Celebrating the wins

We’re in celebration mode at Secfi right now. Our Amsterdam team went on a boat cruise and our San Francisco team is preparing to go out to dinner shortly.

It’s been a big quarter for us and we wanted to reward the team accordingly. I’m a big fan of celebrating wins as a team. Startups are hard and we all work our asses off to make sure our company succeeds.

It’s really important to take a step back often and acknowledge our accomplishments as team. Goals at startups are constantly being raised every month/quarter/year and when we achieve these goals, it needs to be celebrated as such.

We’ll celebrate big tonight, rest up tomorrow and then start all over again on Monday.

Secfi HQ

We’ve got nearly the entire Secfi U.S. team here in new San Francisco office this week.

The office is huge but still a work in progress as we work to get settled in. It’ll be an amazing headquarters for us. I’m excited to host clients, investors and more to our office as we grow.

While I’ve never been a stranger to remote work, it has been a weird year and half during the pandemic. We weren’t able to meet any new hires in person or host any team events obviously. There’s a level of camaraderie that you just get from meeting in person and I’m glad that we now have the opportunity to do just that.

While most companies have given up their offices and gone fully remote, we decided to go with a hybrid approach. We felt that having a home base where people can come visit and people can collaborate would be the best for a team like ours.

Of course, there’s still plenty of flexibility available as people are not required to come into the office at any point. From what we’ve seen and heard, people like coming in from time to time when we have events or special meetings.

It’s been great to collaborate and brainstorm. Having teammates just walk up to my desk and ask a quick question is much better than the dreaded Slack message. I’m looking forward to doing much more in-person work in the coming months. It’s about time.

The electric scooter revolution

Electric scooter companies like Bird and Lime got dragged through the mud when they first launched. People complained that they were a public nuisance and ruined city sidewalks. Bystanders loved to throw the scooters into lakes or the ocean.

Then there was the whole fact that the margins didn’t really make sense for a company like this to exist. They were the blunt end of a lot of jokes in the media. Yet, more scooter companies were launching and there were even startups that provide infrastructure to start your own scooter company.

Electric scooter companies quickly became the poster child of reckless VC funded growth. Then of course the pandemic happened and these companies went to $0 in revenue overnight.

I’m not here to say any of the above is untrue. They are valid concerns and I do share the sentiment that this may not be a sustainable long-term business model. With all that said, these electric scooters have been a net positive for San Francisco (and other cities) as whole. We have additional forms of transportation throughout the city that is environmentally friendly and fun for the passenger.

I have personally been riding these scooters into work almost every day at the fraction of the cost of a Lyft. They make my life and commute much easier and enjoyable. Today, I signed up for a Lime monthly pass.

Many VCs like to say that they are investing in companies to build a better future and I believe companies like Lime are doing just that.

These companies have a long way to go to be a sustainable long-term business, but before we drag these companies through the mud some more, we should all acknowledge that these scooters have been positive as a whole for residents and society.

The lifeblood of this country

I got a little emotional on my commute home today. I took a running class at my gym in downtown San Francisco and was too tired to Lyte bike or e-scooter home so I decided to try to find a bus. Google maps took me to Yerba Buena for a 70 “blue” bus. I had no idea what the heck this bus was. I grew up in San Francisco and rode MUNI buses and trains almost every day but this was a foreign service to me.

After some Googling, I figured out that this was something called Golden Gate Transit which connects SF and the North Bay. I had no idea this existed. Well, I tried to figure out how to pay for this said bus and it took me to multiple web pages and eventually found out that I needed a Clipper card. I didn’t have mine on me so I had to download an app.

The bus arrived and I got on while still trying to figure out how to load my credit card to my Clipper app. The bus driver was great about it and still let me on. After 5 more minutes, I was able to figure it out. This all took me about 15 minutes and I grew up here.

This is not why I got emotional of course. I wrote this long and uninteresting story because as I got on a bus, this guy next to me who barely spoke any English was also trying to figure out how to ride the bus to San Rafael. He was young, clearly didn’t grow up here and was struggling to figure out the app with his little English. Lucky for him, I was going through the same and was able to help out.

I got a bit emotional as I realized just how difficult life can be for a young immigrant. I don’t know much about this guy or his story, but I instantly thought of my Dad who was sent to San Francisco when he was 19 with minimal English skills. Unlike myself who grew up in a comfortable situation in San Francisco, my Dad was forced to leave his home and had to make it a brand new place pretty much on the other side of the planet.

