Opportunities galore... be excited!

We knew it was going to get worse before it got better, and it really hit today. The markets were in a freefall again and there’s no signs of it stopping… anywhere. As I write this, even Bitcoin is down 45% today. Yes, that’s not a typo — that’s a one day drop.

To cap off the day, U.S. stocks are now in their worst single day loss since 1987. This sucks. We all lost a lot of money today and these past few weeks and we’re likely going to lose even more money.

So why am I excited? Well, there’s only one thing we have left now and that’s optimism. I can check the news and portfolio every 5 minutes and promptly put myself in a self induced panic attack, but I choose not to.

Instead, I’m choosing to stay positive and look forward to the opportunities that come from this.

Every dire situation in the past has bred opportunity for people who seek it and can overcome the panic and fear. Even in recent memory, we can look back to the ‘08 financial crisis and see all the companies that were born during the great recession including GroupOn, Lyft, and Uber.

Whatever that opportunity may be — whether it’s new product ideas, investments in cheap stocks, or simply time for you to refocus — these opportunities are and will be out there for the taking.

It won’t be easy, but it’s up to us to take a deep breath and find a way to get through the shitty times so we can prosper down the road.

If none of the above helped, I recommend listening to Howard Lindzon’s daily pod he’s been doing called “Panic with Friends”. I’m almost through the first episode with Jim O’Shaughnessy and it did wonders for me. It’s always comforting listening to people a lot smarter than I am discuss the situation calmly and compare this experience with the last few crashes. It eased my fears and brought my spirits back up.

We’ll get through this.

Holy shit.

Perhaps it took the NBA being suspended for Americans to realize that this is real, but the panic has turned into real chaos.

The market is about to get worse. Much worse. Put your phones away and stock checking your accounts if you’re a long-term investor. Just don’t put yourself through that emotional rollercoaster.

Life as we know it is going to change for the foreseeable future. No NBA. MLB likely to be postponed. March Madness with no fans and likely to be cancelled. No events. Limited restaurants open, if any.

Life may start getting better in as early as a couple months, but it will be a long Spring at the very least.

The bright side? There will be lots of opportunities coming out of this. It’s up to us to keep our heads up and stay positive and look for these opportunities when others only see darkness.

We’ll get through this and hopefully we’ll learn a thing or two from it.

Belated Birthday post: Lessons for my 20 year old self

I started writing this long post on my birthday last Friday and had planned to add to it and eventually finish up through Sunday. Unfortunately, the coronavirus was in full force and the markets started to crash so I was quite distracted with the events and didn’t feel like writing much over the weekend.

The markets have calmed and I was happy to write this with a much happier and positive mindset.

For my birthday, Sophia booked us a reservation at Omakase on Friday night and a sushi dinner in midst of canceling our trip to Japan was exactly what I wanted. It was as great as advertised, but Sophia said it didn’t live up to Sushi Noz in NYC. That’s what I get for taking her there for her first omakase style experience.

I spent Saturday morning playing mini-golf with my 9 year old sister and it was equally parts exhausting and rewarding. After passing off my sister back to my parents, we did an escape the room game (we escaped!) and finished the night off at my favorite restaurant in the world, Thanh Long.

Despite the bad news on Sunday, I had an amazing time with my closest friends. I am insanely fortunate to have a supporting group of friends that will always be there for me. Markets come and go, coronavirus will hopefully be over soon, but moments with friends like this past weekend remind me what the important things in life are.

For my 30th birthday blog post, I thought I would do one of my corny “Letter to My 20 Year Old Self” posts to reflect back on my 20s. If anything, it’ll be great to just laugh at down the road when I turn 40 and maybe... just maybe I’ll have some insight from this to teach my future offspring.

I don’t actually feel like writing a letter, so I figured I’m going to do it in the way I would communicate with my own self… in bullet points.

