Secfi hits Chicago

I’m gearing up for the long weekend followed by a trip to Chicago for our US offsite. I’m incredibly excited for the week ahead. I haven’t seen most of my colleagues for over a year now in person and there’s nothing like getting good face time.

We spend so much time with each other on a day to day basis working largely remote. We do our best to make those connections remotely and build a bond. However, it’s just not the same as when we can get together and really bond in person.

We have a few hours per day reserved to get work done which will be nice. But most of the time reserved just to hang out and have some fun. We’ve all been through a lot these last couple of years and being able to get together, bond, and just enjoy being with each other is incredibly important.

Lastly, we have a lot to celebrate. We’ve had some big wins this past week and I can’t wait to celebrate with everyone in person. The Zoom and Slack celebrations just do not hit the same. It becomes more real when we’re in person together.

For now, I have a long weekend with not too many plans. My sister is in town so I plan on just relaxing. It’s going to be a fun week.

Thursday random thoughts

Things have slowed down significantly for the long weekend. Downtown SF seems like a ghost town today especially with the nice weather. My inbox is nice and quiet. The long weekend and summer vibes have kicked in early and I plan to take off early to meet an old coworker.

With a slower week, my sleep has significantly improved and I feel great. I know it’s fairly obvious, but the days when I can actually get to bed and get 8+ hours of sleep are night and day from the days when I get 7 or less. The biggest challenge for me is getting to bed earlier on nights where I have to be up early the next morning. I just have never been a good sleeper that can fall asleep early. It’s something I need to continue to work on.

We’re wiring a good chunk of cash out for an investment we closed this week. It feels amazing to start writing bigger checks again. We’re in the business of allocating assets and the past two years have been slow given the markets. There’s no better thrill of closing significant deal flow.

As Q2 starts to get wrapped up, I need to start looking into my portfolio and savings once again. Sophia and I have done an okay job 5 months into the year, but I do feel the pressure of increased spending a bit. We haven’t been investing as much as we should be and I want to make sure the 2nd half of the year pans out differently for us. Life style creep is something I’m always battling.

PE in college athletics

I just read that private equity seems to be coming to college athletics soon. RedBird Capital and Weatherford Capital have announced a program for athletic departments. There are scant details so far, but my guess is that these firms will work alongside a handful of athletic departments and provide a line of credit in exchange for future revenue splits.

This could make sense for some select athletic departments. For better or worse, my school the University of Washington is likely a top candidate given that we are entering the Big10 at a 50% revenue cut for the next 6 years until 2030 when we get the full cut. PE money could help level the playing field for the next 5-6 years while giving up some of the future upside when we get a larger cut from the conference.

Of course, this won’t always end happy. Some companies may be eager to get their hands on capital today which won’t result in a happy payout in the future. I can see many of these desperate ADs looking to make a splash and taking out a line of credit to pay some highly talented recruits who won’t pan out. A lot of college athletics are unfortunately not good investments. Lots of schools will learn the hard way…

The SynapseFi mess

I’m unfortunately one of the thousands of users with money stuck due to the SynapseFi mess right now. I had some cash with a fintech neobank called Yotta which used Synapse as their BaaS provider. Unfortunately this is an ugly fintech mess that will result in millions of dollars being locked up until Synapse can figure things out.

In a nutshell, my understanding is as such:

• Synapse is the Banking as a Service (BaaS) provider that builds the infrastructure to connect many fintechs to banks.

• My fintech neobank Yotta used Synapse to connect to Evolve which is a bank.

• Synapse filed for bankruptcy in 2023 and was going to be acquired by TabaPay, but that deal fell through earlier this month.

• There is only a skeleton crew of 6 people at Synapse working now due to the bankruptcy.

• Synapse has since cut-off any access from the fintechs to Evolve and is not longer processing transactions. Since Synapse effectively builds the piping and infrastructure from these fintechs to the banks, no one including myself can get their money out.

• The FDIC cannot step in because this isn’t an issue of a bank going bankrupt. My money is supposedly safe with Evolve which is FDIC insured, but the piping is not broken to get the money out.

As of now, there does not seem to be a resolution in place. Synapse and Evolve are both blaming each other for the issues. The fintechs such as Yotta are blaming Synapse and Evolve.

Someone is going to have to step in and fix the mess to get users their money. While this is not a big deal for me, it appears that thousands of users relied on these fintechs as their primary banking solution for direct deposit, paying bills, etc.

People are asking if this is fintech’s FTX. There’s already a chain reaction of other fintechs also shutting down because of this. For everyone’s sake and for the sake of the industry, let’s all hope that this gets resolved as soon as possible.

Family First

I had a fairly relaxing weekend primarily hanging out with family. My cousin and his family were in town from Indonesia for the weekend. I hadn’t seen them in 10+ years since I last visited Indonesia. We had a nice dinner and drinks at my parent’s house on Friday catching up on life and family matters. Then we spent Saturday in Napa.

