Morning Habits

One really bad habit that I’ve recently redeveloped is checking my phone in the morning right when I wake up. I used to do this a lot, but was able to curb the habit during my last couple years,

It’s pretty easy to point out why I started this bad habit again. By the time I wake up between 6:30-7:30am, our team in Amsterdam is almost done with their workday. I get anxious thinking about what’s happened and if there’s anything pressing.

This is a terrible habit. I tend to stress myself out by overloading myself right when I wake up. Furthermore, I lose productivity. Rarely does much get done while I am in bed and instead of getting on with my morning routine, I procrastinate with no progress done.

It’s time I put my phone away and live in the present in the mornings. This isn’t a complicated experiment, but I can imagine I’m going to be much happier and productive. Looking forward to writing about the results soon.

The Days are Long but Years are Short

I wrote last week about my one year anniversary at Secfi. I can’t believe it’s been an entire year here.

I signed a lease to move into our office space at the Spaces on 3rd and Mission in December. We started with a tiny one person office for myself and slowly kept moving offices. Earlier this week, we moved into the corner suite complete with our own conference room.

Here’s a picture of my current view from my desk. I decided to put some Thursday night football on while I finished up work.

While it’s a testimony of our team’s hard work and success to have this great office and working conditions for our team, I am also writing this at 7:24 pm while still in the office.

It’s been a long day for me. I spent nearly 10 hours in the office so far today and probably have another hour to go after I finish this post.

With that said, I still can’t believe how fast the year has gone. It felt just like yesterday I was on a flight to Amsterdam to meet the team for the first time.

Despite the long days and hours, I couldn’t be in a better position. It has been an amazing year and I am even more excited for the year ahead. Time to crack open a beer to celebrate.

Market Watch: Is this the End?

The start to October hasn’t been great for the markets. Fears of economic slowdown, Trump impeachment, the list goes on.

The 2.99% drop in the S&P 500 is the fourth worst start to the 4th quarter, just shy to the 3.01% drop in the 2009 4th quarter.

Is this the end to the greatest bull run we have ever seen?

The fear is reaching near all-time highs. My friends have been talking about the eventual recession for seemingly ever now. The political environment sure doesn’t instill a lot of confidence.

Given all this, the S&P finished the 3rd quarter of the calendar year just below all-time highs hit in July.

So what’s to make sense of all this? Perhaps it’s time to slow down a little bit and slowly start pulling back. Signs are trending downwards, but the world and markets are not ending.

We saw what happened last Q4 and we now hit all-time highs just half a year later.

I’m not putting cash under my mattress, but it’s time to air on the side of conservatism at this point in time.

Forever Busy

One of the executives at my old firm that I used to work for used to always say, “you know you made it when you lose complete control of your inbox.”

Perhaps I just never gave it thought or I was just naive, but I suppose I always thought that if I worked hard enough, I could always keep my head above water, meet all deadlines, etc.. I mean, I like to think I work very efficiently and ensure that I stay on top of things, so why do I have to fall so far behind that I lose control?

As my career progressed and I was given more responsibility, I started to realize that fighting the constant busy is an unwinnable battle.

The reality of most demanding jobs, yet alone at a fast growing start-up, will force you to constantly work with your head underwater.

There’s always more projects and more revenue to chase. Part of figuring out work-life balance is to not always be on top of everything, but making sure that you know how to deal with the constant sense of busy.

Embrace the busy and the grind. It’s part of the job and won’t change.

The Stuff You Didn't Know About

One of the things that makes working at a start-up interesting is the unpredictability of what you’re going to be doing on any given day.

Of course there’s the fire drills like any normal job, but I’m talking about the random stuff that fall outside your normal job scope. These task can range from mind-numbing but must be done tasks for the business to random odd jobs.

While shopping for TVs for our conference room today, I started thinking about all the side tasks that I’ve been responsible for:

• Finding an office in San Francisco for the company

• Researching and comparing company benefits

• Stocking the office with snacks, drinks, and beer

• Planning offsite meetings at hotels

• Team social events

• Determining company policies

• Designing company “swag”

• Helping determine locations of company trips

I always welcome these tasks as it’s a bit different than the normal business development tasks I do 90% of my day and quite frankly, it’s a lot of fun.

Investing in Unsexy Companies

I am and have been particularly interested in investing in companies tackling unsexy problems.

As a consumer, I love the travel or food industries as much as the next person, but there’s a dime a dozen companies out there trying to solve every single niche problem associated with these traditionally “sexy” industries.

