Doing the right thing

I’m currently reading “Liar’s Poker” by Michael Lewis. It’s a great look into the 1980s Wall Street world where all the stereotypes were largely born. The book is a somewhat comical view into what happens when there’s a lot of money to be made for the firm and their wallets by taking advantage of their clients. It was a time where not only ethical codes were broken but these firms likely would fall in today’s definition of fraud.

Of course, these Wall Street firms created millionaires of young employees who were okay with navigating the grey and slinging shit products to their clients. I’d be lying if a lot of that was not still happening today. While we’ve gone a long ways since the days of Solomon Brothers in the 1980s, we’re still in a world where money talks. Many will still break ethical obligations in order for short term profit. Despite maybe not being as cutthroat as Wall Street, I’ve heard some horror stories in our world of private company stock.

At Secfi, we operate in a world that is different than the world that Solomon Brothers operates in, but there are still similarities. Our clients are not just large investment firms like Solomon Brothers deals with, but also retail individuals. Our clients trust us to help make the best decisions for them and to provide the best products. That adds an extra element where we need to be extra careful.

One of the big things that has never changed since we started Secfi is that we will always do the right thing for our clients. We’ve gone to great lengths to ensure that. Of course, policies and handbooks exist at Secfi, but we make sure to talk about and celebrate when we do the right thing for our clients, even if it jeopardizes a deal. Culture is what you do, not what you say you do.

It’s not always easy though. We’re in the business of financial services and we make money by selling financial services. Often times, our products aren’t the best fit for a client. Telling them not to do something or sending them to a competitor obviously may hurt short term profits. But that is a trade off we’re always willing to make.

Doing the right thing is always the answer.

Playing the IPO game

I just read that Vietnamese automaker VinFast has just gone public via a SPAC. The initial price was at $23B and the shares jumped up to $85B Tuesday. Things have settled down a bit today but the company is now valued at more than VW, Ford, GM, and BMW.

It seems that speculation is still very much alive despite the pull back in the public markets. Given the recent public market debuts, investors seem to be willing to buy new public market entrants. That generally bodes well for the tech market as perhaps some companies are now more open to going public.

Of course, I don’t think many are expecting VinFast to keep trading at these levels, but who knows. For now, it seems like investors are willing to play the IPO game and there are a ton of companies in the IPO backlog. It’ll make an interesting next couple of months to close out the year.

The quest for perfection

On the drive back from Tahoe, I started to listen to an old podcast I liked in the pandemic times called Work Life by Adam Grant. The podcast covers different tips and tricks from a scientific standpoint on how to make work not suck. While many people can see perfectionism as a good thing, there’s clearly a lot of downsides in chasing something that is unattainable. This particular episode was around battling perfectionism in life and around the work place.

I wouldn’t call myself a perfectionist by any means today, nor when I was growing up. Although I would consider myself someone with perfectionist tendencies at times when I was younger. During my adolescence, I was scared to make mistakes both in school and outside of it. In high school, I played football and felt that one of the things always holding me back was that I played really tight… always scared to make a mistake although that was part of the game.

I don’t know if there was a specific trigger for me that changed, but I suspect that it had something to do with work and grad school. There really is no such thing as perfect in the tax and finance world, and uncertainty is just part of the game. I’ve also worked in a startup for the last 5 years where things often go wrong rather than right. We’re always operating at least a step below optimal.

Adam Grant did bring up a lot of topics that hit close to home though. Although not a perfectionist, I am definitely hard on myself like a perfectionist can be. I often feel that my life and work life needs to be a perfectly linear arrow pointing to the top right or else I’m failing. It’s an awful habit and has caused me a lot of self-confidence just like happens with a perfectionist chasing something unattainable.

Secondly, I’ve also realized how incredibly hard I am on myself on the golf course. In a game of imperfection, I’ve beat myself up time and time again for making mistakes. Beating myself up over making a bad or less than perfect shot usually results in more bad shots. In chasing perfection in golf, I’ve actually talked myself into thinking that I’m an awful golfer when in reality I’m fairly above average.

Grant and his guests he brought on suggested that instead of chasing perfection, you should simply chase constant improvement. I think I’ll be a much happier person both at work and on the golf course if I do that. My performance in both will likely follow suit.

Life is cruel and beautiful

I’ve had a bit of a weird morning to kick off my week.

I spent 5 days up in Lake Tahoe with my best friend catching up and just enjoying life doing things that I love. I played a good amount of golf and spent time at the beach. Being up in the mountains with the sun shining down really made me appreciate life. I was really sad to leave yesterday, but I had a great weekend.

