Wrapping up 2022 and my honeymoon

2022 was both an amazing and horrible one. I celebrated some amazing personal things in my life which included my wedding. But I also went through the most difficult year of work in my professional career. I don’t really have much else to say or write about 2022 but that we’ll call it a wash year and I’m ready for 2023.

After a great couple of weeks in Asia, I made it back home yesterday and went back to the office for the first time in a month. I had thought I wanted to write more during my trip, but I quickly realized that I just wanted to be as far away from my laptop as possible. It was a much needed detox from work. Instead I’ve decided to take the next few posts to recap my trip and write down things that happened. I’ll start today with the first leg of my trip.

My trip to Asia got off to a rocky start as Sophia had to meet me in Hanoi a few days late. I ended up spending the weekend in Hanoi by myself and made the best of the situation. It wasn’t ideal but it was this weekend when I rediscovered the beauty solo travel.

I spent Christmas Eve in Hanoi exploring the city, relaxing and reading at multiple cafes, and stopping at every restaurant that looked good. I’ve seen most of Hanoi so I wanted to spend some time in West Lake where the expats hang out and seeing parts of the city I had yet to explore.

I walked from the Old Quarter all the way to Westlake and then rented an awful kids bike to bike around Westlake. The immediate lake area was filled with various cafes and restaurant. I stopped at a few at various points for a coffee or beer break. Overall it was a good activity, but I got bored a bit quickly as a small coffee shop on a lake only gets so special.

After a long morning and early afternoon, I ended up at a sports bar by my hotel where I met an English guy named Timmy who was also traveling in Hanoi solo. We shared a love for sprots and got a long quickly. It was a serendipitous situation as I think we both came back to the bar to hopefully meet others. We ended up drinking together for the next 5 hours and then met the next day for drinks again.

Meeting Timmy reminded me of the good ole days of backpacking SE Asia. Some of my best memories from traveling was meeting strangers from all over the world. Candidly, it was a bit of a relief that I was able to meet friends traveling solo. I had thought that part of my life was potentially over once I gave up backpacking and staying in hostels.

It was a great feeling that I found the magic of travel on day 2 of my trip.

Vacation mode enabled

Hello from Hanoi, Vietnam. I’m on my 3rd day here and I’m happy to say I’m finally settling into vacation mode. It always takes me a couple days to try to switch my brain off from the hustle and bustle of work.

For me, it’s a big mindset shift… going from moving and trying to get as much stuff done as fast as possible to relaxing and just enjoying doing nothing. For that reason, I’m glad I’m taking a much longer vacation where I’m able to take some days to adjust.

The current book I’m reading is “The Order of Time” by Carlo Rovelli. The book gained a bit of popularity on FinTwit and I heard about it when a few people tweeted out about how much their minds were blown after reading it.

I’m about a quarter of the way through and I am starting to have my mind blown. It’s one of those books where you just have to read it to truly understand it. The beginning of the book talks a lot about how time isn’t linear or as we think of it.

Most notably, it’s been proven that time moves faster in the mountains or when you’re in movement. Someone who is sitting still notices that time moves slower and someone who is moving notices that time moves faster.

My big take away after reading those chapters yesterday is that my life is moving a big too fast. I am constantly on the move - looking for the next thing to do. My life (or perception) of life is moving faster than others. That’s not always a good thing.

Making the best out of a shit situation

I wrote yesterday that I felt like I couldn’t catch a break in 2022. With Sophia attending a funeral in Baltimore at the beginning of our planned honeymoon, 2022 had one more surprise for me.

Sophia is headed off to Baltimore tomorrow morning to attend her friend’s father’s funeral. I decided to keep my flight and fly out to Vietnam by myself. I had thought about pushing things back, but it was going to cost me quite a bit of money and I had some nonrefundable hotels booked already. Sophia will end up getting in Sunday night so that leaves me 3 days alone in Hanoi.