Being in America when the vast majority of my extended family is back in Indonesia has always made me a bit of an outcast in the family matters. On top of that, my Dad is 1 of 11 and one of the youngest in the group. At 34, I’m one of the youngest cousins in the family.

My cousin has always put family first as one of the oldest in the group of cousins. He’s always the one organizing things for the family and making sure that everyone gets taken care of including myself. I was excited to spend time with him and his family.

When I was young, I would visit Indonesia every summer and have the opportunity to see and hang out with family. As I got older, those summers became every two, then three years. Now I haven’t been back for 10+ years so I feel a bit disconnected.

As Sophia and I start our own family, I want to make sure my kids realize the importance of putting family first and making sure we don’t lose our culture of being Indonesian. I know it’s unlikely that we’ll get to go to summers in Indonesia every summer, but I need to make it a point to get out there at least on a regular basis.

Feel good Friday

I didn’t have Scottie Scheffler getting arrested on my bingo card for the PGA Championship. What a weird and kind of funny sequence of events.

I’m in wrap up mode today on Friday as I’ve got a long checklist of things that I wasn’t able to get done the last couple of days due to a busy call schedule. I blocked off my schedule just so I can tackle my checklist and ensure that I go into the weekend feeling good. I call these Feel Good Fridays.

In a job where I am on calls or meetings for a large portion of my day, I need these days to catch up on everything. It feels good to have time to myself to work through everything.

Stop and smell the roses

Like many who work at a small business or a startup, I get caught up a lot in the ever increasing goals. You work your ass off to hit a target or a goal. Then you quickly move onto the next one. That’s the reality of growing a company.

We hit a big goal here at Secfi halfway through the quarter. And already we’re starting to think about the next quarter and our goals there. My CEO gave me shit when I reported the good news yesterday in our management team meeting. I had a very business as usual demeanor as I reported what should be ecstatic news.

Six years into building a company and I feel like I’ve almost lost my excitement for winning! I’ve suddenly became the disgruntled veteran at the company. That’s not a great place to be. I’m vowing to change that.

I have so much to be grateful and appreciative about both in my work and personal life. I need to stop and smell the roses. I’ll start by celebrating this big win this weekend.

Chat GPT 4o

After some morning calls, I spent a good 30 minutes playing with Chat GPT 4o. While Chat GPT 3.0 and 4.0 was jaw dropping, I believe 4o will be the reason that I sign up for ChatGPT Plus.

The chat bot and image generator were great and provided a lot of help in certain areas for me mainly around research. However, I struggled to find use cases to use it consistently throughout the day.

With 4o, I now can input nearly anything to output into nearly anything. I can input my legal docs I need to review and get a summary of the document in less than a minute which will save me time.

The voice chat will become my personal assistant that I can speak to in my day to day. It’ll be a much more advanced Siri.

I am probably late to the game in using ChatGPT on a regular basis for work and personal reasons and I’m ready to join the club.

Fintech will rise again

We’ve been taking our lumps in the fintech world for some time now. The rest of tech has recovered decently well but fintech unfortunately is still sitting in a tough position both in the public and private markets.

Multiples in fintech are generally lower than pure play software companies, but the public companies out there are sitting at fairly depressed levels.

In the private market space, there unfortunately is not a ton of activity. Primary rounds that are coming in seem to be mostly down rounds. Secondary buyers are typically staying away from buying into fintech right now.

I myself am caught personally in an annoying fintech issue. I had a relatively small amount of cash with Yotta which is a neobank on top of Evolve/Synapse. With Synapse announcing bankruptcy and a potential buyer pulling out, the bank is in a freeze right now. No one including myself can get our cash out and direct deposits are bouncing.

I am fortunate that I do not need this cash now and of course it is FDIC insured so I don’t expect to lose it. But if this drags out, we could see a situation where it may take months for me to get my cash out. I know others are not in a fortunate position like myself so they are going through worse troubles getting paid, paying rent, etc.

I hope this is resolved ASAP as it’s yet another stain on fintech.

Overall, I still remain bullish on fintech for the same reason I was 6 years ago when I joined Secfi. The incumbents in finance have yet to be disrupted and there is a lot of work to be done to enhance both business and consumer experiences. Our money system operates on decades old code and going deeper, we still have a long way to go in terms of fixing the plumbing in fintech.

Innovation will come and fintech will rise again.

Monday musings

I had written quite a bit about feeling the burn last week. Small and relatively easy tasks were just difficult to accomplish. I felt lethargic and my energy levels were just not there. Instead of fighting it, I decided to take Thursday and Friday off and I’m glad that I did. I feel much more like my normal self today.

