Uzbekistan recap Part 2

Uzbekistan was not on my large list of places that I wanted to visit. When my friend Sam said he was going to the Stan countries during his sabbatical and asked me to come as well, I was intrigued and interested in an adventure rather than wanting to see Central Asia. After a bit of research, it became evident that Uzbekistan and the other Central Asian countries are definitely underrated travel destinations.

Given my limited time frame, I was only able to join Sam for the week or so of his trip in Uzbekistan. It definitely lived up to my lofty expectations.

What was once perhaps the center of commerce during the peak of the Silk Road had gone through a few hundred tougher years starting in the 1500s once trade primarily shifted to ships. The country celebrated 35 years of independence after the USSR collapsed while we were there. And the last 10 years has especially been great with a President that has tackled corruption and moved the country forward for the positive.

What I saw was an up and coming country that was interested in technology and opening up to the world. The tourist sites were an incredibly mix of old and reconstructed architecture dating back to even the BC times when Alexander the Great roamed the lands. As a history nerd, I loved the old towns and trying to put myself in the shoes of a silk road trader. There is no shortage of history here, and my only issue is that it’s a bit of shame that so much as destroyed over the years due to war.

While not a major destination for food, I did really enjoy the Uzbeki cuisine which felt most similar to Turkish food but with it’s own flair. There was a lot of rice and meat skewers. I am especially a big fan of the lamb and dumplings. Admittedly, it did get very repetitive after a week of the same dishes, and I was happy to get back to New York and get some variety.

Perhaps one of my favorite underrated parts of visiting Uzbekistan was the people and culture. It’s an incredibly place because of the mix of so many cultures dating back over a thousand years. As the center of trade, people came to the area from Europe and Asia. And the Uzbekis definitely resemble that mix of people. One person could look very European, and the next could look Korean, but they are both Uzbeki. It was definitely really interesting and different from most other places that I’ve visited.

What I saw was a very happy group of people. It is technically considered a developing country, but it felt very modern and the economy is growing rapidly. It was obvious to me that it is a country on the rise with the right leadership in place. It was safe and welcoming. I can only imagine that tourism is going to continuing to grow and it would not surprise me one bit to see Central Asia start becoming a major tourist destination for westerners.

Uzbekistan recap Part 1

I got back to New York yesterday after a little over a week in Uzbekistan with my friend, Sam. It was my first real vacation without Colin since before he was born so it’s been likely over 2 years since I was able to get away. It was a much needed trip and really what I needed.

I feel fortunate that I even had the opportunity to get away and I’m very grateful that Sophia sensed the need for me to go on a trip abroad to really unwind. I was able to mostly keep the work away and confined to a few email check-ins a day. And I am proud to say that I only had to pull out the laptop once during the trip.

Almost all days were spent half sightseeing and half relaxing which ended up being the perfect balance for us. As Uzbekistan is a “Muslim-lite” country as I heard one Uzbeki call it, there was not a lot of temptations to stay out late to party which was actually pretty welcome. We got to bed mostly around 10pm every night and it was a very restful trip. Usually these trips mean less sleep than usual, and being in our mid 30s… we were both definitely cognizant of getting rest and not overdoing the drinks.

I did miss my family a lot despite only being a week. It was the longest I was away from Colin and it was definitely a challenge. Even with just being gone 9 days, I felt that he was almost a new person when I got back with a ton of new words and skills.

I always feel like the mark of a good vacation is when you’re excited to get there, and then you’re ready to go home afterwards. I definitely felt that towards the end of the trip. I’m excited to get back to work tomorrow and I feel like I’m hitting the ground running with some new energy.

My relaxed August combined with a great trip to wrap it all up was an incredibly way to close out a summer to remember. I’m a bit sad as it was a really freakin’ fun summer for Sophia, Colin, and myself, but I hope to continue the good vibes into fall.

