What a time to be alive. Dogecoin is now up 16,000% over the last year. It’s now impossible to ignore meme stocks/coins.
NFTs, collectibles and meme stocks are all the rage right now. I don’t know how this is all going to end, but I’ve been saying that this is a new world of investing. Things are frothy and a bit scary, but I don’t see this coming to an end anytime soon.
Two weeks in New York and well time is flying.
My west coast hours on the east coast experiment is a mixed bag for a few reasons:
I haven’t been able to get to a consistent sleep schedule. Some nights I sleep 10 hours, some I sleep 6. I’ve been sluggish a lot of days and overenergized other days.
Work has slowly expanded to east coast hours as well with some calls “needing” to be schedule during early morning PT.
Working until 10pm at night isn’t all that it’s cut out to be. It’s hard to enjoy the energy and fun in New York while working the whole time.
I’m not ready to call it quits yet though. I’m hoping to get on a more consistent sleep schedule and more rest and then see how that affects my overall mood.
Regardless, I’ve been having a lot of fun out here in New York. It’s energizing to be in a new place and see the city come back to life. I have no regrets.
Hoping that I can stabilize my hours a bit. The mornings without work have been nice to be able to go workout, go to the driving range or take care of errands.
The Coinbase direct listing is finally here tomorrow. Reports say that it’s going to list at $250 per share or a $65b valuation. I can only imagine it’s going to open much higher than that once it hits most retail trading apps.
I’m really happy for all my friends at Coinbase. There’s a lot of people that worked their asses off to get the company to this point and it’s always great to see the employees benefit.
Coinbase going public is a major milestone for crypto. It further adds legitimacy and builds trust which is what is needed for a cryptocurrency to well… become a currency.
I’m going to follow the stock price closely but regardless of trading, I know there will be a a lot of happy employees tomorrow and I’m excited for them.
After a week and a half in New York, I’m finally starting to feel settled in and back to a routine. New York is starting to feel like home again. As much as I like spontaneity and unpredictability in life, I’ve started to realize that I need more of a routine for maximum productivity.
Part of that routine is aiming to have productive Sundays where I catch up on work and aim to get my week off to great start. It was a long week where I didn’t feel my best as I was fighting off vaccine side effects and adjusting to the east coast.
I have a long laundry list of things to get through including laundry, taxes and work. Hopefully the Master’s in the background will make things a bit more tolerable.
I’m looking forward to the upcoming week when I’m a bit more settled in and back to a routine.
It’s been an up and down first week in New York for me. I was absolutely exhausted yesterday throughout the day - I felt as if I could take a 5 hour nap at any point throughout the day. I’m not sure if it’s directly related to the vaccine side effects, jet lag, or just a bad night of sleep in Monday… more likely a combination of all the above. I feel much better today however.
There were a lot of rumors going around for awhile, but Plaid announced that they just raised a $425m funding round at $13b. This is just about a year after they announced a deal to be acquired by Plaid for $5m which was called off.
The original Plaid deal was seen as perhaps the catalyst for fintech valuations going through the roof over the last year. Since that acquisition was announced, we have Stripe at $95b, Chime at $14.5b, Marqeta at $4b and Robinhood nearing $40b just to name a few.
It’s a good time to be in fintech. Perhaps we can look back and thank Plaid for paving the way for us.
Everyone seems to be talking about office versus remote post-pandemic. Most people are most interested to see how companies, specifically big tech will react. Will they force employees to be in the office or let them go remote full-time? I suspect most will fall somewhere in the middle.
Perhaps the more important debate topic that we should be discussing is changing work hours. The pro-remote work crowd is quick to call office culture archaic, but fail to mention perhaps the most archaic topic which is a predefined 9-5 workday.
Out of the remote/office debate, there’s one thing that’s universal and no one can disagree on: everyone wants flexibility. One way to provide that flexibility is accommodating flexible work schedules. The 9-5 workday was invented as a product of manufacturing to ensure that all cogs in the machine are there during defined hours.
I don’t believe that forcing someone to work a standard 9-5 M-F is the best way to get the most out of an employee. I am a great example of this as my best work hours are between 6-9pm. I’ve never really been a morning person.
I’m going to run an experiment as I live on east coast time for the next 3 months. My plan is to work west coast hours while living on the east coast.
