No mud, no lotus

I learned very early on in my Secfi journey that building a company was going to be a lot harder than initially thought. Prior to Secfi, I had started a few “companies” but none in the same scale as Secfi. Despite realizing the challenges of entrepreneurship, it only took less than a year to figure out that running a startup was going to be a different animal.

I’d guess that’s a common reality that most people that are green to this world face. They see ping pong tables, team outings, nap rooms, etc. at these large successful tech companies. But they don’t see the thousands of companies similar to that one successful company that failed. It’s survivorship bias at it’s finest.

On top of that, they don’t see the late nights getting a company going and the months in the early days when they were weeks away from bankruptcy. That stuff is all unfortunately common place in the startup world.

For better or worse, you need to be in the mud clawing your way out until major success at virtually every startup. Some are of course easier than others. But there’s no such thing as a successful company without adversity. We may be entering another tough period across the industry and I suspect that if a lot of the fear continues, many startups and companies are going to be affected.

It’s tough stuff especially after the rough post-ZIRP downturn we had, but it’s part of the world we live in. I wouldn’t want to have it any other way. No mud, no lotus.

Long weekend wrap-up

I had mostly a great long weekend. Sophia and I went out to a comedy show for her birthday on Friday. It was really nice to get out and do something in the city. My Saturday and Sunday were mostly about just being a Dad as I let Sophia go out with her friends and sleep in a bit.

Colin is at a really fun age where he’s starting to enjoy activities more so we took him to the zoo and the Brooklyn Children’s Museum. It’s arguably more exhausting chasing him, but it’s really fun being able to show him the world a bit more and have him actually be excited.

I was excited to wrap up the weekend and get the week off to a great start by catching up on my laundry list of things to do in the afternoon yesterday. As luck would have it, I caught some kind of bug and was pretty much on my ass from the afternoon through the night. It was a frustrating way to end an otherwise great weekend, but that is life.

Between feeling like shit and fear in the markets, it’s been a tough morning so far.We’re halfway through the quarter and things haven’t gone according to the optimistic plan. The market has been in a panic and IPOs are getting pulled off the shelves. The long awaited IPO window may have been closed before it even began.

I take solace in knowing that I’m not the only one that feels this way and a lot of us in this world are feeling disgruntled with the way things are shaping out. At the end of the day though, we can control what we can control. For me, that’s making sure I stay positive and focus on continuing to work my ass off.

Chasing the wrong things

I like to think I do a good job not living my life on regrets. But I’m also human and every now and then I do think about the decisions I’ve made in my career and if that would have changed things. Overall, I feel incredibly lucky to have the career and job I have now. It’s one where I enjoy what I do and I like the people I work with. You can’t ask for much more than that often.

Of course, there’s also the thought of what my life would look like especially financially if I had gone down a different path at some point. I know people that are now trying to jump on the AI bandwagon. A few of them are gunning for jobs at OpenAI and Anthropic and other fast growing companies. Some of them doing it for good reasons — they want to learn and be part of the wave. Some of them admittedly doing it for the wrong reasons — they want to get rich quick.

From a pure financial standpoint, I know there’s some moves I could have made in the last 10 years that likely could have led to a better financial impact on my personal balance sheet. Whether that was through salary or equity one of the fastest ways to get more money is to jump from job to job.

However, financial considerations aren’t the only factor to think about. And I’m glad that I prioritized growth and personal development instead of chasing the wrong thing. Of course, that’s not to say that I’m unhappy right now on the financial factor. I make enough to take care of my family and I’m in a great spot overall.

As humans, we’re always looking for more in life. For me personally, the best thing is to continue to look for more in my own personal growth and development, and happiness versus money. The money will eventually follow if I do that.

Flow

The natural runner’s high is one of my favorite sensations. Out of all natural things our body does, there’s not that many better feelings to really just hit that high and feeling where everything is good. Your legs are light and you’re just in a flow state.

I chase that comparable high in my day to day often. Of course, it’s definitely different when on a long hard run versus working through a hard problem. The feeling is different, but similar.