Without further ado, notes to my 20 year old self:

1. Meditate everyday. A day with meditation > a day without meditating.

2. Start writing. Keep that journal that you once thought about. Start your blog. It’s therapeutic, you’ll learn a lot about things and yourself, and you’ll want to reflect back on some of your most important years in the future.

3. Think long and hard about switching out of that engineering degree. There’s a lot of high paying jobs in tech and building things is really awesome. You probably won’t listen and end deciding to go to the business school and work for a big firm, but you’ll realize that you were wrong soon enough.

4. Have fun and enjoy your youth, but take it easy on the drinks and realize that you don’t need to be wasted all the time. No matter how unfathomable as this may seem, you will one day get tired and realize that life isn’t about partying all the time.

5. There’s going to be a lot of toxic people in your life. Figure them out and get rid of them. It’s not that hard and you’ll be thanking yourself once you do. Life is too short to be wasting it with people that don’t give a shit about you.

6. Everyone has insecurities and you’re not special. The sooner you realize this, the happier you will be. Embrace yourself as you are and don’t try to change that for anyone.

7. Your metabolism will slow down no matter how much you think it won’t. You will gain weight and that’s okay. Start developing better eating habits so you’re not teaching yourself not to eat junk food after you realize this.

8. Those days where you think the sky is falling? You won’t remember them down the road so keep your head up and realize how little those things are in the grand scheme of things.

9. Embrace the nerd in you. There is nothing wrong with being curious and staying in and missing the party to read books or articles that interest you is perfectly okay.

10. Teach yourself better sleep habits. You may not feel it now, but 5-6 hours of a sleep is 5-6 times more miserable when you’re older.

11. Last thing. Don’t ever think getting a fake tan before a date is a good idea. You are an absolute idiot for thinking this and it won’t end well for you.

Black Monday

I had missed a few days of blogging as I was celebrating my birthday weekend with friends and had planned to finish a longer post on Sunday. Unfortunately, the news of the impending market crash started to trickle in and it was hard to get in the right mindset.

I decided to write about today’s events instead as some personal therapy.

Today marked the worst one-day drop in the market since the financial crisis. The circuit breakers kicked in for the first time in 20 years halting all trading activity for 15 minutes due to a 7% drop in the S&P 500.

The crash can be attributed to the growing spread of the coronavirus coupled with a very timely crude oil war. There’s no hiding it now and the panic has started to become real panic.

I want to say I’m immune to the emotion and that my willpower is strong, but this greatly affected my day today. This is the first major crash of my young investing life. I was 18 during the 2008 financial crisis and barely old enough to really understand the impact. This one hits differently.

My way of coping has been to read and learn as much as I can from some of my favorite investors. That has helped quite a bit, but it is not a cure.

The only cure is to ride this one out and wait for the markets to turn and stick to my plan.

One of my favorite reads was on a post by Ben Carlson today on his blog. My favorite quote:

“These are the days when you don’t need financial advice, you need a psychologist. This is why managing people is always more important than managing investments when you work in the financial services industry. Anyone can build a portfolio. Not everyone can stick to a plan.”

I have not overreacted to this market. Out of my friends, I am one of the few calm and rationale ones that hasn’t sold off everything. I am not sure if this is the best plan, but I am ready to stick to my guns.

Today was an emotional rollercoaster. There will be more days like it, but my worth as an investor will be determined by days like today.

Back where it all started

I grew up in the Sunset district of San Francisco. For those that don’t know, the Sunset is in western part of the city that 95% of transplants and tourists never venture of to.

Even though I grew up here, I would say I only venture off to this part of town perhaps once a month nowadays. Despite being only a 20-25 minute Uber ride, I treat going back to my parent’s home like I’m going on a trip.

I had to run an errand and have an optometrist appointment so decided to stay on this side of town. As I write this, I’m at a coffee shop on 8th and Irving.

My neighborhood has greatly changed since my childhood. This part of town was typically known as the working middle class area filled with lots of immigrants. The Sunset was a hodge podge of lots of Asians mixed in quite a few Irish.