Immigration is what makes this country special. It pains me to see the anti-immigration sentiment that’s been vocal in recent years. As if life isn’t hard enough for an immigrant who just wants a better life, they have to deal with people in this country who don’t want them here. That kills me inside.

That point where it no longer feels like a startup

Today I got a tour of our office that we’re currently renovating. Our SF and Amsterdam headquarters have been out of co-working spaces since we started Secfi. This office will be the official first office we have complete with Secfi decorations, branding and our own personal touch.

It was surreal getting a tour of the office today. It feels like a culmination of our hard work is starting to pay off. I joked earlier today with our CEO and co-founder that the company is starting to feel like a real legitimate company finally.

Next week, we’re going to have close to 30 of our U.S. based employees in the office together. Combined with our product/engineering team in Amsterdam, we’re starting to get close to the 100 employee mark. I suspect that we will hit that mark before the year ends quite easily.

All this is pretty crazy to see. I started as one of the first employees (I believe I’m officially 7) and the first US employee. At one point, it was myself in a co-working space in SOMA. Now we may very well be in a position where we’ll be onboarding someone new in the office perhaps multiple times a week.

By the definition of the term, we are very much still a startup, but it sure doesn’t feel like a startup anymore. That’s obviously a product of our success and growth is something that every company should aim for, but it definitely feels a bit weird. I think it’ll continue to feel weird for awhile. Perhaps by the time it feels normal, we’ll be at 300 employees.

Home

This past weekend I was in Michigan watching my Washington Huskies take on Michigan. It was yet a second pathetic performance by my Huskies in a row. It’s clear that our head coach Jimmy Lake is in over his head. Since taking over about two years ago, he’s been arrogant and preached championship football.

Since then, we’ve had recruiting mishaps, weird assistance coaching hires, multiple coaching gaffes, a loss to a FCS school and an embarrassing blowout on the national stage. It’s been frustrating and I don’t really see a fix anytime soon given the large contracts we have in place.

With that last trip, my crazy summer travel schedule is officially over. The “Roaring 20s” have been filled with travel and celebrations. It’s been a blast, but I’m exhausted and excited to be home for the foreseeable future.

We’ve got a big agenda for the next 3 months and I’m really excited. Over the last few months, we’ve been on hiring craze. Next week, we open our headquarters in San Francisco and have the entire US team in town. I wish we could have the Amsterdam team in town as well, but it’ll be amazing just having a big work gathering again.

It’s time to focus on work and end the year strong. I can’t wait to shift my focus.

Alts everywhere

I was back at work today after the long weekend and taking Tuesday off to just relax. Long story short, I felt amazing and it was the most energetic and productive I’ve felt in a long while. Like they always say, you don’t really know you need a vacation until you have a vacation.

One area that I’m tracking quite a bit is alternative investing platforms. No I’m not talking about just NFTs although that is part of it. I keep seeing new platforms pop up left and right offering investments in fine wine, trading cards, cars, designer bags and of course, art. Hell even Pokemon cards are making a roaring comeback.

I started watching some of these alternative investing platforms starting back in 2018 when there seemed to only be a few. Now I feel like I get fed ads for one on every podcast or newsletter I subscribe to.

Of course a lot of these platforms exist because of the times we live in today. There’s too much money in the system right now and people are finding pretty much anything to put their money into (see NFTs).

All that said, I do believe in the future of alternative asset investing primarily due to the trend of fractional investing. While the average American may not have (or should) spend $100k on a fine bottle of wine that appreciates over time, 100 Americans may invest $1k to partially own that bottle of wine.

The rise of fractional investing has allowed Americans to rethink their portfolios as they now have access to these investments that were previously only available to the ultra wealthy. On top of all this, it’s just fun to own a piece of a collectible.

I’ve got a few (small) investments in various assets and have had a lot of fun on some of these apps lately.

Sleep debt and being okay with doing nothing

I’ve slept in late the past two mornings. Today, I got up went to lunch and then came back and took a nap. This is the most I’ve slept on a weekend in recent memory… maybe since my college days. It’s yet another sign that my body is absolutely beat.

The sleep debt has definitely caught up to me. While I’m not happy that it’s gotten to this point, I’m glad that I recognized it and have been actively trying to address it.

