Back at it

I took a week off from writing due to travel and the year-end rush at work. As I mentioned previously, I want to get more consistent in my daily writing, but it’s proven much more difficult than I expected. Anytime I log onto my computer, I have this sudden urge to check my email and get work done. It’s a terrible habit and I hope to nip that in the bud starting in 2020.

Onwards…

I spent last Thursday through Monday visiting my college friend Matt and his wife Annika in Honolulu and the North Shore. A bunch of old college friends also came and it was a mini-college reunion.

We rented a house on the North Shore with private beach access and a large yard. We hadn’t gotten this entire crew together since we all left college in 2012. We’ve all grown up quite a bit, but deep down, we’re all the same people and it felt like nothing had changed between us.

It was great to unwind a bit and just relax on a gorgeous island. I love Hawaii. I love the culture, the food, and the people. The Hawaiians are the best at being relaxed and enjoying the present moment. We could all learn a thing or two from them.

I am looking forward to taking most of the next two weeks off from work to unwind and write in more detail. The next week will be a big week for me to reflect on 2019 and set personal goals for myself in 2020. I look forward to sharing that on this blog.

The ebb and flow of investing

I lost a lot of money today as Alteryx stock dropped 8.55% to $99. Thus is the life of investing the stock market.

By no means am I downplaying this loss, but this is the game we play and you must be able to sustain these blows to reap the benefits.

I have been invested in Alteryx since $16 and have been slowly building my position over the last few years. The company has healthy financials and growth, beating expectations nearly every quarter since the company has gone public.

There was no negative news today from the company. I’m not sure why the drop happened, but the likely explanation is that this is a pullback on SaaS stock and $AYX, which has been a stock market darling, took the brunt end of it.

The stock is highly volatile with a 52-week low of $48 and a high of $147. While the company is health and the product is amazing, it’s easy to point to the fact that the company may be overvalued while trading at a P/E of 571.

I have no plans to pull back on my current position. My long-term thesis on the company has stayed the same. I believe the room for self-service data and analytics tools will continue to grow to bridge the gap between the generations of non-coders and the generation where coding is ubiquitous and taught in all schools.

To reap the benefits of the future growth, you’ll need the cajones to hold on and power through days like today.

It doesn't get better, you get better.

Life works out funny sometimes. I had a very relaxing weekend where I made sure to catch up on sleep and recharge. I woke up Monday feeling great. Starting around 4pm, I could feel something was not right. The rest of my evening was spent on my couch with a fever and what I think is some sort of stomach bug. By 10pm, everything seemed to have past and I felt fine.

It was a hellish 5 hours where I was really struggling, but happy to report that I feel much better today. Onwards…

“Listen. I wish I could tell you it gets better. But, it doesn’t get better. You get better.” -Joan Rivers

This quote came up during my meditation on Monday and it really resonated with me.

We all go through difficult and stressful times where we bound up and just want to escape. There’s many times where I wish I could revert back to childhood where there was no stress and things were easy, but that’s not how life works.

The beauty behind life is that each of these experiences builds character and resiliency. We may not noticed it, but through each time we’re going to through hell, we get better and better.

Life does not get easier, but we get better at life.

Celebrating Wins

I’ve had a hell of a week getting caught up after Thanksgiving break. There were some long hours in the office this week and I’m exhausted.

Reflecting back on the week, I realized I was so busy that I didn’t notice how much progress and success the team had this week.

It’s sometimes easy to focus on the next thing, but it’s really important to celebrate your accomplishments and wins. You’ve got to enjoy the journey or it’s just not worth it.

As I write this, I’m enjoying a beer and looking forward to celebrating some more with the team.

Chris Petersen - What you do is who you are

I started reading Ben Horowitz’s new book, What You Do Is Who You Are this past week. I am only through maybe the first 8% of the book, but the it’s been fantastic so far.