Obviously this is not an ideal scenario. The timing was really poor for our trip and I was really excited to travel with Sophia for her first trip back to Asia since she came here after she was born. While this isn’t the ideal start to my honeymoon, I also realize that things could have been a lot worse.

We’re still headed to Southeast Asia and we’re going to have an amazing time there. We’ll still get to go to all the major sites we have planned.

For myself, I’ve traveled solo quite a bit before and this is another opportunity to get out of my comfort zone and make the best out of my time solo in Vietnam. I’m not exactly sure what I’ll do, but it’ll probably be a lot of eating amazing food and exploring. There may be no better place to be traveling solo than Vietnam so I am excited.

I couldn’t help but think about how this may be the story of 2022. It’s been a tough year... one where most of us wouldn’t have wanted at the beginning of the year. But at the end of the day, we may look back on 2022 as a period of growth and resilience. Who knows? We may look back at 2022 and realize that it was a great year after all.

Can't catch a break in 2022

I feel like the story of my year is that I can’t catch a break. I know that’s not completely true of course - I had an amazing wedding and celebrated some great things in my life.

But unfortunately, 2022 has been rough especially when it comes to my trips. We were supposed to leave tomorrow night for my honeymoon and Sophia unfortunately got some bad news when she found out today that her best friend’s father passed away. It was tragic news and very unexpected.

Between catching COVID during my trip to Spain, to Sophia catching COVID before our Hawaii trip, and now this terrible situation… I can say that I’m ready for 2022 to end.

Unfortunately these things happen in life. I’m hoping 2023 brings better days for us.

Year-end financial review

I took a bit of time over the weekend to finish up my year-end financial review. I’ll usually do at minimum a complete personal financial review every quarter, but the year-end one takes a bit more time given the tax planning opportunities.

This year, I have a financial advisor who takes care of my portfolio and rebalancing for me so that saves me a bit of time on most of my portfolio. There is still more work to be done though as I have other accounts including crypto that I’ll need to review.

I think most people miss out quite a bit on a lot of opportunities due to a lack of planning. Financial planning takes discipline and effort. I admittedly hate doing it every quarter, but I know the impact it can have on my financial life. My tax loss harvesting this year will alone save me a few thousand dollars in additional taxes.

For those that are not in the know well enough to manage your own finances, I highly recommend finding quality financial and tax advisors that are proactive planners. Unfortunately there’s a lot of low quality advisors out there, but the good ones are worth their weight in gold.

Weekend work

I just got my eyes dilated and I’m just starting to be able to see within a yard again. Not sure why I agreed to do this during the workday, but looks like I’m going to be doing a lot of weekend work to catch up for the time missed today.

I saw a tweet today where a founder was looking to recruit for his startup. One of the requirements was that his company works 6 days a week in office in San Francisco. It was a pretty interesting tweet thread as half the responses was basically telling him he’s a joke and the other half was applauding him for wanting to build something special.

My thoughts are that while this company isn’t for everyone, I think it’s pretty cool and can be a great company. He’s recruiting a specific type of person which most won’t qualify for and that’s okay. With that said, I do wonder how sustainable a model like this is. You can only work so much in life and burnout is a real possibility.

Regardless, anyone that’s worked in a high growth startup will eventually have to work weekends at least sometimes. It sucks but it’s part of the gig. You can’t really just shut it off for an entire 2 days and sometimes you just have to get caught up.

Better days ahead?

As we wrap up 2022, people’s attentions have naturally start turning to 2023 predictions. A new year brings new hope and after 2022, we all could use a fresh start. I’ve heard everything from 2023 will be a soft landing and rebound year to that we’re in for a recession worse than 2009.

No one knows for sure what will happen. My personal take on the situation is that we’ll likely be in a recession and economic slowdown in 2023. Companies will greatly retract spending due to the downturn and we’ll see a ripple effect throughout the entire economy.

The market will not rebound like we hope, but it’ll settle down and volatility will lower. We’ll start to see glimmers of hope in 2023 and comparable/multiples will likely start working their way back to the median ranges.