On a normal weekend day in New York, I would’ve probably got up and spent the day out in the city. Today, I spent most of the day relaxing and watching golf in my hotel room. I’ve got a wedding tonight, and I wanted to rest up for it so I’m not running on fumes tonight.

It’s been a challenge for me. Over the last few years, I’ve programmed myself into thinking that I always need to be doing something. Whether it’s working, sightseeing, working out, or attending events, I’ve always felt the need to be up and about.

This is the outcome of years of bad habits. I now need to learn how to rest and recharge. As silly as it sounds, I’ve had to tell myself multiple times today that it’s perfectly okay to be doing nothing. It may seem small, but for me it’ll be a big win going into this wedding well rested.

Inflections

I slept about 12 hours last night. An absolute crash from my red eye flight and my body telling me it needs more rest. I’m feeling pretty darn good today after a week of feeling meh.

I’m currently listening to Mike Maples Jr on Invest Like the Best with Patrick O’Shaughnessy. I’m only through the first bit but it’s a fantastic listen so far. The podcast starts out with Mike discussing inflections and why founders should be looking for inflections not startup ideas.

Mike’s idea behind inflections is that rather than building for the gaps in the world we see today, you want to be looking for inflections which will allow you to build towards the future. Certain inflections such as the rise of smartphones and GPS in smartphones allowed Lyft to change the ride sharing world.

This idea is a big reason why I joined Secfi in 2018. We saw the current world of startup stock options which was broken, and we saw a future where companies were trending to become more employee and equity friendly. We saw an opportunity to shape the future of stock option exercises and liquidity because of this inflection.

Oversized crypto holdings

I’m back in New York for the long weekend for a wedding. I’m dead after a red eye but this city is energizing and I’m happy to be back.

I was doing some analysis on my portfolio today and realized just how outsized my crypto position has grown. The position is due to growth in the past year, but nevertheless it’s outsized. I know I’m not the only one in this position of course.

The level headed wise financial advisor would say to trim the position and diversify.

The bitcoin head would say selling defies the point of holding bitcoin so HODL.

The ethereum head would say diversify and convert some of those ETH into NFTs.

I’m not yet sure how I’m going to act on this, but it’ll likely be a combination of all the above. At the end of the day, we are living in a bubble. Will this bubble burst like the dotcom bust? Probably not, but that’s no excuse to be reckless either.

New month, new positive changes

And just like that we’re officially in September. Q3 is coming to an end. Football is just about back. And the S&P 500 is on a another 7 month high streak.

Everything seems to be firing on all cylinders. My brokerage (and bank account) is growing. Secfi is doing as best as ever. My career growth has been better than ever. Personally, I’ve caught up with old friends and have a lot of chances to travel.

It would appear that everything has been all fun and games lately, but candidly I haven’t been feeling great. I wrote a bit about this on Monday and figured I was just exhausted after a long weekend. But after doing a lot more meditating and introspection, I’ve come to realize that this has been a trend for the year now.

I’ve been more tired than ever. I haven’t been feeling that healthy or great overall. I can imagine there’s multiple factors contributing to this including stress, lack of sleep, travel, etc. But the overarching theme is that I need to slow things down and get more time away to rest.

Life has been moving really fast over the last year. Event after event. Work goal after work goal. I’ve now conditioned myself to always be on thinking about that next thing. It’s not healthy and it’s not sustainable.

It’s a new month now and it’s as good of a time to make positive changes.

There's fraud in the air

For better or worse, I’ve been down the rabbit hole of reading about recent fraud in the startup and tech world today. This was sparked by two incidents:

1) One in which I narrowly avoided being deceived. This happened over a year ago and this situation seems to be coming to a close. Naturally, it brought up repressed memories.

2) I received an email today from an executive at a publicly traded company that blasted me and Secfi for being “up to speed on the latest meme stocks.” He called his company a top 10 meme stock.

(I’m purposely being vague and not disclosing much detail due to privacy and confidentiality concerns. I wish I could talk about it more.)

After not being to get the two incidents out of my head today, I did a bunch of research on a few other fraudulent incidents over the past few months. I listened to a podcast about another tech company that we were reviewing 2 years ago and luckily passed on working with. Turns out they too were misleading investors and there was some fraud discovered after they had gone public earlier this year.