When I’m in that flow state at work, I’m excited and optimistic about everything. Words come easy on calls. I am constantly writing and just getting my words down through my keyboard. New ideas come in and out. I’m not stopping to check my emails or phones.

For me, most of this starts with already being in a good mental state to begin with. If I’m stressed or exhausted, it’s incredibly hard to get into that flow state. I’m more generally agitated by everything and work feels like well… work.

The magic happens when work doesn’t feel like work to me. It feels like a game in which I’m playing competitively. It brings me back to my days of playing basketball or football where everything is just flowing and I’m laser focused on winning. If I can recreate this atmosphere for myself, I often can get into that flow state.

Most Human wins

I was reading a bunch of panic on Twitter last night about some key safety people leaving Anthropic recently. Combined with the latest advancements in the LLMs, people are yet again freakin’ out about AI taking over.

I get it. It’s a bit scary when you live your whole life perfecting a craft such as engineering, accounting, legal, etc. all for a computer to effectively take over your job. Like cab drivers when Uber came out, lots of people are worried for their future.

Perhaps they have a right to be. AI will undoubtedly eliminate jobs and be able to do many of our every day to day functions. However, the one thing that AI will never be is human. And that’s a key component that people are overlooking. Humans (generally) want human connection, not a connection to AI.

One of the most glaring examples here is the wealth management industry. For years, there were talks about wealth managers and financial advisors effectively disappearing with technology automating everything from investing to financial advice. However, while self-service advice and planning is on the rise, the wealth manager still exists for a reason, and that reason is human connection. When you can afford it, most people want humans managing their wealth and wellbeing.

In most industries, there will always need to be a human there at minimum to reassure the human customer. The entry level jobs of the past that I endured such as populating forms and checking them will mostly disappear. Instead you’ll have an entry level person learning the trade from the AI while the AI does the hard work.

The person that is able to take advantage and learn the craft from the AI will succeed. That person will be able to have a human level conversation with their human customer and build appropriate trust. Compare that to the person that just reads what the AI has given them, and you’ll see who will be disrupted and who will succeed in their careers.

All quiet

Yesterday, I spent most of my day on back to back calls where each one felt like it was leading nowhere. Almost my entire afternoon felt almost like a throwaway in a sense. Great people, but seemingly nothing that was going to move us forward. My last call of the day which was probably the most promising one ended up being a no-show. It was a frustrating day especially for a Monday on an already slow start to the quarter. I figured I’d spend the next hour or so at the office catching up on my work and head home.

Life works in funny ways sometimes and this felt like one of these weird moments. With what felt like a flip of a switch, I had 3 urgent things pop up in rapid succession. I spent the last hour in my office on back to backs. This morning the momentum has continued and now I feel like I’m drowning in work with everything urgent.

I guess I should be used to it nowadays. When things seem abnormally slow, I should probably expect things to bubble up and burst at any moment. It’s a welcome change of pace for sure and I’m not complaining. It’s a good time to execute.

Evolving

It was a particularly tough Super Bowl for me this year. The Seahawks who are a 49er division rival ended up taking on the Patriots who just came out of a ridiculously long dynasty. It was effectively a lose-lose situation for me and I wish both teams can lose.

After all said the done though, I do have a ton of respect and envy on what the Seahawks were able to accomplish with their defense. That was about as an elite defensive performance in a big game that you will see. They’ve been doing it all year long and it peaked in the Super Bowl.

With that, the NFL may have just become a defensive league again with the last two Super Bowl champions basically being crowned because of their defenses. In the last 10 years, the league has been offensive focused with these innovative offenses combined with more mobile and athletic quarterbacks. The poster boy of that is Patrick Mahomes.

However, it seems like the guard can be changing a bit. The Seahawks dominated defensively by effectively playing a zone defense keeping everything in front of them while letting their elite defensive line get to the QB. These defenses seem to built to kill these innovative offenses that we’ve seen in the last 5-10 years.

It’ll be interesting to watch and see how the league evolves. Do teams try to copy the Seahawks and we enter into a defensive era? Can any teams adapt and figure out how to beat this style of defense with their current set-up? Or will teams look to go back perhaps to a different style of offense and maybe look towards the “old school” taller quarterback with big arms?