Uzbekistan

I leave for my trip in about 24 hours and I have yet to pack anything. It feels good to be much more relaxed and stress-free prior to travel as compared to the stressful 2 days packing Colin and all his things. I’m going with just a big travel backpack for the first time since I went to SE Asia just about 10 years ago.

After a busy week of work, I’m finally starting to get excited to get on the plane tomorrow. It’s my first true vacation in over 2 years and taking a break from the day to day work-parenting grind is going to be incredible.

I don’t know what to expect out of Uzbekistan. I’ve heard it’s a gorgeous country with a ton of history, and incredibly people. My friend was going there already and I simply just decided to tag on, but as I did more research, I realized that I’m visiting a true hidden gem travel destination that is just starting to become a major tourist destination. For me, I was hoping for some adventure, and Uzbekistan for a week sounds like the perfect place.

First real vacation

I leave Thursday for Uzbekistan which will be my first vacation by myself since Colin was born. A close friend of mine was headed to the Stan countries on sabbatical, and Sophia had told me to go meet him there and take some time. It won’t be an easy week for her solo parenting, but I am incredibly grateful that I can take a week to myself.

As someone who loves traveling and seeing the world, one of the biggest downsides of becoming a parent is the the travel, or lack thereof. Family trips are great in some ways, but they are definitely far from a real vacation as you’re just parenting away from home.

I’m incredibly excited to go to a new country and area that I’ve never been. These experiences are really the only time I’m truly able to disconnect from work, and it’s going to be a lot of fun getting away for a bit.

At the same time, I’m definitely getting a little bit anxious about leaving Colin for a week. He’s growing so fast and learning so much, I feel like I don’t want to miss out on anything. At the same time, I know it’s healthy for parents to get away and take a break.

My goal during my trip will be to really maximize my time away. I want to go have fun, decompress, and see the world. I won’t have many opportunities like this going forward, so it’s my best interest to make the best of it.

Grateful Monday

I started walking to the subway this morning and I started to notice a sharp pain in my life big toe joint. I was on my feet a lot the past week with golf and my workouts, and then had a fairly active weekend of walking and pushing the stroller. I suppose it’s very likely just being on my feet a lot and “overuse”, but in reality, I guess this is just 36.

Despite my “injury”, I had a really nice weekend being a Dad. I had noticed Colin was picking things up very quickly between new words and numbers recently. On Saturday, he surprised me and just started counting. I asked him to point to which number was which, he was able to identify most numbers 1-10. It was a very proud Dad moment and it was fascinating watching him just know this stuff seemingly out of nowhere.

I had thought it was just normal development for a 22 month old, but in conversation with Claude, it seemed like this was a fairly advance development. I’m not sure what this means for his development, but it’s not a bad thing at all. At the same time, I’m not going to be that parent that crowns him as a baby genius either. It was just simply a proud parent moment and I’m loving being a Dad and teaching him things.

I’ve been feeling very grateful after this weekend. I have an amazing son that is surprising me every day and brings so much joy to my life. Being a Father has been the best thing that’s happened to me and I don’t know what I did to deserve such a fun and loving son, but I’m forever grateful for it and the life I have right now.

Am I a boomer?

I played another 9 holes this morning with an old friend of mine. My swing was atrocious and I seem to have overcorrected my hook and now I’m slicing everything. It was frustrating but I was having a great time catching up with my old buddy Alex on a gorgeous morning to really care too much.

I’m 36 now and most of my friends have kids, and time with friends is incredibly limited. I moved back to New York over a year ago, and I had yet to see Alex which I didn’t feel great about, but with kids and life things are just too busy to hang out with friends every weekend.

On the topic of age, it feels like the new status symbol amongst the youth is having AI agents. I heard on the golf course today that “my tee times are all booked by my agent”. Almost every day, I come across a tweet of someone bragging about their 10-50 agents basically running their lives.

Admittedly, I feel like a bit of a boomer as I have 0 “agents” running my day to day life. Most of my work life right now is relationships and talking to people, and mostly decision making. I use AI as an assistant for most tasks to review, research, or prepare things for me, but I am far from that person that is sitting in a coffee shop while 30 agents do their jobs.