It’ll likely be another challenging year for startups, especially in the first half. Downrounds and bankruptcies will dominate headlines in Q1 and Q2. But I also expect VC funding and secondary market to open up more in 2023 compared to 2022.

While I may sound pessimistic, I actually believe there’s going to be a lot of opportunity in 2023. I’m excited for that and a downmarket won’t deter me from chasing those opportunities.

Reflections

I had a big reflection and realization yesterday. I was reviewing my H2 2022 plans as we close out the year to try to find areas where I missed, and I had realized that I wasn’t exactly eating what I was cooking for most of the last quarter.

One of my big initiatives in H2 2022 was to ignore the market noise and focus on what we can control. The plan was spot on as we can’t control the macroeconomic environment. But the problem was my execution of the plan.

I had come to realize that I was often speaking about the market and talking about “when things settle” all the time. I would start our team meetings with an update on the situation and plan for the weeks ahead based on the market vibe.

So one day I was saying, focus on our goals and initiatives and ignore the market, then the next I’d start the meeting talking about the market!

It seems so silly, but it definitely impacted my personal mentally and my team’s as well as we would succumb to the market volatility and let that dictate our moods. Our focus ultimately should be on grinding towards our goals regardless of what happens on the outside.

It wasn’t a healthy mindset and I plan on changing that going into next year.

The more important things in life

There was awful news this morning as the sports world has learned of Mike Leach passing this morning after a heart attack. Mike Leach was one of the most interesting and genuine figures in college football. I’ll always remember his silly but honest post-game interviews - his life advice during halftime was something I’ll miss. At only 61, he left the world too soon.

Most of the world, including myself, has never met Mike Leach personally. Yet, his sudden death still resonates with most of the sports world today. His impact was far reaching even beyond the the players and coaches that he worked with during his career.

Coach Leach’s death is another great reminder of what’s important in life. No one is going to remember the job you had or the investment that you made. Rather, they’re going to remember how you impacted their lives. It’s good to remind ourselves of this from time to time.

Dire times for early stage

Startups are always going to be risky. The majority of early stage startups never find product-market fit and end up shutting down before they ever get the chance to get started. The statistical risk of bankruptcy goes down with each successive funding round.

Of course during a down market like right now, the companies at the biggest risk of not making it out will be the earlier stage companies. I’ve been speaking to a lot of investors lately to get a pulse on the market and they say the situation is dire.

They’re busy in all the wrong ways right now. Many of the VCs I spoke to said that many of their portfolio companies are months and sometimes weeks away from going bankrupt. Many are looking for emergency debt right now to stay afloat. One investor I mentioned said that he was called twice on Sunday from two different startups desperate for some capital to stay afloat.

We’re probably not going to hear about a lot of these companies in the mainstream tech media. Early stage startups that have yet to make a major dent typically do not get a lot of media coverage.

Regardless, this is yet another domino that will fall in this down market. Unfortunately I think there’s going to be a lot of these startups who do not make it out of this “recession”. I expect things to be pretty brutal in 2023. All of us working in tech should brace ourselves.

The best offense is defense?

I’m free! That is my flu symptoms are officially gone and I can start being a normal human being again. It was rough to get sick immediately after my wedding, but I suppose at least it happened after.

I watched the Brazil vs Croatia game this morning while going through my morning inbox. It was fascinating to watch as it was clearly Brazil’s game to lose the entire way through. Croatia knew they had no chance of keeping up with Brazil if they played into their hands, so Croatia decided to basically hole up on the defensive side and do everything possible to get to penalty kicks.

The strategy was working as they went into extra time and it seemed like this would be headed for penalties. Neymar for Brazil eventually broke through and scored a gorgeous goal which seemed like this would doom Croatia. Pretty much everyone including myself thought the game was over until somehow Croatia got a goal. That was their only 1 shot on target the entire match.