I’ll report back once I’ve finished and give a full review, but the title of the book is pretty self explanatory. Your company’s culture is defined by what you do.

Chris Petersen was a successful football coach because of many reasons, but I would argue that the culture he cultivated on and off the field was the biggest contributor to success. He lived by this mantra and sought to create a culture where team always came first.

Coach Pete was always focused on team unity and building. From walk-on to 5 star recruit, everyone on the team was family and had a place. Knowing someone’s name was just as important as being able to make a block, and Petersen lived that by forcing the team to participate in name games.

He ensured that locker room was kept neat and tidy at all times, not by forcing janitors to clean, but by picking up trash himself.

An individual was never bigger than the team and he lived that when he kicked off star player and now NFL pro bowler, Marcus Peters, off the team his first year as head coach.

Watching the evolution of the culture that Petersen was setting was a thing of beauty as a husky fan. Since he took over in 2013, the team just kept on getting better every year. We made 3 New Year’s Six bowl games in a row from 2016 - 2018 including the College Football Playoff in 2016.

Your culture is created by what you do. Chris Petersen lived this day in and day out and created a team culture that won big on and off the field.

Chris Petersen and Burnout

I’ve been fighting to keep my head above water after the Thanksgiving break. I’m buried in to-dos, meetings, emails, and new employee trainings.

It’s been interesting to see how my writing and habits suffer during these stressful times. I missed a blog post yesterday and I just reread my last post from the day before. It was clear my mind was elsewhere and I was fighting to get words down.

It’s not rocket science that people typically do their best work when they’re in good mental states.

The news of Chris Petersen stepping down as head coach of the University of Washington football team may be a perfect example of this. The Huskies were coming off their worst year in the last 3 years and this season is arguably Petersen’s most disappointing one given the talent on the team.

Coach Pete cited that he needed a break from football. It was clear that the toll of being a football coach for the last 30+ years really hit him.

There’s many reasons why the Huskies underachieved this year, but it’s hard to imagine that a burnt out head coach wasn’t one of the reasons. The season took a toll on Petersen and he no longer had the energy.

I look forward to writing more about Chris Petersen, his program, and legacy as there’s so many parallels to draw in the business world. He was an amazing coach, individual, and leader. I couldn’t imagine a better person to lead my alma mater’s team for the past 6 years.

Week of Gratitude and Travel

Finally getting caught up with everything after trying to take most of last week off. I did a pretty good job at not working and truly taking time to unwind. Unfortunately, my daily blogging suffered as well but I can live with that.

To cap off last week, today I am grateful for the amazing Delta gate agent at Salt Lake City airport. We had an early morning flight from Baltimore for a quick one hour layover in Salt Lake before flying to San Francisco. When we landed, we found out that our flight was delayed 2+ hours (and likely more) due to bad weather in SF.

We were down in the dumps when we noticed there was a flight to Oakland leaving soon and decided to see if there was someway we could get on this flight. We asked this “gate angel” and he put Sophia and I on the flight with no hesitation. He even upgraded us to Comfort+ and worked to get my checked bag onto the right flight.

It’s safe to assume that this gate agent probably has had a few long days working one of the busiest airports in the busiest time of the year, but he was amazing the entire way. Yes, he was just doing his job, but it’s these little things that we remember. He literally made our day and gives me another reason for staying loyal to Delta.

Be nice, be helpful, be empathetic. These are simple things we hear all the time, but goes such a long way when put into action correctly. I hope to take this gate agent’s customer service basics into my everyday life.

Ask Why

“Not wanting something is as good as having it” -Naval Ravikant

Today I am grateful for having everything I need in life. It’s easy to get carried away with Black Friday and excessive consumerism around this time of the year, but it’s important to get grounded and be truly grateful for everything we have, which is more than enough.

Onwards…

Ever since I was young, I have always been a very curious. I probably pissed off my parents by always asking “why” to every answer.

Thankfully nowadays we have the internet for answers which wasn’t as accessible when I was a child.