The gentrification is real here. A few years ago, a brewery opened up blocks away from my parents home where a row of bodegas and laundromats used to be. Newer and taller housing units are popping up everywhere. Teslas and Porsches now roam the streets.

Despite all this, I love coming here because it’s home. Sitting in a coffee shop in the neighborhood I grew up is therapeutic and really what the doctor ordered after a long few weeks.

I walked by an old cafe called the Rain Tree Cafe where I recall I last ate at with my high school friend and his mom nearly 15 years ago. The sound of the N Judah going down the street is music to my ears. Seeing school kids walking down in their uniforms like I used to brings a lot of nostalgia.

Soon enough, the Sunset won’t be the Sunset as I know it. That’s life and the result of a changing city. Despite this, it will always be home.

Some of the smartest people in the world

The team has been working really hard over the last few weeks with some big meetings and presentations. Today was a big day for us as we had a few big meetings that were planned back to back on the same day. Everything went well and it was a big weight off our shoulders, but we are already thinking about the next steps.

That’s the reality of being at a small start-up. Lots of amazing highs followed by the reality that there’s much more work to do.

On to the next…

One thing that came to mind today is how fortunate I am to be working with some of the smartest people in the world on a daily basis.

My life at Secfi gives me access to some of the most talented founders, investors, and operators on a daily basis. I am in constant awe of the level of intelligence and accomplishment of some of the people we work with everyday.

I’ll be honest and admit that there are moments going into some of these meetings where I am brutally nervous given what these people have accomplished and their resumes. It can be intimidating at times knowing that they are taking a meeting with…. well me.

Despite my nervousness going in, I pretty much always leave these meetings much more calm. I think this correlation can be attributed to one of the key reasons that make these people so successful to begin with.

These highly successful people have a naturally calming aura that exudes charisma. It is a bit hard to explain, but perhaps the simple explanation is their ability to be leaders that inspire confidence in others.

I have a lot to learn in my life and career and I am fortunate to have the opportunity to learn from the best in the world.

Down goes Robinhood

The market rallied today and S&P was up almost 5%. The dominating news was Robinhood being down starting from 3 minutes after opening bell. As of 8:46pm PST as I write this, Robinhood is still down and experiencing outages although I was able to open the app for the first time today.

Apps and websites crash all the time. We’ve experienced outages on nearly everyone of our favorite apps at a point in time. However, given the nature of Robinhood’s business, this is a major issue. Robinhood’s 6 million users were not able to execute trades or even review their account. A large number of users undoubtedly could make the argument that they lost money.

As someone in fintech, I have a lot of sympathy for Robinhood. It’s hard to be perfect all the time and well, shit happens unexpectedly no matter how good you are and how much you prepare.

I am in no means giving Robinhood a pass on this. I struggled with the thought of not being able to see my account or make a trade today. They have without a doubt lost the trust of a lot of users.

With that said, there is a human aspect to all this. I know a lot of people at Robinhood and they are an extremely talented bunch but like all of us, human. I know they are working their tails off to get this back up and running and will hopefully learn from this as they continue to grow and disrupt the industry.

I’ll be rooting for them.

Bernie's proposed tax on vesting stock options

Senator Bernie Sanders and Chris Van Hollen introduced a bill titled “CEO and Work Pension Fairness Act”. You can read the bill here or get a quick rundown from Dan Primack at Axios here.

The bill is purportedly proposed to end tax advantages for CEOs and founders of private companies. I am all for fair taxation and raising taxes for the wealthy, but that argument is going to reserved for another blog post. This is focusing on the collateral damage of this proposed bill.

If enacted, this will greatly affect start-up employees and their equity compensation. The proposed bill will tax stock options at vesting for employees who make more than $130k a year and have more than $100k of vesting stock.

What does this mean? Start-up employees may be required to pay tax on options that they do not intend to exercise and likely cannot even sell. This is terrible policy that makes the regulatory issues associated with stock options even worse.