The match went to penalty kicks and Croatia was able to pull it off. Their strategy had worked beautifully to beat a much more talented and better Brazilian team. It was a fascinating game to watch as someone who doesn’t watch much soccer. I suppose it would be the equivalent of a bad football team trying to control the clock the entire game.

I love drawing sports parallels to business and I couldn’t help but think how Croatia’s strategy could be translated to today’s business world. As much as I’d like to be aggressive all the time, perhaps the market is signaling that we all need to pull a Croatia and play defense for now. Let’s bend, not break and live long enough to get us to our opportunities that lie ahead. Anything can happen if we make it to penalty kicks.

SmarterChild 2.0

Lost during the wedding week craze was the release of ChatGPT by OpenAI. The latest tool in generative AI is perhaps the most impressive yet.

Anyone that was around during the AOL/AIM era probably remembers SmarterChild which was the chatbot that kids like me would say inappropriate shit to just for fun. Besides telling SmarterChild how stupid it was or pulling the deez nuts joke on it for the 40th time, it was a pretty impressive bot in that it was… well useful.

Imagine the year is 2001 and web pages still took almost a minute to load. There were no smartphones or Siri. SmarterChild had it’s place to find you a movie listing or get you the weather report quickly. Of course, along came Google, Siri, Alexa, etc. in the next few years that would render SmarterChild obsolete.

Well perhaps that next iteration of SmarterChild is back in ChatGPT. And it’s back with a vengeance. I have not yet had a chance to play with the tool as I’m running about a week behind in life and work right now, but I have seen the outputs and my is it impressive.

The simplest way I can describe it is that imagine SmarterChild but a whole lot smarter. From writing essays to drafting legal documents to even writing rap lyrics, it seems like the possibilities with ChatGPT are endless. The most exciting (or scariest) part to all this is just how human ChatGPT’s answers are.

I tend to live my life as an optimist, especially when it comes to tech. At the moment, I view ChatGPT as something that would’ve saved me hundreds of hours researching tax law cases in school, not one that would’ve helped me cheat through school. But of course, there’s always the unintended consequences of everything and for perhaps the first time in my life, I am questioning if robots can actually take down humanity.

For now though, I’m excited for SmarterChild 2.0 and the good that may come out of this new tech. When I finally get my head above water to play with it, perhaps I’ll hit it with a Deez Nuts joke for good ole time sake.

Wedding weekend recap

My wedding weekend came and went. Just like everyone mentioned, it goes by really quickly. Time flies when you’re having fun with your best friends and family. Today, I’m writing a really long blog post to document everything from that weekend. Hopefully I can look back on the post and reminisce on the weekend one day.

On Thursday, we kicked off the weekend with dinner with my parents and Sophia’s parents and aunt. We went to Cafe Macaroni in North Beach and the food was fantastic as always. My Dad wore a sport coat which was pretty funny to see because I don’t think I’ve seen him dressed up in many years.

Afterwards, Sophia and I went to meet up with some friends at a bar in the Marina. There’s no real better feeling then seeing close friends that you haven’t seen in awhile. Also memorable from that night — Sophia and I rode in a Cruise driverless taxi on the way home for the first time.

Friday was spent nursing a bigger hangover than I’d like in the morning. I ended up going for a quick run and steam room session to kill the hangover, and then spent the rest of the afternoon running errands for the wedding.

At 4:30pm, we had a ceremony walkthrough that took about 10 minutes. The groom and bridal parties got together along with our parents for the first time. It was surreal seeing everyone together in one place.

Afterwards, we walked to our welcome party at 15 Romolo. It was the perfect venue and event that we wanted to set the tone and kick off the weekend. We had some speeches from some people in wedding parties as well as a speech from my little sister, Cali. Her speech definitely was the star of the show as she turned it into a 2 minute comedy routine. I’m not sure where she gets her charisma from, but it’s pretty entertaining to watch for an 11 year old.