What a time and world we live in. Greed is out of control. Fraud is in the air and in plain sight.

There’s a lot of amazing founders and operators out there building some great companies that will benefit society. Unfortunately there’s a whole mess of grifters as well taking advantage of the excess supply of money.

A lot of this is candidly hard to ignore. I feel like I run into these potentially sketchy situations way too often. Again, purposely being vague here, but there may be one or two big VC backed startups that I am aware of that may have some rippling effects throughout the VC backed startup world.

I’m not sure as they’re just gut feelings at this point, but things aren’t adding up and I wouldn’t be surprised to see a few more big incidents pop up in the next coming year or two.

Slowing things down

I’m writing this on my couch after a long Monday due to a long weekend. My good friends got married over the weekend and while I had a blast celebrating them, I’m absolutely exhausted both mentally and physically.

While there’s nothing wrong with a good party weekend, I feel like my body has not been reacting well with my current hectic life. The last few months have felt like constant work, travel and social activities.

Of course, timing is difficult as everyone is looking to get married and travel after a year of staying home. But I have no one to blame but myself. No one is forcing me to travel, stay up late or attend every event. It’s my body and I need to do a better job treating it well.

It’s not rocket science for what I need to do to feel better - I simply need to get more sleep/rest and drink less. I have another two long weekends in a row coming up and my goal is to slow things down a bit. My body will thank me after the weekend.

Business of Sleep part 2

About 2 years ago, I wrote about The Business of Sleep on this blog after reading a great article. Two years later, I still remain bullish on the future of sleep tech. Simply put, sleep affects performance and lots of people like me are terrible sleepers. I’d pay handsomely to get better sleep every night.

I was eating lunch on my deck of my coworking space today and I met the founder of a new VC fund that focuses on sleep tech. We didn’t talk long as we were both eating lunch and I had a meeting to go to, but he mentioned that his fund is the only firm focused solely on sleep.

It’s great to see that there are capital allocators interested in focusing on the future of sleep. I have a genuine interest in sleep tech and I’m hoping I can pick his brain a bit more in the future.

Sleep is a relatively new industry so there’s not many companies focused on it in the pubic markets right now, but I’ve been keeping my eyes peeled for angel investment opportunities in the private markets. I’ll continue to do so and hope that more entrepreneurs are focused in this space.

Meetings

Meetings seem to be everyone’s favorite topic to hate on these days. Oddly enough, tools like Zoom that were made to make communication easier have possibly led to more meetings than when we were in the office.

I often hate meetings as well. I’d like to just put my head down, crank out some work and head home, but like it or not, they’re necessary to ensure that the ship is headed in the right direction.

I built the Equity Strategy team At Secfi to be ultimately flexible given that we are often on calls with clients and stakeholders nearly the whole work day. I didn’t want to layer on many meetings on top of an already busy day of meetings for the team. On the other hand, I wanted to build a collaborative environment in which we worked together on shared common goals and objectives.

Within the team, we only have 3 standing meetings.

• Monday Standup - 30 minute standup with our Operations team where we go over deal flow, deadlines for the week and pressing items that we need to strategize on.

• Thursday Standup - 30 minute standup where everyone on the team has a chance to bring up important items for discussion or feedback. We discuss new deals, strategy and opportunities.

• Biweekly After-Action - Hour long meeting where we go over team wins and achievements, and then discuss areas we could improve on as a team. We discuss our shortcomings and how we can address going forward.

Most of the rest of our communication is done via Slack and email. This has largely worked for our growing team of now 10+ individuals but I also suspect that we’ll have to change things up more as we continue to grow.

Playing the long game

We’re in a fortunate position at Secfi that we’ve got more business than we can handle right now. It’s a good problem, but a problem nonetheless.

We’re continuing to hire and scale our teams in order to meet demands, but the business has unfortunately outpaced our hiring over the last few months. I’ve had to make some tough decisions over the last few months to address the capacity issue.

On one hand, we want to grow the company and revenue as fast as possible. We’re of course a for-profit business and we want to grow and make money. On the other hand, we also must look back to our core value of being customer-focused and must ensure that we provide the best experience possible.

At this point, we cannot work with everyone and provide the customer experience that we want for everyone. It hurts when we have to tell someone we can’t help them now, but it’s much better than providing promises that we cannot deliver on.

This may hurt us short-term, but we’re playing the long game here. Most importantly, we want to make sure we always do the right thing for our clients.