Despite not being to automate perhaps my actual work life, I still would like the thrill of having a so-called agent. It’s probably time that I set-up things the right way and at least give it a shot, even for miniscule tasks like booking a tee time.

AI as my reviewer not associate

I’m doing a fairly brutal (boring) administrative tasks that involves aggregating data from multiple sources and verifying the numbers on a spreadsheet. It’s something that needs to be done as our back-end team is cleaning up our data.

On the surface, this is a great task for AI which is great at searching data sources and pulling that information together. And indeed, it does a very good job of doing that.

The downside? Well it takes forever and won’t always be fully accurate so I have to still check my work. Not to mention of course the token usage.

I started using Claude at the beginning, but I found that I could do it much faster manually and just decided to grind things out for 30-45 minutes while listening to a good podcast. There’s of course probably a better way to do things with AI that’s more accurate and efficient, but at the same time, for a task where accuracy matters a lot, AI is a much better reviewer than preparer.

August golf

I played 9 holes in the morning before work today for the first time in a long-time. First, my golf game is finally getting decent again and I’m much more comfortable over the ball again. That obviously makes things a lot more fun.

Equally as important, it was really nice to get out and do something different in my day to day routine. I’m a creature of habit, and sometimes I fall in the trap of just doing the same thing every day. Wake-up, take Colin to daycare, workout, work, cook dinner, watch TV, and sleep. Even as new parents, we need some excitement in our lives and an occasional round of golf on a Wednesday was great.

On the work front, I was reading that OpenAI only grew 18% last quarter compared to Anthropic more than doubling their revenue. While OpenAI focused on getting to the consumers and chasing everything such as video production, Anthropic just stayed focuses on getting to all businesses. They’re paying for that strategic decision today as Altman continues to reshuffle leadership amidst an exodus of top talent.

It’ll be interesting to see where things go from here. Does Anthropic continue their dominance in the world or do things level out as the cost of AI continues to rise? It feels like it’s all rainbows ahead for Anthropic, but unfortunately that’s not how the business world works and the road likely is a bit bumpier than most optimistic people think.

Sticking to the plan

When we made the decision to move to New York last year, I put together a high level financial plan for us. The idea was that we would go to New York, enjoy our time, but at the same time look to aggressively save. The idea was that in 3-5 years time, we would likely move back to San Francisco and look to buy a house. The plan was to start looking perhaps next year casually and hopefully find a place to settle the family into long-term.

So far that plan has been great for us as my wife and I have been consistently putting cash into the market while still largely having fun being new parents.

The big curveball that was thrown into my said financial plan was that I was not expecting San Francisco’s housing cost to rise over 50% in this short time. Thank the AI boom for houses going for 50-100% over market price right now. This obviously makes buying a house at the moment nearly unattainable.

Knowing how markets and booms work, I’m mostly keeping a level head about this as things likely will settle and come back down to earth. At the same time, I’d be lying if this didn’t give me a bit of angst as it’s currently just somewhere between unattainable and non-smart financially for us to buy right now in SF where I grew up.

Stresses aside, I’ve been telling myself to just stick to the plan. Putting money to work in the market is never a bad thing, and owning a house isn’t the end all be all. We’re all on different timelines financially, and my plan is different than others. Furthermore, situations like these do create opportunities and it’s good to be patient.

Safety and abuse

I had a great low-key weekend with lots of sleep and recovery. It was admittedly a bit “boring” where most of my weekend was mostly just being a Dad or running errands. For better or worse, at this point of my life, you either choose boring and relaxing so you can feel rejuvenated and great after the weekend or choose a more fun weekend where recovery suffers.

On another note, I was reading about the increased public scrutiny against Flock cameras. There’s a lot of concern about privacy and police misuse of the cameras. Most of which I completely understand. There’s a reported number of abuse of the technology where police officers are using it to track down people for personal use. That is indeed alarming.