This is just the latest example of how disconnected Congress is in regards to how stock options (and taxation) work.

Start-ups will have to greatly reconsider their equity compensation plans which is a large part of the appeal of working for a start-up. Small start-ups give out equity to increase employee ownership and as a way to make up for the income gap as they cannot afford to pay their employees what a larger more established company can.

While far from perfect, granting employees stock options in the company has largely worked. It is a big reason why I joined Secfi and I know I’m in the majority who would say the same.

Stock options very simply is a form of deferred compensation. It really is not that much different than a company saying that we cannot pay you a bonus now, but if everything works out in X years, then we can give you a bonus then.

Using that simple example, it would not be fair to tax an employee on that promise for a cash bonus if X, Y, and Z targets are hit. The employee did not get the cash that year and it is not guaranteed. They would still have to hit X, Y, and Z targets in future years before that bonus materializes.

A stock option is not that different than that cash bonus example. It is effectively worth nothing until there is an exit or liquidity event which only happen if the company does well. Employees should not be taxed on those stock options as they are not guaranteed to ever be worth anything.

There are other ways to tax the wealthy. Enacting a bill like this would be disastrous for all parties involved and would directly hurt innovation.

Congress has proven time and time again that they are disconnected with the realities of stock options and have absolutely no clue how they work or their intent. Let’s hope Congress gets a grip and fixes this before it gains traction.

Everyone's a fintech now!

Another long week. I’ve got to do a much better job at stabilizing my hours and ensuring that I don’t take work home. It’s difficult and I’ve been proud of what I’ve done but the last few weeks have been rough and stressful. It’ll be my focus in March as we have a difficult month to close out the quarter.

I’m headed to Portland tomorrow to visit friends, shop at the Nike and Adidas stores, and do some wine tasting. Hoping to get some good R&R and then use Sunday to catch up on life back home.

On to the next…

We’re very likely in a sort of fintech bubble. Big banks and companies have realized that the red tape really hinders moving fast and innovating. Instead, they have gone to their big coffers of cash to acquire fintech companies instead.

We saw Plaid get acquired for $5b by Visa and now Credit Karma was acquired for $7b by Intuit. Shareworks was bought by Morgan Stanley in the last few months as well. With big cash piles, we may see this trend go on for a bit.

Andreesen had a great article on everyone becoming a fintech. While I truly believe that nearly every company will be “fintech” in some capacity, it is also really interesting to take a step back and see everyone trying to get a piece of the fintech pie.

Infrastructure companies such as Marqeta and Galileo have made it very easy for companies to offer banking services and issue credit and debit cards. No longer reserved for large companies like airlines, companies like Uber have their own credit cards with rewards. Lyft is offering free banking for their drivers.

Everyone seems to want a piece of this pie and given the recent acquisitions I can see why. We’re at an exciting time in fintech. I’m happy to be part of it with Secfi.

Pre-wealth advisory

In the markets today we got the small bounce we were all looking for to start the day but unfortunately the good times didn’t last and we ended up closing the day slightly below yesterday. I expect there to be further losses but hopefully we’ve hit the worst with the coronavirus panic. I’m holding steady and making sure I don’t overreact.

On to the next…

Today I joked with a contact at a big private company that my life of helping people with their stock options isn’t as boring as it seems. I don’t think she believe me.

I do truly get enjoyment out of what I do on a day to day basis. I speak to multiple clients on a daily basis where I explain and educate our clients on their equity value. Then I offer them solutions to help achieve their goal.

This sounds easy on paper, but in reality stock options are insanely complicated. Taxes, company growth, personal considerations, etc. — stock options seem to touch on nearly every complicated subject in personal finance.

I speak to so many people on a daily basis that are late to the game on planning. Sadly enough, most simply just had no idea that planning around stock options will usually leave you ahead in the game. The default is to do nothing which is the worst possible thing you an do with stock options.