Bye for now Amsterdam

I leave for back home tomorrow morning. I had just got over my jet lag and felt great for the first time all week. One side of me wishes that I had another week or even two.

The week long trip was short but it might’ve been my favorite one to Amsterdam. Not being able to come for 1.5 years made me appreciate my time here much more and I did my best to not take it for granted.

I had an amazing dinner at an omakase sushi restaurant called Ken Sushi on Thursday and I confirmed that not all sushi in the Netherlands sucks. On Friday, I got to hang out with the team at a happy hour and went to dinner with some on the team. It felt good to break bread with my Amsterdam colleagues again.

Today, my friend Cliff and I took the 20 minute train ride to Utrecht. I realized I had been really missing out on some of the smaller cities in Holland. It’s an amazing small walking city with a big canal. It feels much more medieval and there are plenty of restaurants and bars on the canals.

While paddle boarding the canals today, we ended up stopping at a small wine shop that is under construction. The owner and his girlfriend invited us to come up and we ended up spending most the evening with them.

I miss traveling and meeting new people. I can’t wait to be back in Holland again. For now, it’s back to San Francisco for some R&R before I hit wedding season part II.

Team events

We had a team event yesterday in Amsterdam for the first time since the pandemic began. It was amazing to meet everyone in person. Some people had joined the company during the pandemic and we have been working together for over a year and had never met in person.

There’s nothing that replaces in person interaction. I wrote a bit about business travel a couple weeks ago where I predicted that business travel will come back - not necessarily for meetings/sales calls, but for more frequent all-hands or team gatherings as remote teams look to meet in person again.

At the team event, we did a lot of brainstorming as a company on how we can continue to bridge the gap between our US and Amsterdam teams. Pretty much everyone said it’s vital for the entire team to meet in person and most believe that we should be spending time in each other’s offices more often.

I’m really looking forward to spending more time in Amsterdam and having visitors to San Francisco (eventually).

The new age day traders

I’ve been at multiple weddings this year and have caught up with a lot of old friends after 2+ years. It seems like everyone is now investing by picking stocks and cryptocurrencies.

I’ve written a lot about the new day and age of investing. It seems like everyone thinks they’re a successful day trader. While all the hype right now in the finance world is about venture capital, I believe hedge funds may make a come back with future generations trading the way they do.

This is both an awesome and scary thought. I believe everyone should have access, but quite often a lot of these traders are in over their heads. A lot of my old friends at these weddings have been playing with a lot of leverage lately and I’m terrified for them.

I loved this tweet story by Trung Phan about Jim Simons and his hedge fund, Renaissance Tech. You should read it for yourself, but it tells the story about a mathematician named Jim Simons who ended up running the most successful hedge fund of all time.

Perhaps the craziest part of the thread was the fact that despite being the most successful hedge fund of all time, they only won 50.75% of their trades.

Yes, these brilliant PhDs who are likely much smarter than you and I won only a tad bit more than half their trades.

Many should take a lesson from this before trying to day trade their way to millions. This is who you’re going up against.

Back in Amsterdam to do some thinking

I’m back in Amsterdam after over a year and half. It feels great to be back in my 2nd (or 3rd) city away from San Francisco. I had a great direct flight that was nearly empty. I got an entire row to myself — one of the perks of traveling during the pandemic.

Unfortunately for me, I botched my jet lag plan by sleeping until 3pm after I landed at 9am. It’s going to be a long day tomorrow for me.

I’m really excited to be back in Amsterdam.

Most importantly, I can’t wait to see my colleagues in person after a year and half. I’ve become close with my teammates over the last few years and it’s going to be really nice to see everyone again. We’ve also hired like crazy out here and I can’t wait to meet the new team members in person. Live just hits different.

I’m also excited to spend a week out here with minimal client calls and more focus on strategic initiatives and planning for the future.

I’m looking at this week as a bit of a workcation. Being 9 hours ahead means I get to skip most of the weekly routine meetings and I’ve blocked off my calendar from client calls. I’ve been stuck in a spiral of deals lately and candidly I need a break. It’ll be good to sit down with the team and brainstorm like we used to when things weren’t so hectic all the time.

I haven’t been this excited for a week of work like this in awhile. I can’t wait to get started tomorrow… I just hope I’ll be able to get some sleep until then.