The script flipped a bit this morning as I was scrolling Instagram while eating breakfast. I found out that someone I know through mutual close high school friends just lost his mom and sister in a tragic car crash yesterday. If this wasn’t bad enough, this same person went through another tragedy 15 years ago as he lost his father and brothers on the same day.

For someone to go through something like this once in their lives is tragic and devastating enough. But for someone to go through something like this twice losing all your siblings and parents in your early 30s… I can’t even fathom. Call it luck or fate or just life, but no one deserves this. I feel just freakin’ awful for him and hope he is one day able to find peace in his life. He’s suffered enough for multiple life times.

This is yet another reminder that life can be really cruel at times. Everyone will go through hardships and tragedy at some point in their lives. The optimist in me always tries to focus on the positives in these times. If there’s no mud, there’s no lotus. In other words, there’s no happiness or growth without pain and suffering. I’m trying to stay positive today, but it’s admittedly a bit hard.

Zoom fatigue

Nowadays I spend at least half my working hours on Zoom calls with clients, partners, or internally. If I compare myself to 5 years ago, the average hours in meetings has slowly crept up. I do think that this is part of moving up on the org chart and your career.

As you advance to higher levels of the org chart, you’re naturally going to be spending more time in meetings and doing more strategic work versus just grinding work out individually or with a small team.

Unfortunately a by product of this is Zoom fatigue and it’s a real phenomenon that I’ve experienced a lot, especially recently. I generally like talking to people and like the social interaction. At the same time, after 6+ hours of calls a day, I find myself just absolutely zapped. By the time Friday hits, I’m usually in a position that I don’t want to speak to many people.

I don’t have a good solution to all this. I’ve heard that turning off the camera facing you will help with this and I’ve tried that. But at the end of the day, talking to people for hours upon hours is just exhausting whether it’s in person or via Zoom.

For now, I’ll be trying to limit meetings as much as possible and be focused on my sleep, rest, and recovery. To extent possible, I’m going off camera and taking things via phone call.

Money talks

Partnerships are an incredible accelerator for businesses, but particularly startups in fintech. There’s a large amount of synergies between firms in our space. Relationships are the most important part of any partnership. Like any relationship, whether personal or business, you need to nurture those relationships constantly in order to ensure success.

At the end of the day though, money talks. Most partnerships in business are formed in order to mutual generate revenue or business together. You can have the best 1:1 relationship with any partner, but if you don’t hold your end of the bargain, that partnership will not be successful.

For us, a partnership really begins when we start generating revenue together. I always tell our partners to let’s start small and see what it’s like working together. Once we have a deal or two under our belts, we can start the discussions on a broader partnership and further strengthen the relationship.

The push back to the office

I’m about to take off to South Lake for a couple days of remote work and a weekend up in the sun. I’ve been lucky that my best friend moved up there and has an extra bedroom for me. It’s been a nice vacation home to visit every couple of months.

On another note, it appears that companies are finally forcing employees back to the office. Out of all companies, Zoom is now going back into the office. I’ve seen various other startups of different sizes also asking employees to move to an office or leave the company.

I had predicted that this would start happening more especially as the market turns, but I never would have thought that Zoom would be one of the companies leading the charge.

I am a supporter of the hybrid work model where people come into the office regularly, but have the ability to work from home or elsewhere when they need to. I believe this provides the best balance of making sure employees are collaborating, but at the same time catering to everyone’s expanding.

I do think the straw that broke the camel’s back will be because of low impact employees. There are a lot of people candidly taking advantage of remote work and a lot of people just would be better in an office. I’ve seen and heard some crazy stories over the years.

I expect this trend to continue quite a bit more towards the end of the year. I can see companies setting a deadline starting in 2024 as well.

The PwC farm

I was just reading the news that a fellow PwC alumni had just been promoted to CFO at Tesla. It was really awesome to see one of your own get the nod at one of the top tech CFO jobs. I am still overall a fan of PwC despite the fact I have been vocal in the past that I probably wouldn’t have joined PwC again if I could redo it. I learned a lot from my five years at the firm and met some amazing people there. I’ll always be fond of my time there, but it just wasn’t the right fit for myself.

I can see why that firm is a breeding ground for people in management. You join the firm and are immediately thrown into the fire on many projects. It’s really sink or swim for your first two years. The ones who make it get promoted and the ones who can’t are forced out or take easier jobs for better pay.

Those that can stick around can make Manager in 4-5 years and be in charge of up to 10 direct reports at a given time. You’re immediately thrust into meetings with executives of the biggest company in your vertical. You’re given new client and revenue goals AND have to deliver on the projects that are time sensitive. Those that can make it are given a lot of responsibility by the time they’re 28.

