some old colleagues who are really struggling with the younger classes right now. They are much more demanding and quick to put up unreasonable boundaries. They seem to complain more and put up a larger fight when they don’t get what they want like promotions.

I do think some of this is good and companies should not have the opportunity to crush their employees. But there is a balance here and based on what I heard, it seems like it’s gone a bit too far. Couple this with the fact that more entry level jobs are being eliminated by AI, and it does not seem like a good place for a lot of college graduates right now.

My old friend and colleague put it best. “They complain more and work less, but they also have less opportunities than we did. So for better or worse, they’re forced to stick things out nowadays despite wanting more.”

Impermanence

It’s been a weird and difficult morning for me.

I started off the day with an early wake-up as Colin has started to show signs that he’s ready to drop down to 1 nap. He’s been an amazing sleeper, but he has been tossing and turning in his bed for an hour before falling asleep, and also has been waking up early which he hasn’t really done since he started sleeping through the night.

The writing on the wall is that he’s now a toddler which means going down to 1 nap and having a lot more different needs in life. It’ll be a slight change with pros and cons, but more so Sophia and I were kind of in shock that we are now in this position of dealing with a toddler as it felt like just yesterday we were taking home a baby.

There were moments where I wish I could freeze time a bit. Colin at this age is one of those moments and while I’m excited for him to grow, it is another reminder of the impermanent nature of life.

On that topic, I was also dealt a curve ball this morning as I found out that a friend of mine who is my age of 35 is battling cancer. It was out of the blue and I was just texting him about meeting up a football game a couple weeks ago. It was a big shock this morning that someone so young with a new baby could be dealt something like this. It was hard not to imagine that it could have been me.

He seems optimistic and knowing him, I have no doubt that he’s going to kick cancer’s ass. But it’s yet another remind how fragile life is. I know that the impermanent nature of life is what makes life special, but at times, the changes and curve balls of life makes things sad and scary.

Staying disciplined

It’s a cold and rainy Wednesday in New York. The office is nearly empty save for a few of us. Work is busy… but slow in an interesting way. There is not pressing or urgent, but I’ve got a ton on my to-do and it feels like nothing is getting off that to-do list lately.

Thankfully, I’ve got my afternoon blocked off so I can finally sit down and try to knock out some of my work. If I’m lucky, I’ll have a good 2 hour block where I can just grind through my checklist.

Unfortunately, on days like today, it’s a bit easier said than done. The holidays are nearly here with Thanksgiving next week. We’ve had a busy and stressful year. With nothing pressing, I’d be lying if I didn’t have the thought that I should maybe just take an early day today and try to enjoy some leisure time in the city.

I know from experience that these types of days where you need to dig deep and find that discipline and motivation from within are some of the most important ones. It’s a chance to get caught up and possibly ahead so I can actually enjoy my time off on the weekends and next week for the holidays.

These days also add up when trying to close out the quarter and year strong. That delayed gratification will be worth it in the long run so for now, I need to grab a coffee, some headphones, and get back to the grind.