Super Tuesday

It’s Super Tuesday and it’s a largely uneventful one on the national stage. We all know that this election will be between Trump and Biden. There are a few things I am following on a local and state level that could be interesting.

I used to like election years as I enjoyed some level of politics and moving our democracy forward. However, the last 10 years or so have been brutal. The country is completely divided and elections/politics tend to bring out the worst in people.

Social media has undoubtedly contributed to the political discourse. Everyday I see posts on social media from friends or acquaintances labeling the other side as this or that. It feels like we’ve lost our ways to have educated discussions and see each others viewpoints and we’ve settled to finger pointing.

Election years will always bring conflicts but for the sake of our country and democracy, I hope we can get back to a level of understanding and cooperation. Maybe one day I’ll be excited for an election year agian.

Getting my personal finances back in line

I mentioned last week that I was in the process of rebalancing my portfolio. In order to do that, I get an update on Sophia and my balance sheets. I try to do this “asset check” every quarter at minimum but sometimes I’ll do it as frequently as monthly.

It’s a tedious process to get all my accounts lined up and I don’t love the process of counting my money as often as I do. However, it’s necessary for two reasons.

The first is to make sure that my portfolio is in line with my targets. My investments go up and down and I need to rebalance to make sure that I don’t go over or underweight too much. With the rise in crypto the last month, I especially wanted to check that my crypto allocation has not gone too far or else I’d need to rebalance.

Secondly, it helps get things in line and ensure that I’m on track for my savings goals. I use the opportunity to also track how much money I’m putting into the market versus spending. A year ago, I made the goal to split my earned income into 1/3rds. A third goes towards taxes, a third goes towards rent and spending, and another third goes into savings.

It’s a lofty goal for sure but I was able to deliver on it in 2023. Unfortunately, things have been a bit off in 2024. We’ve been spending quite a bit a bit more recently and dipping into my savings allocation quite a bit. The market performing well has masked quite a bit of our spending habits.

Some of this is personal as we’ve had to travel a lot the past few months due to my father in-laws illness. That of course is okay. But on the other hand, I find myself splurging a lot more on other things such as meals out and my hobbies. It was a good reminder to myself that I need to reel things back and start being more conscious of my spending.

Counting our blessings

It’s been a little over 4 months since my father in-law had a stroke. It was an incredibly scary moment and resulted in Sophia and I spending a month out in Croatia as he recovered enough to fly back to the U.S. If you told us that on March 1st, my father in-law would be where he was at back in October, we’d be ecstatic.

Back then, we had no idea if he’d be able to walk or even eat by himself again. Today, he’s pretty much at around 90% of his physical and cognitive level that he was at before. We’re incredibly fortunate to have him here, yet alone be in a position like this to live a normal life again.

I’ve learned a lot over the last few months. It’s again another reminder that life is precious and we can never predict when things can change quickly. Our parents are unfortunately getting older and they won’t be here forever. If things go well, I’ll outlive my parents by many years. That’s a sad thing to think about, but it’s the truth.

Hanging out with my parents or in-laws is not always easy. Whether it’s travel cross country, less than ideal working conditions, or just simply a long winded story that leads to nowhere, most of us have a lot to be annoyed by when hanging out with family. But at the end of the day, it’s family.

I’ve had a new found appreciation of my family and in-laws in recent years, especially in light of the almost tragedy. I’m trying to enjoy all the time we have left with them. Perhaps one day I’ll be lucky enough to have children that want to spend time with me as well.

Another crypto bull run

I’ve now been part of two cycles now so it’s been two big bull runs followed by two crypto winters. Seems like we’re starting another cycle here with Bitcoin over $60k and ETH approaching $3.5k.

I bought my first Bitcoin and ETH in December of 2017 during the first bull run. The price was $17,235.73 at the time. I had really no idea what I was doing but wanted to participate. I promptly lost it all as the crypto winter began.

Fast forward a year and half later to 2019. We were doing a lot with Coinbase at the time and I had a feeling that things were setting themselves up for another run. I ended up buying a decent amount of Bitcoin at $5,000 and some more during the runup. I also bought some ETH. Things ended up working out well of course this time around.

I was able to sell a good amount in the last bull run and made a nice gain. I also took some of the winnings and doubled down into some projects. Some of those worked out, and some did not.

As I sit here today, I still have not bought any new crypto in almost 3 years. I still hold a good amount of Bitcoin, ETH, Arbritum, some smaller tokens, and still hold onto to a few NFTs. I plan to continue to do just that… nothing but hold.