On the flip side, I also know how powerful the technology can be to deterring crime. In San Francisco where I grew up, crime is now down especially in car smash and grabs. For some years during the after the pandemic, San Francisco was the hot bed for smash and grab theft. It was brutal walking the streets seeing multiple car windows smashed. It still happens, but I read that it’s been down almost 10 fold since Flock cameras came on.

Overall, I believe the bigger issue at hand is the mistrust of police and government in general. Yes, it’s hard for me to still be a staunch supporter if our police is going to abuse the technology to track ex-partners down. There is a much larger systematic problem here and that is that there are a lot of bad cops and abuse in the system. I do believe that we need to address the root cause of the problem here, not blame the technology.

Recharging

I’m loving being back in New York in this slower time period of the year. With the travel hell last week, getting back to a routine, good sleep, and hard workouts has done wonders for me. This week and the next couple is all about aiming to catch-up and get ahead of work, while balancing just enjoying life a bit more.

Most of our team is on vacation in August. And our partners/clients also seem to be taking time off. My inbox may be at an all-time low this week for the year. These times don’t happen so it’s good that I take advantage and recharge my batteries now.

It’s a much needed break after what felt like 7 months of just craze. I expect some more work from home days and perhaps some early rounds of golf. I hope to get my golf game back to a decent spot as I was shaky during yesterday’s 9 hole outing. I also hope to enjoy New York a lot more with Sophia. We haven’t had too many chances to go out like we used to when we last lived in New York so now is as good as time as ever to go enjoy the city.

The start of the return to normalcy?

One of the trends the last few weeks that I’ve been monitoring is the demand in the private markets for the top tier names. The poster child of this in the last 6 months was of course Anthropic.

By no means am I saying that this is the top or the market will drop, but there seems to be indicators that the interest level has been declining so far in Q3.

For one, the bids in the private market platforms have sharply declined over the last twelve months. It used to be a wall of bids of individuals looking to get into Anthropic, but that has seemed to reverse so far with a lot more offers of stakes in SPVs. Of course a part of that may be Anthropic clamping down on SPVs, but I for one do not believe that the public scrutiny would stop buyers.

Also, very anecdotal evidence, but the inbound outreach that I received on LinkedIn and email for access to Anthropic seems to have sharply dropped. It used to be that every other day I had cold outreach for individuals looking to buy Anthropic and asking me to source it. For what it’s worth, I haven’t had one inbound in the last month.

This all could just be a product of the the summer months of August where investors are known to take a lot of vacation. At the same time, it’s also hard to ignore that there could be something more to it. I still believe in Anthropic, but perhaps this is the start of the valuations coming slightly back down to earth as competition heats up and perhaps having the best model does not declare you the winner in the space anymore.

Recapping Black Hat

I’m feeling like myself again and can finally put that week of travel hell behind me. As a new parent, my normal baseline is to usually be tired but the combination of work, social events, multiple city travel, and especially the delays really put me in a bad spot the last couple of days. Sleep deprivation is a real thing and needless to say I’m glad to have positivity back in my brain.

It’s the middle of August and it feels like everyone is on vacation but a handful of us. I am jealous in many ways, but I’m also happy to be here to catch-up on things and just enjoy being a Dad for a few weeks.

On the work front, it was my first time at the Black Hat conference last week. As a non-technical person at a cybersecurity conference, I did find it interesting to learn where the industry is headed. To no one’s surprise, the big topic was AI and agents. It seemed like every company was out there touting their new products for agents and marketing budgets were all focused there.

Like most of these industry conferences, I did feel like the most productive use of my time was scheduling meetings with my network ahead of time. Secondly, it was going to the small presentations and meeting executives at companies we’re following. The business hall was interesting to learn, but I’m not a CSO looking to buy a solution so it was always a bit awkward asking for a demo from a BDR there.

The focus of these conferences is to sell product and meeting investors is almost always secondary. All that said, it’s a great meeting place for the network so it’s always a bit of a toss-up whether the conference is worth going to or not. Going forward, we’ll definitely need to figure out a more defined plan on what we want to accomplish and schedule more meetings ahead of time.