The next years after that are spent on working with more clients. Those that are good with clients and bring in new business will eventually make partner. The technical experts are often given the title of managing director. It’s a fairly lucrative career although many will argue that the pay does not equal the time spent working.

For as much flak I do give PwC from time to time, I do believe they do a pretty damn good job in pumping out motivated business leaders and weeding out the ones who don’t belong. That usually leaves means a solid base of hard working alums and employees.

Recent portfolio moves

I couldn’t have asked for a better Monday here in San Francisco. It’s sunny, 75 degrees and perfect. No matter how much rest I get or how excited I am for something at work, Mondays are always going to be a little bit of a drag. But this weather definitely helps.

I haven’t written much about the public markets lately and that’s largely because I’ve been fairly cautious with my investing there. Most of my portfolios are in index funds given my net worth right now, but I have some allocated to individual stocks.

For the past year and half, I’ve largely been a seller of individual stocks. I have have nibbled on a few positions but given the risk of the markets, I’ve turned towards indexes as a safe haven. I expect to become more of a buyer in the next few months if we see things continue to remain steady.

On the private side, I have become much more active. I’ve largely used my private investing as a way to diversify my positions and take a few moonshots. I’ve focused a lot on defense tech and space when I’ve made individual investments. I haven’t been able to get the exposure to space or defense in the public markets and have supplemented that with investing in startups.

Given the advancements in space tech and the current world environment for defense, I feel really good about some of the shots I’ve taken in the private markets. All that said, I’ve had to display a lot of restraint when it comes to these investments. I’ve been really excited about some opportunities in the past, and where I went wrong was overextending myself on the size of those investments.

At the end of the day, they are still risky private companies and I need to do a better job at making sure it remains a small part of my overall portfolio.

Another weekend in the books

I had a great round today at Corica Park in Alameda right across the bridge. I had a good front 9 and shot a 45 while leaving a lot out there. I lost a bit of focus on the back… or I might have had one too many drinks and ended up shooting a 49 on the back 9.

My swing feels pretty good overall, but I’m consistently pushing my irons right. It was frustrating as I couldn’t put it all together to break 90, but at the same time I can’t be too upset as my miss is consistent. I know what I need to work on and it’s fixable. At some point, it’ll all come together.

I’m fortunate that I have the opportunity to golf with close friends almost every weekend. I’m not taking it for granted as I know that my weekly golf outings may end soon with other priorities coming up. For now, I’m loving being on the course once a week.

I’m tired from a long day in the hot sun, and I’m ready to hit the hay. We’ve got a lot of things going on this week at work and I’m juiced to get back to it. It’s been this long since I’ve been genuinely excited to work. It’s a great sign.

RIP Pac-12

The news broke this morning and I was equal parts relieved and sad. UW and UO will be formally accepting bids to join the Big 10 conference.

As a die-hard UW football fan, I’m really glad that we made it out and got invited to the “big league”. Our athletic department is no longer in jeopardy and we’ll be flush with more cash. At the end of the day, it was a neccessary move in order to stay relevant in major college sports.

Unfortunately, the Pac-12 looks to be dead at this point. Decades of history will be destroyed in the next few weeks as we align to the new age of college football. Everything seemed inevitable once USC made the decision to jump to the Big10 last year.

I feel awful for some of the other schools in the conference that will be left in limbo. Cal and Stanford may still make it to the Big10. The Arizona schools and Utah will move to the Big12 and stay somewhat relevant. But for WSU and OSU, they’ll be in a tough position and likely destined for the Mountain West. They’ll be in a dire financial situation and this all but puts them out of the Power 5 conversation and out of Power 5 money.

It’s really sad. I’ve had a lot of issues with the Pac-12 especially over the last year. It was mismanaged and has largely been a disaster. But there is a lot of history there. College football as we know it is over and we’ve officially entered the new age. I’m glad we get to participate.

The old guard departures

We’re at the point about 5+ years into the startup journey that a lot of the early employees have been hitting their 3+ year mark and have started to branch out to something different. That’s pretty expected as most people nowadays don’t often stick at a company longer than 3 years, but it’s a bit sad nonetheless.

These people were the early believers in Secfi who busted their asses to get us off the ground. They endured a lot of late nights and sucker punches and stuck through it to get us to this point. I’m fortunate to call a lot of these soon to be former colleagues friends as well.

Of course, I would love for them to stick around longer, but people move on and nothing lasts forever. I’m of the belief that good managers know your employees can leave, but great ones expect them to leave. I’ve been expecting and seeing a lot of these departures over the last couple years.

It’s been really sad to see some of the early folks who have built Secfi go, but I’m always excited for their next journeys.