While I do believe in the potential and future growth of crypto, my stance is that the majority of the big gains are likely gone at this point. Putting more money in and hoping for another 10x situation in the short-term is a foolish bet. I like gambling as much as the next person, but at this point, I don’t see gambling in Bitcoin or ETH as the appropriate payouts.

Rather, I’m treating crypto as a long-term hold and a percentage of my balance sheet just like any other stocks. It is a bit outsized at about 10% of my balance sheet right now due to growth and I’d like to keep it at about 10% or less going forward.

The daily grind

In my opinion, one of the hardest parts about work especially at a startup is the daily grind.

We get to do some awesome things at startups like build new products or take on interesting projects often. Those jobs are hard in the sense that you want to do well and they take a lot of thinking. However, they’re usually intellectually stimulating and I look forward to doing those projects.

The daily grind on the other hand is having to do the same thing day in and day out. Unfortunately, you don’t get the luxury of hiring people to take these roles as they don’t warrant a full time position at a startup. So it falls on your plate.

I’m talking about reviewing the CRM and pipeline every morning. Reviewing all inbound leads. Answering inbound contacts. Putting together stats for the broader team. These are the hard tasks as they are monotonous and you just have to grind through them on a daily or weekly basis.

These are the tasks I see a lot of people who don’t come from startups struggle with. They think they are above it and tend to ignore the daily grind tasks.

Why personal finance is hard

A few weeks ago, I had a great chat with someone who runs her own human behavior consulting firm. It was a fintech happy hour and she has done significant work for many of the large fintech companies.

It was a fascinating discussion and I wish I had a lot more 1:1 time with her in a better setting to really dig deeper into her insights. One of her simple insight points was that personal finance is difficult because people want immediate satisfaction. They don’t want to do something now that will benefit them in 10-20-30 years. Of course, this makes sense. We’re humans and we crave immediate gratification.

It explains why a lot of personal finance apps never really take off. Typically, personal financial planning puts off immediate gratification like buying that nice car in favor of saving for the future. On top of that, it takes a decent amount of work to get up and going. That work is easy to put off in light of other things in life like watching Netflix.

While Secfi isn’t a personal finance app, we have a lot of growth when it comes to human behavior. At a little over 5 years in, I’m taking this as an opportunity to revisit some of our existing processes and deliverables with a human behavior lens. We’ve done well, but we have a lot of room for improvement.

Rebalancing after a quick 2 months

I’m back in Baltimore spending the week at my in-laws. My father in-law is finally home after a long journey since his stroke in October. I can’t imagine being stuck in hospitals and rehab facilities for almost 4 months. Fortunately, he was well taken care of and we feel blessed that he got the rehab he needed.

He’s now walking great and cognitively, it feels that he’s like 90% of the way back. Sophia and I hope that we get back to a sense of normalcy and her parents can go back to living their lives mostly normally soon.

On another note - two months of 2024 has gone by quickly. I had barely checked my portfolio since tax-loss harvesting in December. Everything in my portfolio from value, to growth, to crypto seems to be up.

I’ll need to take some time later this week to check my portfolio and make sure things are balanced out. My crypto exposure has likely gone above the levels that I’d like. As hard as it is to sell crypto in this bull run, I want to make sure to keep things in balance.

I like to do this at minimum quarterly, but with the market up big, it’s important that I check into things earlier.

Secfi Secondaries

We launched our Secfi Secondaries offering in early 2023 as our Advisory and Wealth clients had asked for it. While it will never be our primary business, having another revenue stream and product to offer our clients is a good thing especially for a small startup.

The brokerage and secondary business is definitely a tough one to be in however. You’re unfortunately bound to acting on what 3rd parties want to do and serve as effectively the middle man in the equation.

At Secfi, we always love working with clients who are open and want to be educated. We can serve as partners to our clients who are looking out for the best for them. More often than not, that’s who we end up working with on the secondary front to generate liquidity for our clients.

As we develop this new offering, we want to make sure to make this as great of an experience for our clients as possible. We’re going to do things that don’t scale at first and figure out how to best eliminate the pain points in the secondary process.

The first thing on the docket is making sure we work with the right partners who are committed so we can offer the best transparency to our clients. That’s easier said than done and it’ll be a big task.

Deals are in the air again

For the second month, we’re starting to see an uptick in activity in the private markets which bodes well for all of us.

Investors are coming back to the table amidst optimism of lower rates and reset valuations. March seems to be a big month for us as Reddit has a potential to hit the public markets. Many are watching closely to see how they perform.