Sophia and I had a quick stop at a bar with some friends after, but we were in bed by 11pm on Friday. Saturday morning's wakeup was not easy. Sophia was out and about by 6am. I had plans to get up at 7am to go watch the USA world cup match but decided to sleep in an extra hour. I definitely needed it. Of course, neither of us planned to be be this hungover on our wedding day but it seems to happen to every couple so we went easy on ourselves.

Sophia and the bridesmaid along with my grooms gals all got a nice house in Pac Heights to get ready in. It was the perfect house to rent for the day… and it turned out to be a big tech CEO’s SF home. Thought it was a funny coincidence. After a casual morning of running some errands, I got showered, shaved and ready to go.

Every guy I speak to always says to be ready to take a million pictures on your wedding day. And my day was not an exception. We had our first look around 2:30pm and we romped around San Francisco taking photos for the next couple of hours.

The ceremony began at Plant Connection at 4:30pm. We had wanted to do it on the balcony, but ended up having to take things inside because of the rain. While it was not an ideal situation, we made it work. The ceremony was everything we wanted - quick, relaxed, and fun. Sophia and I wrote our own vows for each other and they ended up complementing each other perfectly.

After the ceremony, Sophia and I took yet more photos at Plant Connection and in Chinatown by where our reception was. There was no better relief than being told that we were finally done and being told we could go to the reception. We were announced as a couple as the first time to the cocktail hour and had our first dance right away.

If you could make up a perfect wedding reception for Vieje and Sophia, I don’t think you could’ve done it much better than what we had at Moongate Lounge. The night started with some amazing appetizers including oysters and shrimp cakes. I didn’t want the cocktail hour to end as I was having such an amazing time talking to everyone and drinking old fashions and slurping oysters.

The dinner though was amazing. The food was of course the main reason we chose Moongate Lounge which is on top of Mister Jiu’s which is a Michelin starred restaurant. It did not disappoint at all. We started off with a delicious salad followed by black cod and bok choy. Beef heart fried rice was the carb of the night and that was all finished with their signature dish, the roast duck. We had many complements that this was the best wedding food our guests have had.

The wedding speeches went on throughout dinner and they were absolutely perfect. It was a crazy feeling seeing your closest friends speak about you and your lives together. There’s years of friendship and love that goes into these speeches and it always shows.

The dance party began after Sophia and her Dad’s first dance. It was a good one. My Jewish friends decided to do the Jorah for us and that was hilarious. We also had thunderstruck played for my fellow Dawg fans. I was completely shocked when the DJ said that there was only going to 1 more song… the night flew by way too quickly. We ended the dance party with “Empire State of Mind” by Jay-Z as an ode to NY where Sophia and I met.

After Moongate, we all headed to Chief Sullivan’s for the after-party. Only about 20 people actually made it there. We all had noticed one thing about the night and that is people drank like it was a damn good party. Many had already tapped out by the time 11pm hit. We stayed at Chiefs for a couple of hours, and then Sophia decided it was time to get home and finally sleep.

I was originally someone who didn’t want to have a wedding. I had thought it was a bit excessive for one day and that the stress was not worth it. After this weekend, I can safely say that I was wrong. Seeing your friends and family together in one place celebrating you is a special feeling.

I could write thousands more words on the weekend and the festivities. Hopefully our videographer does a good job of documenting most of the fun that happened. It’s a shame that weddings are supposed to only happen once in your life… I wish I could do it all over again.

Fraud in the air!

Back in May, I wrote that I sensed that there was fraud in the air. I had a sense that given the funding environment of 2021, there was going to be a lot of companies potentially blowing up. I had hoped that none would come to the level of Theranos fraud. Unfortunately, here we sit a couple weeks after the FTX debacle.

Hopefully, this will be the last of the Theranos / FTX level fraud situations. But I do believe we’re unfortunately just at the beginning stages of other companies unraveling. Now I don’t think all these situations will be outright fraud like we saw with FTX, but as I wrote in May there’s going to be a lot of these companies navigate the gray.