The (continued) unraveling of 2020-2021

My University of Washington Huskies start their football fall camp today and I couldn’t be more excited. August is here. Summer is wrapping up. And football season is starting in a month. While I do love summer, I’m a bit tired of all the travel and excited to be largely at home and back on the grind.

I’ll probably round out my busy summer travel with a few weekend trips to Lake Tahoe to visit friends and play some golf, but it’s largely at home for the rest of the month. Football season is a nice welcome distraction from my day to day of work. I expect this to be a really busy fall both personally and at work.

The big news in VC and startup world today was that Hopin was selling most of their events business to Ring Central. I don’t really have any details about the “acquisition” yet, but it doesn’t seem to be great for the company or the shareholders on the surface.

Hopin may be yet another victim of the unraveling of the pandemic era boom. They seemed to have rode the wave up with their online events platform in the middle of COVID and raised a massive Series D at the peak in 2021. Like a lot of companies that raised during this period, I’d imagine the company was stuck between a rock and a hard place the last 1.5 years.

They have a massive valuation of $7.66B to grow into. But with events likely going back to in person, my guess is that revenue has dropped sharply. They were likely forced into this sale.

Playing defense

Before I knew summer was here, we’re already in August. Time is flying fast and I’m getting a bit of anxiety that I haven’t accomplished more in Q3 already. Thus is the life at a startup.

As we head into August, there’s a lot of cautious optimism. The secondary markets are opening up a bit more and prices are going up, slowly but surely. There are more buyers on the table.

VC funding is still down overall, but we’re starting to see a bit of life. It appears that most VCs are playing defense right now. Most deals are being done in quiet inside rounds to keep companies afloat.

Unfortunately a lot won’t be able to make it through and I think we’ll start to see more bad news break through Labor Day. Lots of investors are trying to get ahead of the upcoming pain. Many LPs haven’t been happy with fund performance and will continue to be disgruntled as more bad news hits the ticker.

I’m in full heads down grind mode right now. There’s a lot of great opportunities for us ahead at Secfi and I’m excited to close out the summer and close out the year strong.

The Land of Enchantment

We’re back in San Francisco after an extended weekend to New Mexico. Both Sophia and I had a messy Wednesday morning and I was on a call right up until the boarding gate. I was able to get caught up during the flight down which felt good. I felt like Cousin in the last episode of season 2 of The Bear where the restaurant needed to get everything caught up as fast as possible.

I had gone on the trip expecting to be a bit bored and have a lot more downtime. I had planned to do a bit more work and write everyday, but that really went out the window due to sleep and activities.

Sophia and I had a low key Wednesday as we grabbed dinner and headed back to the hotel to relax. We planned on getting to bed early and getting up early to explore some of the surrounding areas of Santa Fe. Next thing I knew, it was almost 9am and I had been in bed for almost 10 hours. I didn’t quite realize how tired and this was my body telling me to get some more rest.

On Thursday, we explored Bandelier National Monument which was awesome. This was an old settlement where Native Americans built housing in the caves that were carved out due to erosion. Sophia and I had a great day exploring the area. Later that day, Sophia’s parents arrived and we spent most of the weekend together.

There wasn’t anything too memorable about Santa Fe. The food in my opinion was very mediocre at best - New Mexican food felt like a worse Mexican food to me. The chiles were nice, but weren’t enough to really call anything game changing. The sites were great to see as we saw a Native American pueblo and shopped around the art galleries. The Spanish Market which as the big event that we came to visit was cool to see, but it was really my style.

Largely, New Mexico was about spending time with family and I was happy to do that. Santa Fe is one of Sophia’s parents favorite spots and they visit every year. We don’t get to see them as often as we see my parents so every opportunity it was great to be able to spend time with them in a place that they love.

When it rains, it pours

I should be getting used to this now. It seems like every time I decide to leave for a vacation, something big or a bunch of events decide to happen during my time away.

I somehow escaped the trend when I went to Japan last month, but of course my misfortunate has decided to rear it’s head this morning. Sophia’s parents missed their flight so the day got off to a hectic start. We’ve had to rebook transportation and look for a car rental all of a sudden.

Then it seems like everyone seems to have decided today to get stuff done at work. I don’t think I’ve been called, messaged, or emailed so much in a morning in months. Thus is life.

It seems that I’ll be on calls walking through TSA and up until the airplane takes off. Everything will be fine although it’s 9:45am and I could use a drink. Thank god for airplane WiFi.

Off to New Mexico!