Again, I need to do a much better job in making sure I don’t get to this point. Part of that is making sure that I don’t overdo it at work. Another part is making sure I take enough breaks throughout each quarter. Holding out for a vacation in a few months like I did previously was not the right answer.

I spent most of my Thursday and Friday visiting my high school friends up in Healdsburg. The combination of sun and friends was exactly what the doctor ordered. It’s always great hanging out with my high school friends who have an amazing perspective on life. They are far removed from the tech scene and the corporate rat race and hanging out with them always reminds me of what’s important in life.

It seems like GameStop is back as Roaring Kitty has resurfaced on social media. The stock is now sitting at close to an 80% gain. Memestocks are back it appears. I can’t believe I just wrote that and I look forward to watching this from afar. Grab your popcorn.

Everything will be fine

I’m headed up to Healdsburg this morning to hang out with my high school friends for the next couple of days. It’s going to be gorgeous and we plan on spending it all outdoors.

For the first time in maybe 8 years of work, I’ve decided to leave my laptop at home while I go on a trip. It’s incredibly weird to think about and even write about it, but I’ve had my work laptop with me nearly on pretty much every trip… just in case.

Inevitably, when I have some downtown or I’m bored, I’ll go through work emails and Slack just to “catch up”. It’s a bad habit and contributes to my burnout.

It’s going to be a weird feeling, but I got a good feeling that everything will be fine at work without me for a couple days.

Gold bars are the new crypto

My coworking space in SF is a ghost town today with the 75 degree weather. After being in coworking spaces for the past couple of years, I find it absolutely hilarious just how much good weather impacts whether people come in. The remote work aspect is great and of course I support people taking advantage when they’re not busy. But I do wonder how much less people actually work when it’s nice out here with the remote work aspect.

I read an article on CNBC that gold bars are selling like crazy in Korean convenience stores and vending machines. I have been told no less than 5 times in the past few weeks that Costco is selling gold bars and have been selling out.

I’ve been joking with friends that I’m converting my entire portfolio to gold. Some people took that literally and asked if they should be buying gold as well. Gold is starting to become the new crypto which is pretty funny as Bitcoin is meant to be the new digital gold.

For novelty purposes, I’ll go out and buy a few bars for fun once the bubble bursts a bit. I do think it’ll be cool to have a gold bar or two just to show off at dinner parties.

The quiet

I slept like shit last night waking up often and thinking about some work things that I knew were not that important and were going to be fine. Of course everything worked out perfectly fine today and I knew that it would be. But anxiety is anxiety and it seems to get me good in the worst possible times. I could really use those extra couple hours of sleep.

Things are oddly quiet right now. It’s May so I suppose it’s the start of vacation time and it does seem like a good number of people are out of the office.

I would’ve thought that there would be at least a few more S1s filed by now. We’ve had Rubrik, Reddit, and Ibotta go public this year and all have been deemed successful. If you told me a few weeks ago that would happen, I would’ve guessed at least a few more companies would at least file.

We have been hearing that a lot of people are pushing plans out to 2025 altogether. Perhaps with the uncertainty of the election year, the geopolitical events happening domestically and abroad, and inflation, it may be enough good reason to sit tight and wait until 2025. Perhaps investors are looking to “sell in May and go away” already.

Overwork

I had a great weekend up in Napa celebrating our close friends Sam and Leili getting married. We had a ton of fun in the sun on Friday doing a bit of wine tasting and relaxing. The wedding on Saturday was absolutely gorgeous and I had a great time.

Sophia made sure we got some naps in on both Friday and Saturday, and that was sorely needed. As someone who doesn’t nap often, falling asleep for 1.5+ hours on both days was a sign as any that I’ve been putting my body through a lot and I need more rest.

I was reading about the sad news about the Bank of America junior investment banker who passed away from exhaustion after working multiple 120+ hour weeks. While he was a junior banker, he was also a former Green Beret or special forces operator in the army. This is someone who has gone through grueling training in their lifetime, not someone who is fresh out of college.

I know investment banking is a grueling and brutal job that most know what they’re getting into, but losing your life over work is just not it. We all go through busy weeks of work, but working that many hours in a week back to back is just not sustainable. I’ve never worked in banking, but I have gone through weeks of 80+ hour weeks and your brain and body can only go through so much.

I can only imagine what that individual’s family is going through and I hope this brings some changes to the industry. No one should ever be put in a position that their lives are ruined because of work, yet alone losing their lives because of it.

For myself, I’m lucky to be working at a company where we acknowledge the realities and challenges of startup life, but also put a premium on work-life balance. It’s a reminder for myself to always look out for folks on the team who may be overworked and provide my support.

Giving up control

I’m off to Napa today for a wedding. Working hard to clear my inbox and get some things done in the next 45 minutes and taking a few calls this morning in the car.