Today, I woke up without an alarm clock at 8:30am ET. I made breakfast, meditated and ran 5 miles. I was in front of my computer feeling great by 11am ET ready to work. On the surface, this accommodates what I feel can make me the most productive, but only time will tell.
My hope is that by the end of this 3 month experiment, I’ll find out if the better question we should be asking is whether we should offer flexible work schedules rather than whether we should return to the office full time.
I got my first dose of the vaccine on Saturday. I got lucky and signed Sophia and I up for appointments when I saw that Duane Reade released a bunch on Friday.
I’m feeling like I’ve got some mild side effect symptoms today. After a great round of golf with my homie Alex, I started to feel fatigue and out of it. I got home and decided it was best to stay in and relax. Right now, I’m feeling a bit tired and a bit achy.
Of course, this is all worth it. I’m ecstatic that the end is almost near and I largely stop worrying. I spoke to a few friends of mine yesterday who have been vaccinated for a bit and they say it’s like a huge weight off your shoulders. I can’t wait until things are back and I can stop worrying.
I got to New York on Thursday and I can definitively confirm that the city is not dead. It’s as alive and crowded as I remembered it when I left almost 2.5 years ago.
There’s just a different energy in New York City that you can’t find anywhere else. We’ve been slowly eating our way through the city and I suspect that we’ll leave in 2 months and still not be able to hit all the places that we’ve wanted to go.
Besides seeing some old friends, there’s a lot of work related things I want to get done when I’m out here. I got my first dose of the vaccine today so I’m hoping that I’ll be able to meet some new people at some point when these antibodies kick in.
It feels great being back.
After possibly almost a year, I finally finished Sapiens. It was a book I had to read, stop reading for a bit and then pick back up to truly appreciate. There’s just so much information and thought packed into each page of that book that it took me an abnormally long time to read through it.
I’m going to reread the book soon at some point in time. It’s that fascinating and thought provoking.
I loved how Yuval Noah Harrari ended the book to tie everything together. He posed the question: what do we want to want?
Humans are achieving feats at an unprecedented rate, but despite these accomplishments, we likely are not much happier today. On our quest to accomplishment, humans have largely destroyed the well being of other animals and our ecosystem.
So we have no idea what we are trying to accomplishment and we are destroying everything along the way. That’s a terrifying prospect.
The optimist in me wants to believe that we can right this ship as a human race, but only time will tell.
We’ve hired an amazing moving company to get our stuff and move it to storage. I’m thoroughly impressed by how efficient they are going especially with 4 flights of stairs. Two of the taller guys are literally stacking boxes and carrying them on their backs. It's pretty amazing to see.
As one guy was carrying some boxes, he said to me that “I can do this every day.”
It was amazing to me as moving boxes up and down a staircase for a living might be my worst nightmare. It’s great to see that these guys enjoy what they’re doing and do it with a smile on their face.
I wish I could say I could do my job every day. In truth, there’s some parts to my job that I love and I can do all day every day, but there’s a whole lot of my job that is tedious that I’d love to offload. That time will hopefully come eventually — soon enough we’ll find some people that can do those tasks every day and do it happily.
It’s funny how life works sometimes. This week is one of those weeks where timing and luck are definitely not on my side.
On top of packing up my apartment and moving to New York, I’m involved in 4 large proposals/deals this week. It’s a week that would’ve been stressful even without moving, but it’s some added stress. I’m definitely feeling it now, but trying to stay positive that it’s only a few days of hell and then I’ll be in New York.
It’s pretty obvious that we need to hire like crazy. It’s been a big focus of mine in Q1 and we’ve hired some great talent, but there’s so much more work to be done. I’ve written extensively about it but it’s become even more evident throughout Q1 that we’re understaffed and we need to add significant staff at all levels.
It’s going to be a wildly different company by the end of the year. I’m excited for it, but I know things will likely get worse before they get better so I’m mentally preparing myself for a hectic year.
Sophia and I are packing up our apartment in San Francisco to travel for 3 months. We’re going back to New York for the first two and then headed to Playa del Carmen for a month before coming back to San Francisco.
We signed into a lease at the beginning of the pandemic for more space. In retrospect, I wish we had taken advantage and traveled more but it was tough to pull the trigger considering the uncertainty.