While I don’t believe competition is necessarily a bad thing for a start-up, some industries just have no defensible moat leading to an undifferentiated market. How many personal finance apps or meal kit companies are out there at this point?

As someone who has done small fun consumer side projects in the past, I understand the appeal. It’s fun starting that food, travel, or clothing company. Fun doesn’t always make a good business though.

Tackling the unsexy problems of the world may prove to be an easier path to success with much less resistance.

For one, there’s less competition naturally as people tend to gravitate to solving only the sexy problems.

And two, people are much more willing to pay to take care of problems they don’t want to deal with, i.e. the unsexy problems, e.g. I’d much rather book my travel or spend time researching where to eat dinner than researching what soil to buy for my garden or dealing with my overfilled garbage can.

So bring on the waste management, soil, and other obscure start-ups of the world. There’s lots of problems in the world to be solved and they don’t always have to be sexy.

Start-up Growing Pains

One of my favorite subjects that I enjoy reading about is start-up growing pains and the issues people have when getting the company off the ground. The stories always seem to a follow a theme. Initial success mixed in with “failures” or “disasters” followed by triumph through hard work and perseverance.

At Secfi, we experienced similar issues earlier this year which we like to label as the growing pains of becoming a more mature company.

I’m not going to divulge too much information here, but I do hope to write in more detail about this one day. Long story short is that we lost a relationship with a key business partner earlier this year.

As a small start-up, we rely on a lot of key business relationships and this one proved costly. We lost multiple deals and clients because of this. We had to have a lot of difficult conversations with potential clients. It was a frustrating experience for all parties and during the time it was happening, it was hard to envision how we were going to recover.

Looking back at this experience, I truly believe that losing this relationship is going to be one of the best things that happened for Secfi. Yes, we lost revenue and deals because of this, but it allowed us to take a step back and reevaluate how we were handling all aspects of the business.

We decided we needed to get more defined processes in place. We started diversifying our business relationships to ensure that we have back-up plans and options. It allowed us to focus on product and automation. We had the difficult conversations with clients and learned how to handle these situations.

In theory, we all want our companies and start-ups to go perfectly, but the reality is that is never the case. There will always be hiccups and roadblocks along the journey. The question isn’t whether these growing pains will happen but rather how you respond and handle these situations.

Recovery

My general strategy to battling colds and minor illnesses is to get a good workout in and power through. It’s generally worked over the years. I can’t remember when the last time I was sick enough to keep me home or stop me from my normal day minus some sniffles here or there.

Well sure enough I started to feel a cold coming along this week with a sore throat starting on Tuesday and affecting my nights and mornings. Given the week’s events, I decided to power through with all events mixing in normal workouts here.

I started to feel the effects Friday after work and a workout. I thought I could sweat this one out and get on with my Friday evening. I wasn’t feeling too hot and still decided to keep dinner and drink plans with friends. On Saturday, it was a gorgeous day so I thought the beach, dinner, and drinks would kick the cold.

This wasn’t my smartest idea. I woke up this Sunday morning feeling like I was hit by a train. I’ve been home all day recovering in what feels like the worst I’ve felt from a cold in recent memory.

It’s an important lesson that I need to learn how to take care of my body and get proper rest. My body fought and fought for days, but at some point it was going to give.

This is my own fault of course. If I got some rest earlier this weekend, I probably would’ve been fine and not have lost a day to this cold. Next time, I’ll refer back to this post and tell my stubborn self to sit out some events and get some rest.

This is What I Signed Up For

Our CEO was in town this past week for meeting and such. Having a team spread out between San Francisco-London-Amsterdam definitely poses it’s unique challenges, but it makes times when we all can get together that much better and more valuable.

We had a week packed full of meetings, brainstorming sessions, interviews, meet and greets, and a lot of fun in between. Reflecting back on the week, it’s amazing to see what we accomplished in just a week when time is limited.

We had a final lunch Friday afternoon with the entire team including our newest hire who will be starting with us in November. By then, we were all a little burnt out of discussing hard strategy and deal flow, and conversation naturally turned towards dreaming about the future of the company.

We talked about the future design of the office, funny marketing tactics, and ridiculous swag that we all wanted. We joked about Silicon Valley, billboards, and shared hilarious hypothetical situations.

