Exciting days ahead for Secfi

It’s Friday afternoon and I’m exhausted after a good two weeks of work and life. I got back from vacation and hit the ground running hard to get back into shape after a hectic summer, and picked up quickly on the work front. I’m planning a lowkey weekend with a lot of recovery and rest built in.

There’s a lot of exciting and fun things happening on the work front in the next few months. The problem with fun and exciting projects? They take a lot of time, effort, and energy and I expect a lot more hours and later nights in the office which is not easy with a young kid at home.

With that said, there’s a balance to be had and I feel grateful everyday that I get to help build an amazing company with great people while working on incredibly interesting projects. I talk to people all the time who don’t have that luxury. They are stuck working 60+ hour weeks slaving away in a rat race.

I used to be in that same rat race, and I have never missed it since I left. In my eyes, life is way too short to be working for a large firm where you are just one small cog in a machine. If I’m putting in those hours, I’d better be doing it working on something I enjoy and care about.

Updating my financial plan

I don’t know if I’ve ever wanted to freeze time as much as I do right now with Colin at just over 22 months. It’s hard to put into words the amount of joy that he brings to me every day right now. He’s just at such a fun age and everything he does is absolutely hilarious. The plus side to him growing is that things have only gotten better with him and being a Dad, so despite loving this stage, that next stage in life will hopefully continue the upward trajectory.

On the topic of life stages, Sophia came in the office and we met with our Secfi financial advisor today. I work here but I was also our first customer on the Wealth side who manages my money and financial plan.

I’d imagine that I’m probably in the top 1% of financial literacy given my line of work and background, but I still have a financial advisor and it’s money well spent. In the basic sense, I have someone else looking after my retirement so I pay for the time I would spend having to do that. But for me, it’s much more than that. I have someone that’s looking over my well being and keeping me accountable, and also stopping me from doing stupid things.

Today, we spent a lot of time just going over our current savings plan and ensuring that it’s setting us up for success. The peace of mind that we’re doing things right is great. On top of that, we spoke a lot about setting up the right accounts and planning for Colin’s future.

The one thing that I did wrong — waiting 2 years to schedule a check-in with my advisor. Luckily we’re in a position of better late than never, but there’s a reason why biannual check-ins are valuable and we plan to do more of these sessions together going forward.

When culture starts bleeding into performance

The college football season is two weeks in and my Washington Huskies are in a very strange spot right now. We’re 2-0 which is where we should be after playing two teams in lower divisions, but it’s maybe the most unsatisfying 2-0 in the country. We’ve looked anywhere from uninspiring to downright awful in our two games at home. We probably should have lost to Utah State last week.

This is just a weird team all around. I’ve seen teams that just have no talent and are clearly outmatched. I’ve seen teams that are just poorly coached with talent and they always seem like they are running around with no purpose. But this team feels like neither of those.

In fact, we look great for the most part and then somehow find a way to implode or shoot ourselves in the foot. Whether it’s just lineman tripping over their own feet, dropped balls, missed easy throws, or just simply boneheaded penalties, we seem to have all the above in the first two games.

I don’t have a great way to explain why this is the case. But I am worried that the worst case scenario may be that we have a culture problem that starts from the top and has bled into the locker room.

First, we have a head coach that was tinkering with a lot of job openings elsewhere in the country. Call it negotiation to get more money or resources or whether he was truly looking to get out, that set-up a weird situation for the players who he is asking to commit to us.

Secondly, we had a situation where our QB tried to transfer out during the offseason only to come back due to contractual reasons. Call that one immaturity or getting bad advice, it’s hard to see how that does not impact a locker room and feelings when your most important player actually tried to leave.

Lastly, I wonder what the impact of the new NIL is on a team like this. Money is the biggest motivator right now for most players, and we have done a good job as a program putting together a system that resembles the NFL. Do we just have a bunch of mercenaries at this point?

This is probably the worst case scenario so I hope I’m wrong. But I wonder if we have a bad cultural problem within the locker room where everyone seems to be playing for themselves, their contracts and NFL potential. If that happens, then the school’s wins and success suddenly don’t matter as much. I really hope that’s not the case and we can right the ship here and salvage the season.

AI Anxiety

I have a group chat with my closest guy friends from college. As you can expect, it’s a chat where we basically just make fun of each other, talk crap about sports, and just riff on the happenings of the world.

Despite multiple kids being born and life events, it’s pretty rare that anything serious ever gets discussed in that group chat. Yesterday was the first time in a long time that we actually got serious for a second as we discussed what would happen with AI and if there’s a real chance it would destroy humanity.

We were all in an interesting state as we discussed the anxiety that AI has caused everyone. Most of us work at tech with one friend at a frontier lab. None of us truly believe that AI is going to destroy humanity, but we all mentioned that we were struggling with a bit of anxiety given how much AI is talked about in our day to day.

My work life naturally has to be focused on AI. But everything I’m being fed on social media is also AI. Whether it’s simply just political news, or another viral topic, or simply just someone trying to sell me their newsletter on “How to get ahead in AI”, it is really overwhelming.