A historical funding environment has created a situation where a lot of companies are running without oversight. This leads to founders/executives at companies perhaps having too much power. Whether it’s a misalignment of incentivizes or executives acting unethically, we’re likely going to see a few more unfortunate bad news headlines in the next few months.

Time to get married

It’s my last day of work this week as I’ve taken the rest of the week off to focus on my wedding on Saturday.

I’ve been oddly calm about the whole ordeal. My good friend asked me if I had any butterflies today and I honestly don’t. I was wondering if this was a bad thing - I guess the movies always make it seem like it’s a huge deal. I guess it’s just part of my personality that I never get too high or too low.

I am really excited to see all my friends and family this weekend. It is the one time in my life where I can be selfish and throw a party just for myself and that’s not lost on me. On the other hand, I’m not sure I’m a believer in the “best day of my life” mantra when it comes to weddings. While this is definitely going to be a memorable day, I hope that this one day isn’t the best day of my life. I hope that I continue to have better and better days with Sophia as life goes on. That’s what life is all about.

I was a big skeptic of throwing a wedding earlier this year and it took me awhile to realize that it is really special to find that person that you want to spend your life with and have your loved ones celebrate that with you.

Sophia gets most of the credit here when it comes to planning the wedding, but I’m proud of the way everything has turned out. We planned the wedding that we wanted. I can’t wait to see it all come together this weekend.

Lifestyle creep and consumerism

I had a great long weekend that was much needed going into my wedding week and weekend. I didn’t do much which was great. I am slowly starting to relearn the art of just doing nothing again which has been big for my physical and mental health.

Given that it’s Cyber Monday, I wanted to write a bit about lifestyle creep and consumerism. My friends and I were discussing this a bit over the weekend as most of our are in our 30s and have now hit the point of financial stability.

We’re now able to afford nice things and we’re all starting to buy more and more goods. I don’t believe that anyone is immune to lifestyle creep. It’s natural that as you make more money and can afford things like healthier food and more unique experiences, you will likely buy it.

I do believe that I’ve probably gone a bit too far down the path of consumerism, especially in the past two years. I’d imagine a lot of Americans likely feel the same. The post-pandemic spending spree is a real thing. I find myself spending more money eating out and buying more clothes that I have ever. My monthly credit card bill has been on a steady climb.

Acknowledging this, I can’t be too hard on myself. I’m not a heavy spender in general and have saved a good amount this year. In addition, this is an expensive year. I attended many weddings, am getting married myself and will be heading on my honeymoon. I’ll give myself a pass for this year as the first full year post-pandemic.

I do think it’s good to keep these things in check from time to time. My goal going into the next year is going to be to cut back on spending and aim to increase my savings rate. 2023 is a great year to make some changes.

A year to be thankful

On Thanksgiving Eve, I thought it would be appropriate to write about things that I am grateful for. Back in my 20s, I used to keep a daily gratitude journal that I thought helped me stay grounded. I soon transitioned to attempting to write on this blog and thought that could take over my gratitude journaling.

Unfortunately, I haven’t been doing as good of a job on writing about things that I am grateful for. Perhaps I will aim to change that in the future.

This year especially, I believe that most of us can turn to gratitude. It was a difficult year to say the least. We saw war break out in Eastern Europe. The markets have crashed. Fraud is rampant. And yes, most of our net worth has dropped significantly.

I admit I’ve gotten caught up in all the negativity much more than I normally do this year. But none of that really matters in the end. We all should be happy just for the ability to be here today. Having a different perspective on all the negativity can do wonders for the brain and mindset.

So yes, it’s been a rough year comparatively. On the flip side, I am grateful to be healthy. I am grateful to have amazing friends and family. I am grateful to have the support of my amazing colleagues and the chance to build at Secfi.

Life is good right now and I’ve got everything I need. That’s something to be thankful for!

Due diligence and FTX

I was reading that Tiger Global pays outside consultants over $100M per year to conduct due diligence for their funds. Of course, the crazy part to all this is that Tiger invested in FTX and that $38M investment is now worth $0.