It’s really important for us to always question why something is the way it is. Using the answer, “that’s just how it is” or “that’s what I was told” is a terrible way to think about things.

Those are the easy responses for when you do not want to think critically. When you respond that way, you are borrowing someone else’s thoughts, not forming your own.

The greatest innovators in the world question why something exists the way it does. So the next time someone tells you to do something, maybe you should question it and ask why it’s done that way. You might have the next billion dollar start-up idea.

Travel Security

Today I am grateful for having a roof over my head on this rainy day. Unfortunately, not everyone will have that luxury on this cold and rainy evening in San Francisco.

I am headed to Baltimore tomorrow morning to spend Thanksgiving with Sophia’s family. We have a really early morning flight at 6am so I’m optimistic that we’ll get out on time on one of the worst travel days of the year.

Not surprisingly, I have a little bit of travel anxiety thinking about the potential travel nightmare that’s in front of us.

I look forward to the day where security lines are streamlined.

I recently spoke to the founder of a start-up that’s working to create a blockchain identity platform which individuals can use to verify their identity.

While I think we’re still far out from implementing this in real transactions such as the airport, these kind of applications of blockchain technology is what excites me.

Imagine airports where a simple scan of the face will verify your identity and flight details within seconds and there are no more TSA agents checking your ID one by one.

Gratitude

In honor of Thanksgiving, I wanted to write one thing I’m grateful for everyday this week.

Today, I am grateful for the ability to travel and experience different cultures. I booked a flight to Seoul and Tokyo in March. I am unbelievable lucky to be in a position to travel and see the world and it’s something I never want to take for granted.

On to the topic of gratitude…

It’s a shame that many people don’t understand the power of gratitude. The mere thought of being grateful for what you have rather than focusing on what you don’t have is a hard thought to come by.

We’re all guilty of wanting more in life whether that’s material goods, money, another job, or relationships. This is why practicing gratitude is so important. It’s easy to go through life focusing on wanting when true happiness comes from what you already have.

If you’ve gotten to experience a day on earth today, you are already very lucky. Don’t forget that.

Talent and Coaching

My Washington Huskies fell to 6-5 on the year last night after losing to the Colorado Buffaloes in Boulder. On paper, this is a game that we had no business of losing but has unfortunately been the trend this year with brutal losses to Cal, Stanford, and Colorado.

We are undoubtedly much more talented than Colorado with a quarterback that will be drafted in the first round as well as NFL talent surrounding him. It’s hard to see more than a couple Colorado players ending up in the NFL in the next few years.

This year has been the worst year for a Christ Petersen led team by far. We’ve wasted a lot of talent that will play at the next level and the blame solely falls on the coaches. Yes, execution is a large part of it and maybe the players this year are missing the “it” factor, but a team this talented losing 5 games including 3 to much inferior opponents falls squarely on the coaching and recruiting misses.

Just like in football as in business, all the talent in the world without the teamwork and leadership does not often lead to success. Superior talent can masks large holes and deficiencies, but eventually will be exposed.

It’s a harsh lesson and reality that I want to always remind myself as I help build out Secfi. In many cases, training, culture, and leadership will outweigh pure talent and intelligence.

Just like last night when a team full of 4* and 5* recruits couldn’t beat a team full of 2* and 3* recruits, a team of the smartest people in the world with poor guidance cannot beat a high performing team with tremendous leadership.

Blanket Statements are Evil

Election season is starting to heat up and it’s going to be a long and weird year. Politics have come up quite a bit more in conversations with friends recently and everyone is seemingly on edge despite being on the same side of the aisle.

One blank statement and thought that I have come to hate is the billionaires are evil agenda. People who believe this are missing the point completely and have begun to wage war against the wrong enemy.

There are billionaires who are evil. There are also people in the middle and lower class who are also evil. The war should be against the crooks who lie, cheat, and steal and the system that allows crooks to thrive.