I suspect that if things go decently well, we’ll see a lot more companies start their IPO process and try to hit the market before investors take off for the summer.

Of course, this is all cautious optimism. But the private markets lag behind the public markets, and the public markets have been looking good for the last few months.

Doing things that don't scale

This year, I want to go back to focusing on doing things don’t scale. The phrase was coined by Paul Graham in a essay written in 2013 and it’s something that resonated with me back in 2018 when I first joined Secfi.

While written primarily for early stage startups getting off the ground, Secfi is now in it’s second phase where a quick reset is needed. We grew significantly since we started in 2017 through the 2021 bull market, and then have been in a steady state since the market pullback. We’ve launched new business lines and have had to keep things afloat on the existing lines as we waited out the bull market.

Now that we’re in 2024, we’re looking to build off our learnings from the past 6 years and take the company to it’s next phase. That’s where we need to go back to our startup principles and start doing things that don’t scale again.

Paul Graham’s essay can be summarized simply in that to get going as a startup you need to recruit users manually and give them an overwhelmingly good experience. Both of those things don’t typically scale. However, the experience should lead us to a clearer picture of what we need to build and how we should do it.

Secfi is a fortunate position and the last 6 years have given us enough brand recognition that we don’t necessarily have to recruit users manually. However, we do want to put extra focus on delighting our users more and learning from them. That’ll take a lot of work, but it’s worth the time and effort.

I suspect that we’ll look to make significant changes in our processes and products in 2024 and that’s a great thing as we look to improve.

The remote future

I’m back home from Hawaii after a short flight delay and a long wait at baggage claim. Despite sleeping under 4 hours, I feel pretty good and motivated to get shit done. It was a good vacation.

My friends and I talked a lot about remote work in Hawaii yesterday at the beach. My friend who had been living on Oahu since prior to the pandemic had mentioned that the local surf spots during weekdays has spiked significantly presumably due to remote work.

Unsurprisingly, Oahu has become a top destination for remote workers. My friend who lives in the upscale newly built Ward Village says there’s constant construction and I counted two new big residential high rises going up.

He’s also there temporarily just enjoying life while working remote. He says there’s quite a few people in the same boat that he’s met in his coworking space. It’s a great life for sure. He surfs a couple times a week. Plays a couple rounds of golf a week. And then participates in various other activities like dance classes and barbeques throughout. He often works remote from his rooftop pool.

He’s admittedly just coasting out there and knows that the peak of engineers taking advantage of remote work is behind us. My friend’s got a great situation as he’s a talented engineer who is incredibly effective. My guess is that these opportunities for the majority of individuals will start to disappear significantly in the coming months and years.

The cost of engineering talent is going down due to the global workforce and AI. Tech companies also know that their employees have been living fairly cushy life styles over the last few years with high pay and very modest work hours.

Wrapping up Hawaii

And just like that I’m down to my last day and half here in Hawaii. Time does fly when you’re enjoying life. I’ve had a great mix of time with old friends, family, and alone time.

These trips are starting to look much different in our mid-30s. We are no longer going out to the bars late at night anymore and I’ve been up at 6 or 7am every day this week. It’s been a nice and welcome change of pace.

It’s been nice taking some time off from work to refocus my energy. Luckily, unlike some of my last vacations, things seem to be slow and I haven’t had the need to do much work at all. I’m starting to get the itch to get back to it. That’s a sign of a great vacation.

City energy

I made it to Hawaii yesterday after a long 6 hour flight. I was obviously very happy to be here and see my sister and friends. I did feel a lot better after checking into my hotel and getting some awesome poke. But I did feel a bit… well off. Part of this is likely because I was tired from the day and night before, and then the flight.

The bigger part I believe is that I needed to shake off the “city energy”. This is a concept that has come up in my meditation a bit. Most of us who live in big cities will run from thing to thing, always busy. It creates this mindset that I always need to be doing something and be productive.

When I landed yesterday in Honolulu, I definitely had a lot of that city energy. I immediately got back to my hotel, unpacked and organized. Got my laptop connected to the WiFi and closed a few workstreams leftover from the flight. Then immediately started building a checklist of things I needed to buy tonight.

I feel a lot better tonight after getting a good nights sleep. I’m finally starting to shake off that city energy and getting excited about lounging and doing a whole lot of nothing. I told myself that I would have an hour or two of laptop time just to get settled in and feel good. Then vacation mode can finally begin officially.