I remember sitting there at that lunch table after an hour of good laughs, and thinking that this is what I signed up for. We worked our ass off all week. Made great plans and strategies for growing this company. And now we are sitting here on a sunny Friday afternoon celebrating our wins and discussing the future dream goals of the company.

There’s going to be a lot of hard work ahead and we need to execute, but that Friday afternoon was a great reminder of why I made the right decision to join Secfi.

One Year Anniversary - Giving Notice

Yesterday (September 17) was the one year anniversary of when I gave notice at PwC to join a start-up called Secfi. I’m probably going to reflect on my one year at Secfi much more in multiple upcoming posts, but I wanted to reflect on that day when I made the leap of faith.

I was at a meeting with a partner that I was close with and decided that the best opportunity would be to ask for 10 minutes when we got back to the office. I had just got done presenting to a CFO of a hedge fund, but can remember the nerves really started after that meeting.

On one hand, I knew this was the right decision and I mulled it over for months on months. But on the other hand, there was always that level of doubt. What if we fail? What if the job is worse than I thought? What if I hate my coworkers? What if I never get a chance at partnership at PwC again.

The decision to quit my job at PwC was much more difficult because well things were pretty good for me. I had a great network of friends and everyone including partners treated me well. If I continued to perform, I likely was headed for a career as a partner with a nice pension and big salary for the rest of my life.

Something was always missing though. I knew even if I made partner and made leadership at the firm, I would always be longing for more. I had every opportunity at PwC, but there was always something missing and I knew that would never be fulfilled unless I left.

That’s why I decided to get 10 minutes on my partner’s calendar on September 17, 2018. It was a moment I’d never forget. I was nervous and after I broke the news, I was actually shocked by how relieved I was. It was a large weight off my shoulders and I knew I made the right decision.

My partner and everyone else at PwC were very supportive of me and I’ll always remember that. I’ll always cherish my time and what PwC has done for me. It was a great 5 years of learning, working my ass off, and a lot of fun along the way, but I knew I was ready for my next adventure.

Goodbye and Hello San Francisco

This past weekend, I had an interesting set of activities.

On Friday, I attended a friend from high school’s going away party at Emporium. She’s in the beauty product industry and is moving to LA to take a great gig at a make-up startup.

On Saturday, I picked up a friend from college who just moved back to San Francisco to take a job at Airbnb. He moved to SF after graduation in 2011 and has been in Seattle for the last few years before deciding to move back to San Francisco.

In this day and age, moving between cities every few years seems to be the norm. I’ve lived in SF, Seattle, and New York in my 29 years on this rock. In my last 5 years living in New York and San Francisco, I’ve attended countless goodbye parties as friends and acquaintances decide to take the next step in life elsewhere or just decided that they were bored.

A lot has been said and written about the trend of millenials buying less and less homes with varying explanations including trends of city goers, rising costs, etc. I don’t believe not has been said about millenials refusing to be tied to one city home and wanting to be mobile when opportunity or want arises.

The modern age of technology and connectivity has greatly softened the risk and pains of moving to a brand new city. More than ever, people are moving city to city every few years or even less. I expect this trend to continue and perhaps even become the new norm in the not so distant future.

Ban Juul?

The headlines this week have been dominated by Juul related illnesses and topped with the orange man in the whitehouse calling on the FDA to ban flavored vapes.

I first encountered Juul on Instagram years ago when I noticed a lot of college-frat-barstool type accounts were posting videos of college kids Juuling. It was suddenly everywhere on my feed. It was pretty evident they were marketing to college kids and possibly younger.

Juul has been an interesting debate. On one hand, it can help people quit smoking but on the other hand it can be just as bad for you. No one can give Juul a pass for marketing to kids, but should it banned for adults as well? I feel like a ban on Juul should also mean a ban on cigarettes, but we all know that’s not happening.

I have never owned a Juul, but a lot of my friends do. When I’m out with my friends the Juul is a nice and convenient head rush and I partake quite a bit. I know it’s poison and a terrible habit, but I always felt that this was a temporary thing and I only do it once every few weekends when I’m out so it was okay.

Well I think it’s time that I stop being stupid and put an end to this. If the fat man in the white house thinks this should be banned, then what does that say about me? As of today, I’m officially quitting Juul. No occasional weekend puffs. No special occasion hiatuses. It’s a terrible habit that can kill me one day and it’s time I stop.

I haven’t really perfected my strategy here but being a non-regular user, it should be much easier than a regular daily user. My initial thoughts is to keep a “weekend bank” where I deposit cash into every Friday/Saturday/Sunday that I don’t partake in Juul when my friends are, and then use that bank every Sunday or Monday to treat myself like a nice meal or a spa treatment.