The evolution will be interesting to watch. It’s a reminder that nothing ever stays the same, even if it feels like things cyclical. What’s old may be new again soon.

The people

When I was first interviewing for jobs in college, one of the cliche questions that students would almost always bring up in their company presentations was “why XXX company?”. The response was almost always equally cliche, “our people.”

Cliche as it is, I’ve found that to be more or less true. I stayed at PwC probably a lot longer than I would have because I liked my colleagues and the people I worked for. My 7+ year run at Secfi is only possible because I enjoy working with and grinding for the people.

This is especially true for demanding jobs where you’re required to spend a lot of your waking hours in the week at work doing hard things. When times are tough, you need good colleagues to prop you up and encourage you.

We’ve done a good job at Secfi hiring a great group of people that make work fun. I’m grateful everyday that I get to go into the office and be excited to see people. That culture is important, but fragile. We have made bad hires in the past that have thrown wrenches in the culture of the company. We’ve since recovered but it’s not lost on me that we need to protect the company culture at all costs.

Noise and focus

There’s a lot of external noise right now in the world and markets. We’re unfortunately always going to be tied to that noise and need to pay attention to it. The markets especially can cause panic and overreaction. We’re not immune to it by any means.

However, there’s only so many things that we can control and the market is not one of them. For that reason, I always try to tell myself to stay focused. I can’t control the markets but I can control my efforts on working with great companies and individuals, and being diligent in my work. Market noise also presents an opportunity for those that keep an open mind.

The thawing

It’s the thick of the winter right now and it’s been a tough one in New York so far. The combination of the snow and cold has made these past couple of weeks much worse than normal. This week has been a bit of reprieve with a high at 30 degrees at least. I have still yet to dig my car out from the snow and ice, and I’m dreading that decision right now.

For me with a 15 month year-old, there’s really not that much you can do and that’s been a challenge. Colin is probably too young to appreciate an aquarium or a museum. We can take him to a play gym, but that would be alongside the other Brooklyn parents thinking the same thing. For now, I suppose we just got to suck things up and make the best of it.

On the work front, we’re still in a bit of a dead period after the holidays, but things are thawing out. There’s a gigantic IPO backlog right now with a ton of companies that are chomping at the bit at the opportunity to go out. It may feel quiet, but there’s a ton happening behind the scenes. The IPO window will open this year. The only question I have is how long will it be open.

Good or bad outcome, I’m excited to see how it plays out as this has been long anticipated for the last 4 years. It’s a welcome thaw.

AI limitations

I spent a few hours on Saturday working on extracting data from our CRM and using AI to transform the data with the goal to ultimately use AI to enrich the data to provide a better analysis.

My initial thinking was that ChatGPT should at minimum be just as good as some of the older ETL tools I’ve used. It was unfortunately a mixed bag. ChatGPT was able to do some basic joins, but it was very prone to bugs and ultimately did not pick up on what my end goal with the data set was for. I do attribute a bit of this to my prompting skills that probably could use work.

However, I did run into multiple bugs and issues such as telling me they successfully brought in data points from another spreadsheet while leaving the column blank. There were definitely a lot more bugs and errors than I thought I would encounter especially because I was not asking it to do very complicated things and an Excel formula could’ve also solved what I was trying to do.

Ultimately after an hour of playing around with it, I ended up just doing it the old fashioned way with Excel formulas and end to end that took me no more than a few minutes. I’m sure there are more specialized tools out there as ETL tools exist for a reason, and I’m convinced that with the right prompting, I could’ve make it work. But at this point, some tasks are likely still lot easier and quicker the old fashioned way.

New life with AI

In the last week or so, I’ve been forcefully integrating AI into my life. Of course, I used various AI tools in my day to day before, but I made it a point this week to really leverage it in almost everything I do.

For example, previously I would maybe just write an email as it would take me less than a minute to get it done whereas AI may even take longer. Or perhaps I would just do the data wrangling and analysis manually as it was almost easier for me to do the Excel formulas and put a pivot table together rather than ask ChatGPT to do it.