Lessons from my break from alcohol

After a 4.5 week break, I started drinking against last Thursday. I ended up having a few drinks each night of the weekend and then had a bigger day for the Super Bowl where we reserved the top floor of a bar. I learned a lot in the last 5 weeks of giving up alcohol and then restarting drinking again.

While I get the benefits of not drinking, I do believe I am in a good spot where I can drink again and be okay. So for now, I will continue to drink every now and then. I wanted to write a final blog post about those learnings and put an end to this experiment.

• The biggest difference in giving up alcohol for me was clearly the sleep. I fell asleep easier. I had a much more consistent sleep schedule. And I overall felt more rested. Sleeping sober 6-7 hours felt better than sleeping 8-9 hours with drinking the night before.

• On a similar topic, it’s brutally obvious that I need to cut back on my drinking solely for the sleep benefits. I have struggled with energy and sleep the past two years and it’s clear now that alcohol has been the biggest contributor to that.

• My overall mood has generally been happier. I would often struggle with Mondays and would go as far to say I felt depressed a lot of Mondays. Giving up alcohol revived my Mondays significantly. I still had a lot of stress but my base level was much better consistently.

• I had a lot of more energy and enthusiasm for work as well.

• I also noticed that I dreamt a lot more when I was sober. This is likely a sign that I was getting to REM sleep much easier.

• My skin was also noticeably better. I’m not a skincare routine nut like my wife, but I noticed that my skin cleared up. After this weekend of drinking, I can notice myself breaking out a bit.

• Like most Asians, I suffer from a bad gut. Not drinking for sure helped out with that significantly. I felt healthier overall. Given that Sunday was the Super Bowl, my last couple of days have been rather tough on the gut.

• I felt that I had more energy during my workouts for sure. But it wasn’t night or day. I think a lot of it had to do more with the better rest. I do feel much less bloated though.

• Overall though physically, I felt great. I golfed better when I was sober. I had more focus on my golf game and I had a lot more confidence. It was great to see this.

• My biggest fear of not being able to be social without alcohol was largely false. I went to parties. I went to bars. I had fun. Of course it was incredibly tempting to drink when everyone else around me was also drinking, but I also was able to manage quite well. This was perhaps one of the biggest surprises. I was not as reliant on drinking as I thought.

• I didn’t miss alcohol nearly as much as I would’ve thought. At the end of the day, more energy and a better overall mood consistently outweighed the benefits of drinking for the most part. I now know I need to be more conscience when I do drink… that extra drink at night is not worth it.

• In terms of stress relivers, I didn’t need alcohol as much as I thought. It was nice to be able to battle stress in healthier ways.

While I don’t believe I need to go fully alcohol free, I am feeling a lot more aware and conscience of the downsides of alcohol. I’m glad I took the 4.5 weeks off from drinking.

A great weekend and more football pain

I had an overall nice long weekend. I took Friday off to hit the slopes for the first time this season and remembered why I love snowboarding. The snow was great and I’m glad that we went on Friday as the crowds were in full force on Saturday. Sitting in hours of traffic is something that is just too costly for me nowadays.

On Friday night, I hung out with high school friends and it was great to see everyone. We’ve been friends for almost 20 years at this point. Then Sophia came back home on Saturday and we had a nice dinner at The Progress for an early birthday celebration.

Of course, I was hoping for a perfect ending to the weekend with a 49ers win in the Super Bowl. But it wasn’t meant to be. We played a great game, but eventually had one too many mistakes. Against Patrick Mahomes, you have to be nearly perfect and we were one notch below that.

It was another brutal loss and the 2023-2024 season for both my college and pro teams will always be known as the 2nd place year. Losing in the Natty and Super Bowl is always hard, but in the same year, it’s devastating. I know I’m far from being a tortured sports fan… even getting to the championship games in both college and the NFL is something that most people dream about.

Both the Huskies and Niners will be back. There’s always next year.

The guilt of taking time off

I’m taking tomorrow off to go ski for the first time this season and then head out next Wednesday to go to Hawaii for five days. While I’m excited, I can’t help but feel a bit of guilt right now for taking the days off. It’s something that I’ve always felt since starting my work life and something I’m actively working on.

Things have picked up significantly since the new year and we’re in a busy period. Things are looking, well really great for us right now. When you work at a startup, you want to maximize on these opportunities because they don’t last forever.

Given that, I do feel guilty that I’m taking days off when I’m probably needed the most. It’s not a new thing - I’ve kind of always felt this way. In reality though, it’s incredibly hard to time vacations for when things are slow. Inevitably, things always seem to pick up right when you’re supposed to be leaving for a trip.