We’re really excited about being back in New York. It’s the city we met in and it’s our favorite city in the world. I can’t wait to get the best food and see New York come alive again post-pandemic.
I’m also really excited to work west coast hours in New York. While I have some flexibility, I’ve decided I’m going to try to stick to my west coast work day. I want to take the morning to wake up without an alarm clock, go to the gym, and then start my work day around 11am ET.
It’ll be an interesting experiment as I’ve always felt I’m a much better evening worker. I’m interested to see if I’m more productive overall.
We just finished the majority of our packing. I’m going to try to make it to the east coast with one golf bag, carry on suitcase, and a backpack. I’m going to try (likely unsuccessfully) to limit Sophia’s bags.
There’s a lot of chatter on social media nowadays about work hours for Goldman bankers. Apparently some analysts took a survey of their colleagues and published the data revealing that work hours are brutal and the environment may even be worse.
This is no surprise. The hours and work culture of investment banking is widely publicized and maybe even celebrated.
I’ve never worked in investment banking, but I do remember the days of working long hours for a large firm. My experience is nothing compared to what they go through, but 80-100 hour weeks were common at times. The work always seemed endless and I never truly felt rewarded from completing those weeks.
I also write this on hour number 12 in the office right now working for a startup. Most people who have been through it know that startup life isn’t easy. Hours are long and you find new ways to get punched in the face every day.
With that said, the amount of reward I get from work is unparalleled. I’m controlling my own destiny and I have skin in the game. That’s something I never had in my last job. I’m tired… it’s been a long day and I’m ready to go home. Tomorrow is an even longer day of calls and meetings.
Despite all that, I’m still excited. Tomorrow is another opportunity to win as a company.
I really loved Fred Wilson’s blog post today titled Resilience. It was exactly a post I needed to read this morning.
Sticking with something, even when the chips are down, is hard. Many people (most?) can’t do it. They are impatient. They want the easy money.
I often get impatient with how things are going. We all want growth and success and we want it now, but in reality things take much longer.
This is amplified in this ridiculous market where seemingly every company is going gangbusters and raising money at ridiculous valuations. Even though we’ve had some great success at Secfi and we’re growing quite fast for a startup our size, it’s easy to look ahead and compare ourselves.
While the world has been going through a painful and deadly global pandemic, the tech sector has experienced a bull market of epic proportions that has lifted all boats and made some incredibly wealthy. But that bull market will eventually end and things will get harder for founders and CEOs and investors.
I’m not sure where this bull market will end, but I do know that every company has a different story and journey. Things don’t happen overnight and I’ve felt the need to focus on enjoying the journey much more rather than focusing on the eventual outcome.
I’ve been writing a lot about taking time off and work-life balance. A lot of this is due to the pandemic where boundaries are down and seemingly everyone is working more. Another part of it is that I’m constantly trying to learn how to better balance work and life.
I’ve been hearing that “you don’t realize how much you needed a break until after you take a break”. It’s coming up a lot with my colleagues and even my clients.
Our leadership team at Secfi gave the team Friday and Monday off. It was a much needed break. A lot of us have been feeling burnt out and I thought it was a much needed break just about 1 year into the pandemic.
Personally, I felt great and even started to get excited about getting back to work on Monday evening but it was obvious that I really needed a vacation. I spoke to Fred our CEO earlier today to catch up after the break and we both agreed that I need to take more time off.
It’s great to work for a company that is supportive of work-life balance. I’m looking forward to more time off in the next coming month, but in the meantime I’ve got a hugely busy week ahead. Time to get back to it.
I’m seeing so many startups in the healthtech industry right now seemingly doing well. I wrote about the business of sleep almost a year and half ago and discussed why I’m bullish on the industry. Sleep is just one area of the booming healthtech sector.
I’m also particularly interested in healthtech startups tackling healthier eating. There’s a startup called Levels which monitors your glucose levels and helps you adjust your diet to maintain your glucose levels. I haven’t tried it yet as it seems like a lot to take in, but as someone whose energy fluctuates greatly throughout the day and week, I’m interested to see how it could help affect my performance.
I’ll look to give it a shot in the next few months and see how it affects me.
As a whole, a big reason that startups like Levels are booming is that people are looking to utilize science and tech to maximize their productivity and efficiency in today’s modern and demanding life. It started with simple diets over the last few years and now we’re seeing tech-enabled solutions. It’ll be fun to watch how this evolves.