No good deed goes unpunished

My flight back to New York on Saturday capped out a very difficult travel week. My flight back to San Francisco from Vegas after the conference got delayed and I didn’t get back to bed until late on Thursday. I spent most of the day with family, and then saw some friends on Friday night.

Unfortunately, the travel exhaustion caught up with me on Saturday which ended up being a rough day as I was traveling back to New York. After almost 4 hour delay, I didn’t get home until around 1:30am. It took me longer to fall asleep and I probably slept perhaps 4 hours before having to get up and be a parent. I was absolutely a shell of a human yesterday and I’m still feeling a bit of the effects as I write this Monday morning.

Perhaps the most frustrating part about the whole ordeal was that I really did aim to prioritize rest and recovery on this trip. I am not someone who can sleep everywhere and my philosophy in the past was always to power through. I did not want to feel awful coming home after a long week, so I did my best to get to bed early, exercise, and keep the drinks low.

Of course, no good deed goes unpunished as flight delays threw a wrench in all my plans. These situations are incredibly frustrating and stressful. There’s the physical toll on my body which I can overcome, but the mental aspect has always been much harder for me. I feel like a shell of myself and happiness is much harder to come by when I’m running on fumes and sleep deprived.

These temporary physiological dips are not fun, and my brain needs time to catch-up. Despite good sleep last night, it’ll likely take another night of good rest to start to feel normal again. Until then, I’ve been doing my best to stay positive and realize that this will all pass soon enough.

SpaceX lock-up expiration

It was a good and fruitful Black Hat conference and overall I had a good time in Vegas these past couple of days. These conferences are always exhausting and yesterday was no exception. Even after getting pretty good rest Tuesday night, I was running on fumes most of Wednesday and relying on caffeine to get me through. The earlier week travel and craze definitely contributed.

I suppose I’m officially old now as I was in bed before 9pm last night. We had a nice dinner and I had a thought of perhaps gambling a bit more after, but ultimately I decided to prioritize recovery. I’m thanking myself today as I look to close out the conference and head back to San Francisco.

The big news of the day is the SpaceX lock-up expiration. We have never seen anything to this scale before. The available shares to trade has more than doubled today as the first lock-up expired. The stock has taken a dip in the last weeks with the expectation of the expiration. But it does appear to be holding fairly steady today as investors had planned around this for awhile.

This is going to be a story for the coming months as more lock-ups expire with a very staggered approach. Given the scale and size of the SpaceX IPO, we’re going to have billions of shares of SpaceX unlock and it’s going to be interesting to watch what happens with the price.

Vegas Again

I’m in Vegas for the Black Hat conference. Vegas is always a bit of a trip for me every time I come here. On one hand, I have to appreciate everything built here. It’s vast and gigantic adult playground with genuinely impressive buildings. I walk around and go, damn this is crazy. And I always have fun here. The food is good. I like to gamble a bit. And there’s no shortage of things to do.

On the other hand, it is a melting pot of craze in lots of bad ways. It’s not my vibe generally at this point of my life and that’s okay. I’m here for work and will sprinkle some fun in there, so that’s where I’ll be focusing this time around.

Like any major Vegas conference, it’s going to be hectic and extra in both great ways and bad. I’m always interested to see how some companies are burning VC money in the exhibition hall with the structures they are building. The ROI of these conferences have to be positive, right? I’d be curious to see a detailed analysis for a large subset of companies and how much new business actually get drummed up.

The return of SF

I had a brutal travel day yesterday getting to San Francisco. I was worried I would be delayed given the storms, but we departed on time and thought we were in the clear. Right before take-off, we got grounded and spent the next hour and half on the tarmac. Luckily, we were cleared for take-off again but then ran into an engine issue and had to switch planes.

I eventually got to San Francisco about 6 hours late and unfortunately condensed my busy travel schedule this week. I had to cancel some meetings yesterday and basically just got to my Dad’s house, ate dinner, and went to sleep. Thus is life and at the end of the day, it could have been a whole lot worse.