I also try to remind myself that I haven’t taken a lot of PTO in the last 6 months since my last trip and that we’re in a marathon, not a sprint. I’ve unfortunately grown accustomed to working on vacations and staying in touch. But I also need to remember that it’s also critical to properly recharge on these trips.

F*ck cancer

I have a call with a doctor today to talk about hereditary cancer screening. Sophia and I are starting the process of perhaps having children so we wanted to make sure we run the appropriate tests and be informed.

My Mom passed away from breast cancer in 1997 when I was 7. It was a different day and age back then and it pains me to think that through better education and resources in today’s day and age, she most likely would’ve lived and beaten it.

I am grateful that science and tech has advanced so far in the last 27 years. We can now test if people are genetic predisposed to cancer and can take a lot of preventative measures. I can only imagine how many lives have been saved.

There's lots of ways to make money in the world...

I just saw that Adam Neumann is looking to buy back WeWork with the help of Third Point today. In a weird way, this may be the best case scenario for shareholders at this point. Regardless, I hope it happens because I’m curious to see the outcome.

On another note, I finally feel that I’ve got my entrepreneurial itch back again. I had been so heads down with Secfi the last 5 years that I’ve been solely focused on the startup and VC world.

One of my goals this year was to get back to learning about all kinds of businesses out there, not just VC backed tech companies. I want to know how the rest of the business world works, not just the tech bubble I’m in.

It’s been a fascinating month doing a lot of reading and learning. Cash flowing businesses are my new interest right now and I’m not limiting myself to any specific industry. I’ve read about everything from IT service businesses to security guard contractors to dog babysitting.

I have no idea if that’s where my future will be, but at the minimum having a well rounded view on business can only help.

This weekend concluded my 4th and likely last weekend of my sober experiment. I decided to take a break from drinking after coming back from Houston on the 9th of January and I haven’t had a drink since. I wanted to run an experiment and see how I would feel after a month of taking a break from any sort of alcohol.

Well, in short, I feel great. The benefits from not drinking are clear as day.

The major improvement in my life has to do around sleep. I am sleeping just significantly better than I have, perhaps since I was a teen. First, I have a much more consistent sleep schedule. I am in bed around 10:30/11 and am up at 6:30/7 every morning. On the weekends, the schedule shifts back an hour. Despite not getting a full 9 hours that I hope for, I wake up feeling more rested.

Similar to the above, I just feel much more motivated and energized to attack the day. I was really struggling with Mondays over the last couple of years as I felt I was slow out of the gates to start the week often. But my Mondays are completely different nowadays after getting good rest over the weekend.

In regards to overall health, obviously more energy is a net positive for my fitness and I’ve had great workouts the last few weeks. My gut health is one area that is definitely improved as well and I feel just overall much healthier.

In terms of my social life, I’m definitely staying in a lot more. This past weekend, I stayed home on Friday and Saturday night to play video games and watch TV. My friends who are also not drinking right now are more or less doing the same. This is admittedly a lot easier when there’s no major sports events right now.

All that said, my social life hasn’t taken that big of an impact by not drinking. I still go out to dinner with my friends and have fun. I went to a bar to watch the 49ers game last weekend and had a great time. I find myself more present when I’m not drinking and actually trying to get to know the people around me.

However, I’m definitely purposely not being as social as I used to be. I am doing more activities during the day. But overall I’d would probably say the effects of removing alcohol on my social life has been neutral.

Perhaps most important on this experiment the last month is that I’m hoping to have a healthier relationship with alcohol going forward. The break has confirmed that my life does not revolve around social events that involve drinking. I am no longer 23 and drinking consistently every weekend is just not worth it.

I will have my first drink again sometime this week. When I start drinking again next week, I will do so in a much more controlled manner. Perhaps I don’t need to drink at every social occasion I go out or maybe I should just get a Diet Coke when on a company work trip. My body will thank me later.

Bring it on 2024

It’s been a long week so I’m glad that it’s Friday. I’m tired and could use a couple days to recharge.

We’re one month in in 2024 and the year feels a lot more optimistic in general. Tender offers are back and the secondary markets should pick up. Liquidity is slowly coming back for startup employees. The IPO may open up a bit at the end of Q1 and Q2. We’ll be watching that closely.

I know there will be setbacks this year. It won’t be linear progress back, but we’ll start to see more of a normal environment in 2024 hopefully. I’m incredibly excited to see what’s happening in the startup world. It’s going to be a great year for us.