At the end of the day, I believe AI is a tool and that it likely will be a net positive for society. It’s been a net positive for me as I now have a fitness and health coach, mini-pediatrician, etc. in my pocket. But at some point when it’s the only thing talked about in life right now, I’m pretty sick of it and admittedly it has all gotten to my head.

I was surprised that my group of friends also felt similarly and it wasn’t just me given my line of work. It seems to be a common thing and anxiety is high everywhere. For me personally, I probably could use a good solid break from the news a bit. I’ll leave the dooming to others who choose to be miserable.

Learning from Colin

I had Colin solo from Thursday until Sunday. I used to be “scared” of these weekends as solo parenting meant double the work and really no time to myself. There were times in the past where I would basically struggle into Sunday when Sophia got back and need a day or two to recover.

Nowadays, I look forward to these weekends. Part of that is that Colin is a bit older, and part of it is that I’m now a veteran parent who doesn’t stress as much anymore and knows the flow. These weekends are now a lot of fun and I look forward to them.

I know ahead of time that my focus is going to be solely on Colin so my schedule is cleared and I can be 100% present with him. That clarity in my head does wonders for me as I can just simply focus on the most important thing which is being the best Dad possible. Work, friends, etc. suddenly don’t matter as much in that moment. I go to bed early knowing that I have a full day of parenting the next day so I feel refreshed and ready to go.

These weekends are a magical time for me especially at this age. It’s been amazing learning from Colin. There’s so many simple learnings. Yesterday, I took Colin to grab a slice of pizza for lunch and he asked to walk home. It took much longer than pushing him in a stroller, but he took so much pleasure in just walking and seeing things.

He stopped to look at the beautiful flowers. He looked at the building made out of bricks and equated them to his legos and said “wow cool”. He even found pleasure in looking down at the Gowanus Canal… as ugly as that water looks. For me, I had nowhere to be or anything to do and I remembered that life is about the journey not the destination.

There was no need to rush home and going the slow way to just enjoy the simple things with Colin turned out to be one of my favorite lessons that I’ve learned from him.

25 Years since 9/11

Today marks the 25th anniversary of 9/11. I remember waking up in the morning and my cousin calling my Dad to turn on the TV. We turned on a tiny (literally 10 inch) TV in my Dad’s room and saw the news that the planes had hit. I was 11 at the time and my Dad took me to school, but we were all sent home shortly thereafter.

It was crazy days that followed and I still remember one of my cousins telling me “this is the end of the world, you know that right?” Of course it wasn’t, but that day 25 years ago shaped a lot of modern American history. I read a stat that 1/3rd of Americans were born after 9/11 which is a crazy thought to me.

Every 9/11 feels different to me nowadays because I live in New York again, and work in the FiDi by One World Trade. I run past the 9/11 Memorial every other day at least. It’s a surreal thought that all these innocent people could have gone through that incredibly tragedy back then. The stories I still hear from the people who were in New York during that time are still crazy to me.

After 25 years, I’m glad to say that we’ve never forgotten and we’re still continuing to honor the heroes who lost their lives on that day.

Side hustles with AI

I can’t help but think how fun it would be to launch a side business in this day and age. Personally I have enough work at Secfi that I wouldn’t consider it, but if my career took a different path and I stayed at a boring large firm or corporation, I would definitely be exploring launching a business on the side.

I did a bit of that in my early 20s as a way to learn and get away from the day to day grind. The fun parts are fun, but there are a lot of annoying parts about running a business. With AI now, almost all those mundane boring tasks could be almost fully automated allowing someone to really focus on building product and other high value tasks.

Most of my side businesses were never ambitious enough as I didn’t have time and ultimately we winded everything down as our jobs picked up. Nowadays, there may not be a better time to start a side hustle for those Americans that have an entrepreneurial itch.

Perspective after travel

One of the reasons that I love traveling the world is that I get to experience different cultures and see how the rest of the world lives. I love learning how the world works and the history behind different parts of the world.

A byproduct of all my fortunate travels is that it puts my life in perspective. Going to Uzbekistan and seeing how the Uzbekis lived made me remember exactly what matters the most in this life. That is family and community. It didn’t take long to see how family oriented the Uzbekis were as it felt like half my flight from New York was babies or children flying back to Uzbekistan to presumably see family.

Growing up in San Francisco and living in New York, I’ve been accustomed to having nearly everything that I want and need. I didn’t grow up rich by any means, but I was comfortable and got a great education and got to experience different cuisines and travel the world. I don’t want to say the Uzbekis were simple, but I think it’s fair to say that most of the country lives a much simpler life than most Americans.

The country cares less about their status on social media, their material goods, clout from work, etc. And the best part is that they all seem incredibly happy. We all could learn a lot from the Uzbekis.

During one of my tours, our young tour guide asked me if Uzbekistan was the first time I had traveled internationally. I don’t actually know how many countries I’ve been to, but I can confidently say it’s more than the vast majority of the world. This awesome young man had stated that it was his dream to travel and see the world.

When situations like this happen, it really puts things in perspective on just how freakin’ lucky I am to have the life that I have. I definitely do not take it for granted, but traveling is a great reminder from time to time.

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.