I’d love to read the memo that these firms produced on FTX. I doubt I ever will get my hands on one, but naturally I am curious if these memos actually highlighted any of the said red flags that have come to surface.

There’s a lot of shitting on these VCs and funds for investing in FTX right now. Perhaps a lot of it is warranted. But my personal take is that almost everyone would have invested in SBF and FTX if given the chance to earlier this year or last.

There’s a huge crowd of investors out there doing their VC brag tour by tweeting out that they didn’t invest when they had the chance. My question to those folk is that if you knew that SBF was a complete fraud - where were you months ago when all this was happening?

Full on - he had nearly everyone fooled including legendary VC funds who have been doing this for 30+ years. It’s easy to say in hindsight that this was brutally obvious. They had no board, there was no corporate governance or oversight, etc. Actually coming to terms with it would have been much harder.

I can only wonder what would have happened if I had met SBF and was given the chance to invest. My overconfident self perhaps would say that I would’ve smelled that something was wrong and chosen not to invest. The realistic me would realize that 99% of people who met SBF was also fooled and odds are I would have fallen in that 99%.

The World Cup

I had a great weekend catching up on a whole bunch of stuff in life. We’re in the final stages of wedding planning and believe that we’re just about 90% of the way there. Anyone that has planned a wedding probably can understand that feeling of relief of almost being done.

I’ve got a short, but busy week. And I am really looking forward to the Thanksgiving break to finalize everything and get some rest before the big weekend. Of course, the World Cup has to start this week which definitely complicates plans.

As a sports fan, it’s hard not to love the World Cup. I’m not the biggest soccer fan, but it’s the world’s game and it’s fun to watch the world compete against each other.

On the flip side, it’s hard to ignore the absurdity of the World Cup being held in Qatar. I have no desire to write about the BS that’s happening, so I’ll leave it at that there’s clear corruption involved at FIFA and it’s really sad to watch.

The US had a good shot to get beat Wales and get 3 points today, but we faltered. We had dominated the entire first half and I thought for a minute that we would walk in for an easy win. Unfortunately, Wales had different plans and put a lot of pressure on the young US team.

I believe our youth and inexperience really played a factor today. We played scared in the second half and it showed. We’re likely many years away at best from actually be in contention to winning the World Cup so my expectations are low. I am hoping for progress though and I think if we see that, I’ll come away happy.

The Twitter saga continues

There are a lot of rumors coming out Twitter HQ on… Twitter the past few weeks. Last night, it seemed like things were going to really hit the fan as people speculated that up to 90% of employees were going to quit.

#RIPTwitter was trending as people thought that the platform was going to go down overnight. Well… we all woke up and Twitter seems to be operating as normal.

There’s a whole lot to write about and discuss on the whole Elon Musk and Twitter saga, but I wanted to focus primarily on the “working extremely hardcore” part today. Musk had asked employees to continue working extremely hardcore or resign with severance.

To no one’s surprise, many people took the severance and decided to leave Twitter. I’m a bit conflicted by Musk’s decision to put this ultimatum out there.

On one hand, I do understand that Musk has been extremely insensitive to Twitter employees, many of whom have worked their asses off for the good of the platform. He’s handled everything poorly and has made a joke of firing people. That’s not how leaders should act.

On the other hand, I also understand that the company was probably running very heavy and there needed to be wholesale changes. There is nothing wrong with running a company with only people willing to work “extremely hardcore”.

I do think Musk overplayed his hand here by misunderstanding what he was working with. At Tesla and SpaceX, he was able to hire “hardcore” workers that were dedicated to the mission of space travel or eliminating gas cars. It’s much easier to find very driven people in these fields looking to make an impact on the world.

I can only imagine how opposite that may be at Twitter. While there are many that believe in the platform and the mission, it’s completely different running a social media than one in which you build state of the art rockets to send to space.

I hope Musk does succeed as I love Twitter as a platform, but I think he’s got a lot of work cut out for him.