This week, I’ve been forcing myself to put everything into ChatGPT and I’m constantly surprised by the results. Sometimes things do take longer, but the results could be an improvement on what I would have done. Often, I’ll learn something new from the way ChatGPT did it.

There hasn’t been anything riveting or game changing so far, but it’s been fun and has given me a renewed interest in taking care of mundane tasks and exploring more ways to automate my life.

The inevitable change

Another life lesson that is amplified when you have a kid is the impermanent nature of everything. My meditation practice has been great in regards to understanding the changing nature of life and that the only guarantee is that things will change. However, raising Colin and watching him progress through the “phases” is an eye opening experience.

For better or worse, they go through so many phases and stages especially in the first few years of their lives. One week it’s non-stop eating. The next week they won’t stop throwing food. Then there’s a random regression in there where their sleep or nap starts to get weird. In the last 15 months of raising Colin, I’ve learned that good or bad, nothing lasts forever.

At work, we’re going through an oddly slow period where things seem to be taking longer than expected and also feels that we’re getting unlucky. We live in a world of peaks and valleys often. Sometimes it feels like we can’t be stopped and the wins come left and right, and then there’s periods where we feel like we can’t stop taking L’s. It’s important to keep my head down and remember that things will change.

Blocking off time for learning

I laid in bed yesterday for an hour reading more about these AI agents, specifically the recently viral Clawdbot. It seems like the agent tools are really coming along and people have been able to get their agents to do some pretty amazing things such as finding the cheapest car to buy and control their entire home.

Like many, I dream of an actual AI agent that can help tackle annoying tasks for me such as booking hard to get reservations, booking my travel, getting appointments and filling out forms. I’m not convinced Clawdbot lives up to the hype just yet. It seems to be potentially a bit of a fad and viral moment, and I can imagine that there will be better tools down the road.

Regardless, I’m chomping at the bit for some dedicated time to set-up an agent. The thought of having a full day to buy a Mac and try to set-up Clawdbot to work on projects for me sounds like a dream. Unfortunately, the hard part is finding the time. With a demanding job and a 15 month at home, I don’t get much free time anymore.

I am well aware that can be seen as a bad excuse though. And I need to just suck it up and find the time whether in the evenings/nights, or asking Sophia for some time on the weekends to play. There’s always more time, it just depends what my priorities are. Colin will always come first, but perhaps time to learn and play with new technology needs to be moved up the priority list.

Time

We saw Colin stand up on his own on Friday and start walking. He had been taking steps for over a month now going from piece furniture to another piece of furniture. But this was the first time we saw him get up on his own. So I suppose officially, he started walking on Friday.

Given his personality, I think we have about another week or two before he starts running. For now though, we’re celebrating his big milestone. In an interesting way, both Sophia and I were pretty sad on Friday when we saw it happen. We’re happy to see him grow and enter this new stage, but he’s no longer that little baby.

The biggest lesson I’ve learned as a new first-time father is that time moves quickly and life is precious. I always felt it but having a kid changed my perspective even more. I always felt myself aging and I could see it, but it’s different as an adult. Watching a small child grow and go through these short phases quickly puts things in a whole different perspective.

Being Colin’s dad has been the biggest joy of my life. It’s cliche to say, but I never thought I could love someone or something more. It’s been a lot of transition and learning, but I’m really loving being a father right now. I need to make sure to enjoy every moment I have and be present.

To do that, I’ve started to make a lot of minor adjustments in my life such as leaving my phone in a different room when I’m playing with Colin. It helps ground me and be present. I’m also actively trying to not check my email in the morning while I focus on getting Colin ready for daycare. The emails can wait until I get in the office, but Colin aging does not stop.

The latest atrocities in our country

I’m deeply troubled by what’s happening right now in our country. In the last ICE shooting in Minneapolis, you could make the argument that it was self-defense. I disagree with that argument based on the video evidence, but it wasn’t a completely baseless argument.

There is no justification or argument for the latest shooting on Friday. We had an innocent lawful citizen practicing his first and second amendment rights that was executed in plain sight. As someone who supports deporting violent illegal immigrants, it is clear that this is a gigantic failed experiment and clearly no longer about that said purpose.