Looking forward to checking in the future about this.

18 Years Since 9/11

I had lunch with Sophia in Salesforce park today and we talked a lot about 9/11 and the impact it had. I can only imagine what it was like living in New York City that day.

I was getting ready to go to school and I remember my cousin calling my Dad and telling him to turn on the TV. I went to school that day and was promptly sent home.

We spent the day watching the news. My 11 year old brain was trying to digest it as much as possible. I recall my always melodramatic cousins telling everyone that this was the end of the world.

Sophia asked me today if I knew what it meant at the time. I said that I understood why people were mad at us and that war was coming, but I don’t my 11 year old self could ever foresee the impact in the next 18 years.

Thousands of people died that day in New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Hundreds of thousands more will die in the coming years. Old wars would ignite. New wars would begin. The Patriot Act. One single day would go on to impact the rest of the world for many years to come.

John sent us this Atlantic article about fate and luck on 9/11. The stories from the day are fascinating and it makes you really realize the impact of decisions. We’ve made millions of decisions in our lives, but one single decision could your ultimate fate in life.

Case of the Mondays

Some days you have it and some days you just don’t.

Yesterday (Monday) was one of those days where the slightest task was a struggle. Mondays are always never easy, but it was exceptionally bad yesterday.

As I reflect back on the weekend, it’s pretty easy to pinpoint why.

Friday night, dinner and drinks with friends. In bed right before midnight.

Saturday afternoon, college football at a bar with friends starting at 3:00pm.

Saturday evening, my University of Washington Huskies game started at 7:30pm, got delayed nearly 3 hours due to lightning and resumed up again at 10:30pm. In bed right before 2:00am Sunday morning. The perfect storm.

While this may seem like a normal weekend for people in their early 20s, I’m starting to realize that I simply can’t hang anymore.

I’m almost 30 and It’s time to listen to my body more. Two nights out, especially a real late one on Saturday, really affects my Mondays now. More sleep and less drinks.

The Mourning After: UW Loses Again

I’m forever an optimistic person, but there’s nothing that gets me down like my Washington Huskies blowing a game. The losses the last few years have been even more painful as we’ve gotten good, but haven’t been able to get over the hump and beaten an elite team while always dropping 1-2 games a year where we have no business in losing.

Enter the Cal Bears. After losing in Berkeley last year, we had a 70k+ packed house at 7:30pm ready for revenge. This was until a 3 hour lightning and weather delay. By the time gameplay resumed again around 10:30pm, 90% of the fans were already in bed or headed home and all home field advantage was more or less lost.

We ended up losing this game on many errors. Notably 5 dropped passes including one pretty much wide open touchdown. Add an awful false start on on the 1 yard line and that’s two touchdowns that were virtually erased.

UW should’ve won this game. Had any of these errors or lightning not hit, I probably would be writing about how we won right now, but that’s not how college football or life works.

As I reflect on how this translates to business, you can’t control the elements so you got to take what’s given to you and do what it takes to win. UW didn’t on Saturday and it’s going to hurt.

The Year of the IPO: We Work

When I joined Secfi, one of my first tasks was to find a co-working space to set-up as our first San Francisco office. We toured a lot of places and eventually ended up settling at the Spaces on 3rd and Mission. Spaces is a subsidiary of Regus.

For those that are unfamiliar, Regus was the original WeWork. Many people mistakenly believe that WeWork started the co-working and virtual office trend, but Regus was doing since the 1980s. WeWork was founded in 2010 and has unprecedented growth while riding on the coat tails of popular millennial trends: mobile workspaces, remote work, and start-ups.

I wasn’t surprised yesterday when WeWork announced that their IPO is not garnering enough interest and their IPO is going to cut their valuation by more than half. Burning cash aside, the company has been controversial to say the least. The company and CEO Adam Neumann seem to have generated quite the number of headlines in 2019.

• WeWork’s CEO Makes Millions as Landlord to WeWork

• Adam Neumann Returns $6 million He Squeezed From WeWork

Couple this with the underwhelming IPOs of Uber and Lyft earlier this year, it’s no surprise that there hasn’t been enough interest during the WeWork roadshow. Investors seem to be wanting to stay away and for good reason.