I’ve been going back to the gym lately and it’s been awesome lifting free weights again. I don’t consider myself a big or heavy lifter. I have no desire to get jacked or anything, but I’ve been lifting weights since high school during my football days and it’s therapeutic for me.
It’s a time when I can zone out from work and get some natural endorphins. It’s an hour of my day where I can do whatever: brainstorm business ideas or day dream.
Today was my first day working out my legs and I was thinking about my old football coach. He was a character to say the least, but I always remember when he used to scream at us during weight training to motivate us.
“Look at those people outside. They’re too soft for this!”
While I don’t think football was for everyone, I was always surprised by how many people had desires to play football but were indeed too soft for it. I’m not talking about the contact, but rather the work that’s required.
We all dream of catching touchdown passes and getting a big sack to end games, but not many can put up with the two-a-days, conditioning and weight training required to get to that point. Football is a grind that never ends until the end of your last season.
There’s a lot of parallels to the startup and business world when I think about football. Everyone wants to be an entrepreneur and a key contributor, but very few actually are willing to put in the work to get there. Behind every successful company is hours of hard work, grind and sacrifices. Not everyone can do it - no matter how much they say they can. It takes a special kind of person to go through this grind day in and day out.
Like coach said… some people are just too soft for this.
On Saturday, my friend hosted a small backyard going away shindig for one of our friends. It was a small party but it started to feel like normalcy again. I was a social butterfly the entire night bouncing around from person to person including people I’ve barely met.
I’m normally a person who hates small talk and generally avoids speaking to random people when I can avoid it especially during lunch. Today, I ended up chatting to a random stranger for about 10 minutes while waiting for my food.
When I left, I had realized how uncharacteristic this was of me. It was the moment when I realized just how starved I’ve been for human interaction.
Last week I wrote about how 2021 could be the year of consumer apps. Some of these apps born during the pandemic such as Clubhouse facilitate human interaction. It’s no wonder why these consumer social apps have become so popular during this time.
I’m hoping my social interaction in the next few months will be beyond Zoom and Clubhouse. We’re close and the light is at the end of the tunnel.
Everything is moving so fast right now. Everything is moving at a much different pace than in 2018 when I made the leap to tech.
Companies are being built faster. Tools and resources to build a company have enabled entrepreneurs to launch a business in a matter of hours. Technological advancements have made launching a business seamless and easier than ever.
Companies are growing faster. Remote working and globalization has allowed access to a wider range of talent across the globe. Recruiting times are going down and people are hiring faster.
Companies are going public faster. The emergence of SPACs have enabled companies that were not public ready to go public in record speeds. I wrote a few months ago about the trend of companies going public earlier. Companies like Hims&Hers born just 4 years ago is now public.
Valuations are rising faster than ever. I remember when the unicorn valuation mark was a big deal. Nowadays it seems like every other day there is a new unicorn being crowned. Call it a bubble, but this is different than the dotcom era. Tech companies are achieving growth and revenue rarely seen before in history. We’re in a new era of tech valuations both on the private and public market.
We’re going to have to get used to this speed. Tech growth is exponential and everything will continue to get easier and grow faster as time goes on.
Back when I was in college and going through my first job recruitment interviews I remember speaking to a young professional who was describing what post-college life was like. He said that the average day in college is way better than the average day of working. It was an interesting take and it always stuck with me.
(I’ve found that to be largely true as I do miss sleeping in and creating my own schedule which I don’t have the luxury of at work.)
I’ve been doing a lot of recruiting lately as our team has been growing like crazy and a question I often get is what the average day at work is like compared to my last job at PwC which is a gigantic firm.
In matter of transparency, I always tell candidates that life at Secfi isn’t always rosey. Startups are hard and I often feel like I’m getting punched in the face every day. There’s a lot of work that candidly I don’t want to do and we don’t have a workforce to pass the work off to. With that said, my bad day at Secfi is still better than my bad day at PwC. That’s a great thing.
On a more positive front, my good days at Secfi are way better than my good days at PwC. There’s no better feeling of fulfillment than growing this company and celebrating wins as a team. Our work is magnified here and it definitely feels that way all the time.
There’s still bad days like anywhere you work but the average day at Secfi is way better than the average day at PwC.