This is an obvious attempt by the President to use his Federal power and establish control. We have ICE agents who are clearly not qualified and should not be on the streets with deadly weapons. These Federal agents being in our cities are destabilizing the country and will lead to more violence.

Even if you are a Trump supporter and a Republican, I do not see how you stand to gain from this nonsense. The midterms are coming up and if the Democrats have any brain cells left, they would run their entire campaigns showing videos of the atrocities being committed in our cities.

The immigrant's mentality

My Dad grew up in post-World War 2 Indonesia selling ice cubes on the street as a child. He was fortunate to have had the opportunity to go to school here in the U.S. and start his own business. He was able to live the “American Dream”.

It wasn’t easy though. Running his own business meant he worked 6 days a week. I recall he was constantly stressed and never really at ease despite having a successful business. He always seemed like he was constantly hustling. Even to this day, he still works despite likely not needing to.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to realize and appreciate my Dad’s hustle as his immigrant mentality. For better or worse, he was never comfortable and always looking to get ahead and get stuff done. Business is going well — hustle. Business is going poorly — hustle. Of course, there is a balance and I felt that my Dad probably went overboard at times.

At the same time, I hope to never lose that immigrant’s mentality and I look forward to passing it along to Colin despite having a much easier life than my Dad. I believe it’s my family’s secret sauce. As such, here I am on a Friday in the office at 8:30am after a very successful 2025. It’s time to hustle.

Learning AI

With the newest generation and tools, I don’t know where I really sit on the spectrum of technologically literate anymore. I always grew up as “the computer guy” that knew how to fix computers and type fast. For one reason or another, I spurned my childhood passion of computer engineering in college for a business and accounting degree so I was not able to keep up with my friends who coded for a living.

I tried to keep up and teach myself basic coding over the years and while I know probably most than the vast majority of the average folks, I’m far from being able to actually build anything nowadays.

Of course, AI changes that quite greatly and now technically anyone can build something. As the AI tools get better, I continue to leverage them more and more in my daily work. Usage breeds learning and I’m excited to continue to learn.

But I know I have a long ways to go to catch-up to other “AI pros”. I do know I don’t want to be left behind and have to ask my son how to do things for me in a few years. I need to keep up with the times and spend time to learn the new tools and technology. I’d like to remain a “computer guy” even as I grow older.

Uneasiness

Well the good news of the morning is Trump announcing that he won’t take Greenland by force. Not attacking our allies is a good thing, but the fact that it was even on the table is an absurdity to begin with. As expected, the markets went up after hearing the news.

The entire situation right now has me feeling uneasy. There’s a ton of politic turmoil in the world. Like him or not, Trump is on a power trip and flexing his executive authority. There’s tension domestically and abroad right now.

At the same time, the economy and market is going well. The expectation is that this will be a big IPO year and the markets continue to go up. The AI bubble continues to get bigger.

Of course, none of this can last forever. The optimistic in me says that we’re headed for uncharted territory given the new productivity gains in technology. The pessimist in me says that we’re due for a sizable correction.

For better or worse, both can be true. I’m not going to try to be smarter than everyone and time the market, but I do know that there’s going to be a bumpy road ahead at some point. All we can do is plan for a potential downside while we keep dancing when the music is playing.

Getting back to it

The last month has been a period of rest and catch-up. Since we took off right before the holidays through getting back to the office after our Austria ski trip, we’ve been in a weird period of “chilling”.

On one hand, these periods are necessary for the team to unwind and recharge. It’s important that we take time to recharge for the year ahead as there will be busier times.

At same time, these periods always make me uncomfortable as well. By design, we lose a bit of our edge and urgency. Getting stuff done always takes longer and we tend to push things back further.

Generally, it’s a business risk that we’re willing to take. But it does cause a lot of stress once we’re back as there’s a ton of catch-up and we need to get back into it. The end of January is approaching and it feels like we’re just getting started.

We have a lot to make-up and catch-up on. Luckily, I feel recharged and ready to go again. Back to the grind we go.