We cannot be a society that frowns upon innovation and entrepreneurship. Creating a large technology company which makes you a billionaire does not make you evil. Our lives are better with Microsoft and Amazon.

Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos are not perfect people, but they are far from evil. In reality, Bill Gates has dedicated the majority of his life and wealth to philanthropic efforts and Jeff Bezos just announced a $100m donation to help aid the homeless.

I cringe everytime I hear blanket statements like this whether in politics, business, or just everyday life. It’s the lazy answer that many use and adds no value to an educated conversation.

Instead of using blanket statements, people need to turn to research and education. That is the way to think critically, make informed statements, and take stances on issues.

Restoration Hardware!

I started following Restoration Hardware last year. I had never been to a store, but my girlfriend and friends would talk about the store like it was paradise.

Besides the fact the they sell furniture, going to a store is an experience. I like companies to sell experiences as products.

As retail has changed due to Amazon, companies like Restoration Hardware that sell experiences seem to be thriving.

I’m not sure if Amazon will ever have a monopoly in furniture as they do in other industries. Most people want to look at furniture before they buy it and shipping it isn’t easy.

It’s for these reasons that I was interested in Restoration Hardware but was having trouble pulling the trigger on buying some stock when I received an email blast from Rob at Koyfin.

Koyfin is a fantastic free tool for you to track your stock. The charts and tools they create for you to follow stocks and the markets is fantastic.

Big shout out to Rob at Koyfin here for publishing this article back in March 2019. It was the right push I needed to pull the trigger and I was able to get in at $106. The stock hit $190 today.

https://www.koyfin.com/research/2019/03/29/good-entry-level-for-restoration-hardware-rh-stock/

The internet is an amazing place. My favorite part about it is the ability for me to get access to people like Rob who are much smarter than I am. Thanks for the tip, Rob!

Blog in Review

I started this blog for a couple primary reasons: 1) as a sounding board for personal therapy and 2) to preserve my thoughts and learn to delivery content more effectively. I started the blog with the goal to write something everyday even if it was minor and personal.

So far I’ve been so-so with my goals. I miss quite a few days at times so my regularity is something I want to improve on. I’ve also loved writing and using this as a personal journal.

With that said, one area I really want to focus in on in 2020 is delivering better content. Anecdotally, I think I’m at 80% personal writings and I want to get that to 50/50 so I can start my accomplish some of my other goals with this blog.

Onwards…

Yesterday was my Dad’s 63rd birthday. My Mom passed away when I was 7 so my Dad largely raised me as a single father who also ran a small business.

We had a lot of rough spots growing up and we didn’t see eye to eye on very many things. You can blame it on a lot of cultural differences (he grew up in Indonesia) and on me for being a difficult kid.

One thing I’m very proud about in my adult life is reconnecting with my Dad and acknowledging my faults as a child/teen while also forgiving him for any short comings he may have had as a father.

Life is short and you only have one true father and I’m glad that our relationship is in a really great spot at this point in my life.

We had a great dinner where we dined on hot pot and wagyu beef. I paid for dinner to the pleasure of my Dad.

Hard Conversations

I admittedly used to be pretty awful at having the hard conversations. I had an old boss that would always say that I was too nice and needed to be more of an asshole at times.

There may be some truth to that statement, but it’s not something I can or will ever be good at — I just can’t be an “asshole”. It’s not who I am, now or likely ever.

One thing I’ve learned in my life is that we should always play to our strengths and mitigate my weaknesses.

If being stern is one of my weaknesses, then I’m going to mitigate it with my strengths of being trustworthy and honest at all times.

This came into play later earlier today when I had to have a hard conversation with someone. I knew it was going to be a tough conversation due to a few layers of issues.

It was beating me up for a couple hours as I thought about different solutions and ways to attack the conversation. At the end of the day, the solution was simple: do the right thing and explain the situation in brutal honesty.