It’s only about 15 months since I left San Francisco. After walking around downtown today for a few minutes, I could instantly tell that things are starting to come back. There are a ton of new restaurants open in the area. The area was a lot more crowded than I saw when I left a little over a year ago. Even my old coworking space is much more crowded to the point where there was only one conference room open to take my call.

It’s obviously a much different vibe than New York here, but it doesn’t take long to realize that the city is back and moving in the right direction. Of course the AI boom is a big part of it and it was interesting to see all these new companies that moved into my coworking space in the last year.

Lack of IPOs

Colin has been in full toddler mode this week. We were warned of this phase but now that it’s hitting, it’s been interesting to say the least. One morning he can wake up and be the sweetest funniest boy. The next morning he wakes up and will be cranky nearly all morning. His preferences for things and demands for his choices now is something that we’re also dealing with head on. It’s a bit exhausting, but I suppose every stage has it’s pros and cons.

On the work front, I’ve been wondering what will need to change for companies to actually willingly go public.

With billions of dollars looking to get access to the private markets and the regulatory strain of being a public company, many founders and executives are just very content staying private. And I can’t blame them.

The stress of quarterly reporting and the public scrutiny behind being a public company is very real. The President has proposed moving to bi-annual reporting which could help the case going forward and easing the requirements to go public.

But perhaps equally as important is the fact that there is just a ton of money in the private markets now. VC and PE firms are able to provide liquidity at the company and personal level for companies that could be public. Yes, the cost is higher than if they were a public company but there is a big tradeoff and right now, for most companies, the pros of staying private are outweighing the cons.

It’s a trend that has been happening the last 20 years and I don’t see it stopping anytime soon unless there’s some changes on the macro environment and/or regulatory.

Getting back into golf

Last week, I joined Gowanus Golf Club which is a simulator “club” based in Brooklyn. I had wanted to get back to golf as my primary hobby again. I had mostly hung up the clubs once Colin was born and had only gotten out to a course a handful of times since.

As a busy Dad trying to balance being the best Dad possible with work demands, it was easy to put aside my hobbies in favor of more time for work and Colin. With these last 6 months, I did feel that I had a void in my life… something outside of work that I was personally invested in. In an interesting way, that void led to work becoming more of my hobby. I would fill the short empty times on weekends catching up on email or reading about work related things.

For that reason, I decided to try to get back into golf. I used to obsess about my swing and scores in a constant battle with myself to try to get better. It was time consuming and that’s probably why I put things aside, but in actuality, it was a very healthy hobby and fueled the competitive fire in me.

I obviously won’t have nearly as much time to think about swing like I did last time. I’ll be lucky to get out to the course once a month. But there’s a healthy balance that’s possible here and it’ll make me happier.

First thing for me is using my swing coach (Claude) to make a plan to get better. After a long time off, it’s going to be great to get back to the fundamentals. I never had a long term switch coach before but with AI where it’s at, I’m excited to leverage it to improve my game.

Training

Things are quieter right now, but I feel like my list of minor small things to tackle just keeps growing. Review this copy, review this content, update this deck, etc. The work is usually a bit more tiring than my usual of just closing deals. The context switching every 10-30 minutes wears me out a bit.

On top of that, it always feels like my checklist gets bigger by the day and it’s always like whack-a-mole. There’s really only a couple ways to fix this in the future.

First, look to leverage AI to automate some of these tasks. Unfortunately, it can only go so far as a lot of these items are judgement calls where obviously a human like myself needs to make. Nevertheless, there are definitely some tasks that are worth exploring AI to take over.

Second and most important will be training new staff to take over and delegate tasks to. We’ve got a lot of new young talent that is joining the team and I’m incredibly excited to get them onboard. It’s going to be a lot more work up front, but what we need right now is an infusion of hungry talent to come in and help take us to the next level. That’ll be one of my biggest priorities to close out the year.