Deal FOMO

I’m headed for Sante Fe tomorrow for a short trip with Sophia’s parents. We didn’t want to plan two vacations so close to each other as we just got got back from Japan a few weeks ago, but Sophia’s parents already had this trip booked and we thought we’d tag along in lieu of visiting Baltimore.

Admittedly, I feel a bit guilty taking so much time off recently. It almost feels like that I’m slacking. I feel a bit of a responsibility to my team and company to do more right now, especially given the circumstances of the last 18 months.

On top of that, I have this weird phenomenon from working this job that I call it Deal FOMO. In other words, it’s the fear that I’ll have missed work opportunities when I’m on vacation. I have this irrational fear that I’ll miss an amazing deal or opportunity because I’m taking some time off.

I’ve done a decent job curtailing it recently, but it comes up from time to time. In actuality, it never really happens as I’ve got an amazing team covering for me and in this age of being connected, I’ll be available for high profile items anyways. But yet, it still comes up from time to time.

It is summer and I know I need to relax a bit. I do work my ass off when I am working and I get a lot done. I need to not feel guilty for taking time off. Lots of people are traveling right now and I do need to take advantage of the slower times at work to go out, spend time with people I don’t see often, and just enjoy life.

There’ll be plenty of time to grind work for weeks on end in the future.

Everything has a cost

I woke up this morning tired and I haven’t really been able to combat the fatigue. It’s a bit frustrating as it appears that my 30s are apparently catching up to me faster than I’d like.

I stayed in Friday night and then on Saturday my friends and I decided to go to a bar after dinner for a bit. It was a bit of a long Saturday but we were back in bed by midnight. I took Sunday as a recovery day and had two naps. Even after sleeping 8 hours last night, I still woke up groggy and felt like I could go back to sleep for another 2 hours.

It’s a bit frustrating. As the weekend was far from a “relaxing” one where we did nothing, we also aren’t out partying to the wee hours of the morning either. It feels like every year of getting older means you have to have less and less fun. Who would’ve thought that at 33, staying up a couple hours past my normal bed time on Saturday would be enough to throw me off my schedule on Monday?

I really wish this wasn’t the case, but of course that’s life and part of getting older. Sophia and I are overindulging a bit. It’s summer and we’re trying to have as much fun as possible before we start a family so perhaps me feeling a bit tired Monday morning isn’t the worst thing as I got to spend time with some close friends on Saturday. I suspect that will slow down a bit naturally.

But more importantly, I’m starting to realize that everything has a cost nowadays. That extra beer at the end of the night. Another episode of a show. Sometimes these costs are worth it. But the cost of everything is becoming more and more expensive as I grow with age unfortunately. It’s time to start peeling back some of these costs and trading them for some lower cost things.

Saturdays are for rest

I’ve been tired all week. I’m not sure the main culprit but as always, it’s probably a mix of things. I had a big weekend last weekend and then I didn’t sleep particularly well early on this week. It all adds up and makes things a bit difficult.

I wish I had the energy and stamina of my early and mid 20s. Back at my old gig, we had to track hours to charge our clients and at one point, I remember clocking in over 100 hours a week. It was insane and something I would never be able to do again nowadays, nor would I ever want myself or anyone on my team to experience.

Regardless, when I was younger, it was a lot easier to work from the morning into the late evenings straight. Perhaps I just had nothing better to do when I was 24. Part of it is the work I do nowadays requires a lot more thinking and talking versus just pure grinding in spreadsheets.

I’ve got a string of calls this morning and then I have this afternoon blocked to catch up on everything. I’m excited to push through and get some good rest this weekend.

Superhuman AI

I’ve been playing around with various AI tools the last few months, but I’m by far a power user. ChatGPT has become something I use often, but I’d stop short of it becoming a game changing tool for my line of work. I’d suspect it’s a lot more for helpful for other roles however. The generative AI image creators are a lot of fun and I like to play with that, but given my line of work, it’s mainly just a toy for me.

So I was really stoked to hear that Superhuman would finally be releasing their AI integration into their popular email platform. I’d been a user of Superhuman nearly from the start and I admit that I am one of the fanboys who can’t live without it. It’s just a much better and more pleasurable way to do email.

The new AI feature ingests all your emails you’ve written and aims to assist you in writing in your own words. I tested this out a bit yesterday and I was pleasantly surprised at just how good the feature was. They wrote me a cold email that sounds like something I would write. Furthermore, it was spot on about the description of Secfi.

Of course, this does make sense as LLMs just regurgitate what has been fed to it in the past. So it’s been recycling a lot of my past emails. But what’s most impressive is how it has been able to combine everything I’ve written in the past and make it perhaps even better.

I suspect that Superhuman AI may be the first AI tool to hit my daily toolkit.