The conversation couldn’t have gone better and everyone walked away in agreement and a plan of action going forward. I’m not sure how it would have gone if approached any other way, but I do know who I am and what works for me.

Salaries

I saw a tweet from the CEO of Lamba School talking about salaries of some of their graduates and thought it was interesting and relevant to my post yesterday.

Austen Allred

So a lot of Lambda School grads get hired making more than I (or most all Lambda School staff make), and every once in a while I get a little bit jealous of them. But now we have students getting hired at space companies (Blue Origin) and all of us are jealous.

The harsh reality of working a small but growing start-up is that you will undoubtedly take a paycut from what you can earn from a larger company.

Of course, this is a choice that we all make to pursue our dreams of building a company, get invaluable experience, and get equity in a company.

I am not complaining about the situation I am in, but it is a reality that we all face. The opportunity cost when looking at pure salary numbers can be significant.

Salary, Money, and Happiness

A friend of mine has been interviewing and weighing job offers from a few companies over the last few weeks after taking a sabbatical.

I’ve been helping him out a bit on some advice in regards to negotiating, weighing his offers, etc. He’s a highly paid engineer in San Francisco so he had no real “bad” options.

After a couple months into the process, he narrowed his offers down to two companies and offers:

Company A: Large public and reputable company that offered the most in total compensation which would be a nice pay bump from his last job.

Company B: Large public and reputable company that offered less than A, but still more than his previous job. He preferred the team, work life balance, and product here more than A.

He started doing a lot of research on Company A and found that it appeared that the company was on a downward trajectory with a lot of bad reviews and press recently. I could tell he was torn between taking the money or taking the job with the company he wanted most.

I advised him that his best bet is to determine what he valued more: 1) the money now or 2) the prospects of him growing more at the other company. I had thought he was going to choose Company B quite easily.

The next day he told me he chose Company A as the things he was indexing on, i.e. company not doing as well may be superficial and it was still a great company. I was a bit shocked, but supported his decision.

I too had been in a position at my last job. Do I stay and take the money, or do I leave to join a small start-up with much less pay but perhaps more direction into what I wanted to do? I chose the latter after months of painstaking deliberation.

At the end of the day, I don’t think I would’ve lived with myself if I passed up the opportunity I took. Sometimes you may need to take a step back to move forward, and it ended up being one of the best decisions of my life.

It wasn’t easy though. It’s much easier to talk about passing up the money than actually doing it. Taking a large paycut and thinking about the opportunity cost after X years was painful. At the end of the day, my gut took over and made up it’s mind.

I spoke to my buddy today and he told me that he was reneging on taking the offer with Company A and was going back to Company B and offering to take that position. At the end of his day, he went with his gut which I thought was the right decision.

The extra pay wasn’t worth it at the end and would not have made him any happier. I was stoked for him and proud that he made the right decision.

The Big Easy

I took a few days off and spent Thursday - Monday in New Orleans for my friend Brian’s bachelor party. Our group of 18 guys rented out the “Magazine Mansion” in the Garden District.

The trip was as ridiculous as you would imagine 18 college friends having a reunion would be. While there were plenty of flashbacks to our days in college, one thing I couldn’t help but notice was how mature we all have gotten in our late 20s.

Between people leaving dinner to take work calls and others choosing to delay heading to the bar to go to a museum or go sight seeing, it was amusing to observe how the group has come in the 10+ years of knowing each other.

Onwards to New Orleans…

For those that have never been, it truly is another world down there. The culture, architecture, and people are one of a kind.

I’ve been there 3 times in the last 10 years, and every time I’m there I always meet some of the most interesting people in the world. The last time I came, Uber was just getting started and the presence of Uber led me to some “interesting” conversations with drivers.

I won’t write about them as I’d like to keep it PG-13 on this blog, but part of the NOLA experience is interacting with locals and talking to your driver is a great way to do it.