Investors can point to the predecessor of WeWork for a historical view. Regus filed for bankruptcy in 2003 in the wake of the dot-com bubble. I have no idea how the market will react if and when WeWork goes public, but for their sake, let’s hope this bull market continues.

The Year of the IPO

The so-called year of the IPO has been fun to watch as both an investor and spectator. The most popular IPO of the year? CNBC reported that SoftBank is now more than $600m underwater on its Uber investment. With that said, there have been many successful IPOs so far including $MDLA, $CRWD, and $BYND.

Twitter and StockTwits has been going crazy with seemingly everyone chiming in on whether to be long or short on these stocks, whether we’re in a bubble, and when the recession is going to hit. The sheer amount of companies that are losing large sums of money every year is remarkable and unprecedented. The memes and jokes on fintwit have been amazing.

The easy answer is to say we are in a bubble and a recession is imminent. The hard part is to predict when that will happen. The two things I am certain of is that timing the market is impossible and that no one really knows how to value these companies.

I for one am planning to enjoy the bull market and ride the wave. If and when things go south, then at least we’ve got a lot of great memes and jokes that came from the year of the IPO.

Inbox Zero

I always find it quite amazing how much time I spend on email every day. I used to work for a partner that said “you know you made it when you lose complete control of your inbox.”

The popular startup, Superhuman seems to tackling this problem. Superhuman users are almost cultish with their “Sent via Superhuman” tags. It’s almost become a status symbol in the tech industry.

As someone who strives for inbox zero, I do love the idea behind it. I have never used it as I’m a chronic Windows user and it’s only available for iOS, but I’m anxiously anticipating when Superhuman is released for Windows.

In the meantime, I’ve made it a point to continually improve my email experience and learn new shortcuts on Gmail. It may not be Superhuman, but I cleared 100+ emails in 15 minutes today and that’s progress from where I used to be.

There’s going to be a lot of startups that claim that they are the “Superhuman for X” in the near future. I’m excited to see how these startups improve productivity and efficiency.

The Business of Trust

We’re currently in the process of buying software to support some of our business functions at Secfi. I can’t pinpoint the exact moment of when I started feeling this way, but I just don’t trust our salesperson. Perhaps it’s the repeated “discounts” offered at the end of each month or the forced timelines that are imposed on us, but I’m at the point where I can’t believe anything I hear anymore.

A few months ago I met with a client to discuss potential financing for his stock options so he could save on taxes when his company eventually goes public. He was an early employee of one of the tech darlings that is going public in 2019/2020 so he had a lot of interesting insight into the world of start-ups and growth.

One of many interesting tidbits that he mentioned was that he believes that Secfi is in the business of trust. That always stuck with me and has become one of the cornerstones of my approach when dealing with clients.

Everyday we build trust with our clients by offering free tools so they have more transparency and can manage their equity compensation better. Everytime we speak to a client, we build trust by offering genuine help and advice so they can make the best decision for situation. We want to make sure the client knows that we’re on their side and truly want them to make the best decision for themselves.

I’ve never worked in SaaS sales, but perhaps these people can take a page from our book on how to build trust.

The Aura of "Strategy" Positions

For the past month and half, a large focus of my job has been focused on recruiting with the goal to grow the San Francisco office from 2 to 4-5 by early fall. It’s been an amazing, stressful, and exhausting experience. I’ve enjoyed the process, but I’m even more excited for the hires to finally join the team when we’re done with interviews.

One interesting pattern I’ve noticed is that almost everyone, particularly people who come from big company/firm backgrounds and/or have MBAs, mention that they are interested in joining a small start-up for the opportunity to work in “strategy”. I found this interesting as I’m not positive what truly defines a “strategy” role besides a name in their title.

I think a lot of people instantly see the word “strategy” in a title and assume that it must be an important role and they want to be there one day. Everyone has the right to work hard, move up, and pursue roles they are interested in and the beauty of working at a start-up is that it offers you that opportunity.

The problem is that these people don’t know what a “strategy” position really means either. Many of these candidates have the idea that they will work hard in this temporary role in product, operations, sales, or whatever it is for a short period, have success, and since they are at a start-up, they can move quickly up to a “strategy” position. They are misaligned with what working at a start-up is about.

Working in a start-up is about rolling up the sleeves and getting stuff done so you play your part in building your company. By working at a start-up, you’re already in a “strategy” role every single day. You need to strategically plan, prioritize, and execute your (large) role in this small organization so the wheels keep turning. This never changes whether you’re in the position you’re in now or have “strategy” in your title.