I’d like to get my work to a point where I can actually take some days off without ever checking my inbox or doing things. I know it’s a bit of a pipe dream while at a startup, but I know it’s possible.

It’s something I’ll need to work towards. I have an awesome team and it’ll be on me to train them properly so they can step in for me on most matters when I’m out of office. It’s a great opportunity for the people on my team to step up and it’s great for me to be able to recharge properly. I need to work towards that.

Recruiting and hiring

I’m off tomorrow for my good friend’s wedding in Napa. I’m really excited to get away, even for just a few days. Hanging out with friends in the sun and celebrating is always a great way to unwind a bit.

Recruiting and hiring is top of mind for me right now at work. Since we met as a management team at an offsite a couple months ago, it was evident that we needed to make some key hires this spring and summer to strengthen our team.

We’re in the heat of that right now and as always, it’s taken up more time that we initially expected. That’s okay and it’s time well spent.

Recruiting great hires takes time. You don’t meet someone and convince them to join the company with just one quick conversation. It takes time to nurture individuals and get them excited about your mission.

On the interviews, we go through many candidates resumes and that takes hours every week for each position. Then we have to go speak to the candidates that we feel fit within what we’re looking for. As frustrating as it is when we speak to a candidate that doesn’t fit especially after spending hours, it’s the right decision to wait until we find the right fit.

We are constantly reminding ourselves that we need to raise the bar and not to settle. There are amazing candidates out there, but we want only the best fits for Secfi. The time and effort spent is worth it.

IPO interest

After an exhausting couple of days, I finally feel like I’m back in control and things are not spiraling anymore. It took a few extra hours of work on Tuesday and a good night sleep, but I’m starting to feel normal again. Regardless, I’m due for at least a few days off to just relax though and I’m going to look to do that next week.

On the IPO market, it seems to be that Reddit, Rubrik, and Ibotta stock are all holding up despite the market dropping. All 3 have successful IPOs and were able to debut with an IPO pop. That’s a good sign as investors show interest in IPO names once again.

We’ll have to see where the stock trades in the coming months as we get to the IPO lockup expiration. But for now, so far so good. All 3 shares are down below the initial opening price, but they have held up for the most part and I’d imagine employees will be generally happy to finally getting a piece of liquidity.

The shitty part about startups

I wish I could go out and tell everyone how awesome my work life is always. But unfortunately that’s just not always true. Anyone that’s worked a demanding job will tell you that there is no perfect job.

This is especially true at a startup where you are forced to take on many roles and wear different hats. Now I know that in general, that is a positive thing. You want to have an impact on the business and have important responsibilities. It’s why we join a startup to begin with but it’s always a double edged sword.

Put simply, you’re forced to take care of everything that falls under your umbrella. At bigger companies, you may have help from staff or other departments such as legal, HR, etc. However, at a small startup, you’re often a team of one and don’t have the luxury of having specified help.

Right now I’m dealing with separate regulatory, HR, legal, and accounting matters on top of dealing with my “day job” of closing deals. Not exactly my definition of fun.

To keep myself going, I keep telling myself that nothing easy is every worth doing. That makes me feel slightly better about the mountain of work I have in front of me.

Feeling the burn

The unfortunate but familiar feeling of burn out is starting to come back. I’ve been battling bouts of burnout for the last few years and for better or worse have gotten familiar with the signs.

For me, it’s an obvious sign when it’s difficult to get out of bed and get going on a work day. It’s beyond just feeling tired though. We are all tired, but I can usually power through tiredness especially if I’m excited about work. But when I’m starting to feel burnout, the excitement is muted or just not there.

Whenever I get the feeling, I try to reflect back and figure out the root cause. This time around, I believe it’s simply just not taking enough time to rest and recover. I’ve taken a day or two off for long weekends the last couple of months, but that is usually due to travel for a weekend event.

I took a few days off to go to Hawaii in February and that was nice, but it’s been over 2 months and perhaps it wasn’t enough. Last year I took a week staycation to just recover and recharge. I think a few days to a week off to recharge is exactly what I need right now and I’m going to try to find sometime in the next couple of weeks to do just that.

Prioritizing

Work has been incredibly busy the last few weeks. With the IPO market back, we’re seeing a lot of activity and renewed interest from employees looking to exercise their options or obtain liquidity. It’s great for business after a couple down years.

We get to see a lot of great companies which is awesome. Learning about different businesses and their drivers is one of my favorite aspects of the job. The downside to having a great pipeline is that we can’t fund everyone’s deal and we need to prioritize the ones that fit our structure the best.

One of the hardest parts is having to tell someone or a company that we couldn’t get there. All these years and it’s still a difficult part of the job for me. There’s some great companies out there that are definitely difficult decisions to say no to. But at the end of the day, it’s our job to make sure our capital is allocated in the best deals possible and that means picking the best of the best, not just great.