The city earns it’s nickname, The Big Easy. I know we were in large touristy areas the entire time, but it’s hard to see how people actually work there. It seems that people are always outside hanging out, listening to live music, and just living life the right way.

Sell or Hold: Employee Lockup Periods

One of the stock market headlines of the day was the lockup period ending for Uber.

When a company goes public through a traditional IPO process, the investment banks who lead the underwriting will restrict early investors and insiders, including employees, from selling their shares for a specific period — usually 180 days after the company goes public.

The lockup period is purported to help stabilize the stock price after an IPO which traditional is already very volatile. There’s a lot of other things going on besides price stabilization including banks using this period to gain additional profits for themselves, but that’s for another post and another day.

The end of a lockup period traditionally signals large sell offs by employees and investors as they finally hope to achieve liquidity.

On October 29, Beyond Meat’s lockup expired and shares fell 18.8%. On August 19, Lyft’s lockup period expired and shares gained during the day before closing down 1.5%. Today, Uber shares hit an all-time public low and closed the day down 3.85%.

As a fan of the markets and someone who follows private companies for a living, it’s a fascinating day to analyze.

Employees are finally allowed to achieve their liquidity they’ve been hoping for so they can buy homes, start businesses, etc. Most have been waiting years for this moment and many will now be able to achieve the dreams they’ve been waiting for.

On the other hand, investing is never easy and emotions always play a large hand. What if the stock continues to rise? Next year, it could be worth double the value.

I always tell clients and friends that this is a great problem to have, but unfortunately not an easy problem to have. The large majority of clients will either cash out completely or take a portion such as half off the table now.

This is a new age of the stock market. Never have we seen this many unprofitable highly valued companies hit the public market and so far the public markets have not responded well, especially on the consumer side.

I don’t know what the answer is in regards to someone who holds Uber stock. If it were me, I would create a selling plan at set times to take the emotion out of this while still holding on for some potential future growth. Only time will tell what the best move here is.

Rise of Robots

The Secfi office is on 3rd and Mission in the SOMA so I find myself at the Metreon/Yerba Buena gardens quite often for lunch.

When I was a kid somewhere around 8 years old, the Sony Metreon was created as some sort of tech entertainment hub. I recall going there quite a bit to watch movies, play video games, etc. Since then, it’s been converted into more of a mall with a Target, movie theatre, and a food court.

Last week I noticed that there was a new ramen machine placed next to the CafeX stall. For those not familiar, CafeX is the new robotic coffee machine that effectively replaces a barista. While not as cool looking, the ramen machine is like a vending machine for hot ramen.

I’m very skeptical of these very “gimmicky” type robot companies. I love the idea of automation and undoubtedly see the value of robots in our everyday life, but I struggle to see why our lives are enhanced significantly by robot baristas, ramen preparers, or pizza makers (Zume).

The reason why I call these companies gimmicks is because consumers like myself want to try these things as they are fun, but they serve no real everyday purpose.

For example, on Sunday, I decided to try the ramen machine for lunch. I paid $14 for my tonkotsu ramen, and 2 minutes later a hot plastic bowl of ramen was ready for the taking.

I had a lot of fun doing this. I filmed it and sent it to my girlfriend. As far as taste… well it was edible. It tasted like a salty broth of top ramen. There’s nothing wrong with that, and I love my occasional salty unhealthy top ramen bowl, but for $14, I was not necessarily pleased.

I have trouble seeing the automation and effect on on the bottomline by using these robots. CafeX still has an employee tending the machine. I’d imagine repairs and maintenance cost a lot.

I’m excited for the future of robotics. I dream of the day where I can let a robot into my building who delivers my bowl of Pho still piping hot in it’s heat chamber. I look forward to take autonomous cars on trips. The difference here is that these types of “robots” serve a purpose — they can and will do things better than humans.

Until a robot can make my coffee, ramen, or pizza than a human, I’m staying away from these gimmick robots.