That’s why Secfi exists. We like the word “pre-wealth advisory” to describe what we do. So many of our clients are in the pre-wealth phase where they may be paper rich waiting for their companies to exit so they can finally enter in the wealth phase of their lives.

Of course, nothing is guaranteed but planning ahead with your stock options will put you ahead.

My life may sound boring, but there may be nothing more fulfilling than when someone explains how much of an impact I made on their financial situation.

Fear and panic

I’m writing this as I’m watching the South Carolina Democratic debate. Bernie is getting the front runner treatment and getting absolutely roasted by the other candidates. It was a better showing by Bloomberg. There’s still 30 minutes to go, but I thought this was a much better showing for Bloomberg and he should benefit from everyone else roasting Bernie.

On to the next…

The market sell-off continues. Fear and panic over the potential pandemic from the coronavirus is rampant. Nearly all my close friends are screaming recession and saying I told you so.

In times like these people like to forget the events of the past few months.

I’m not sure what’s crazier: the fact that my portfolio is down 11.06% in the past week or that my portfolio is still up 11.30% in the past 3 months.

The coronavirus mess is not going to resolved in the next month. This is going to continue for some time. There will likely be further market falls as news of the virus gets worse. Perhaps there will be a bounce back or two. If the virus gets as bad as the worst fear, we’re going to have a much bigger problem than worrying about our stocks.

With that said, spring is coming. Coronavirus will go away. The markets will bounce back. In these times, we need to hold on to our wits and not panic. This may be the best buying opportunity we’ll see all year.

Pandemic and market fears

As expected, the market tanked today amidst fears of the coronavirus affecting our global economy.

Is the coronavirus the beginning of the end of this bull run? @charliebillello put together this great list and remarked that each of these corrections seemed like the end of the world at the time. For those that don’t want to count, this is the 26th time since March 2009 that there’s been a correction >5%.

There’s a lot of good logical reasoning why this time is different. None of the previous times listed above had factories being closed resulting in supply chains being impaired. This is the first time we’re seeing large scale travel bans.

With that said, this could very well just be a dip and the coronavirus is largely contained in the next few weeks and markets will bounce back.

I know a lot of smart people who cried recession at the other times on this list and were wrong. I am not sure how this will all play out, but I’m puling back a bit with my fingers crossed that this all gets handled soon.

There's no denying it now

Like many, I was on the side that the coronovirus was likely to be all but over and it was a media hype. The battle between VC and media on Twitter in regards to the coronovirus was probably one of the more entertaining twitter arguments in recent history.

I am still not 100% convinced that we need a global panic right now. Many more people have died from the flu in January and February. The death rate of the coronovirus is relatively low compared to SARS and MERS.

I completely understand the argument for erring on the side of caution, but I’m not a doctor so I typically like to try to laugh these things off.

I have an upcoming vacation planned to South Korea and Japan with Sophia and friends at the beginning of April. After being on anti-cancel the trip team, it’s starting to look more and more like that these countries will start to be on lock-down by the time April comes around.

There’s no denying that we are on the brink of a pandemic now. I remain hopeful that everything will be contained in the next two weeks, but it does not seem likely. Countries will need to do the responsible thing and control travel.

Every nation needs to employ all necessary precautions to get everything under control before things get worse.

If things continue on this trend, hopefully we can postpone our trip to later this year once everything is controlled.

Jason Calacanis vs DHH

I got back from Tahoe tonight after a full day of snowboarding. It was a great day on the slopes. Francis and I ended up meeting some of his old coworkers and it was awesome spending the day with them. They come from the fintech world and they’re all doing some really cool things nowadays.

We talked a lot about finance, data science, stock options, and VC money. It’s never a bad day on the slopes when you have good conversation and I learned a lot from them.

On the drive home today, Francis and I listened to the latest podcast by angel investor Jason Calacanis where he hosts David Heinemeier Hansson who is the co-founder of Basecamp.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zyq_lnLK-RU

Jason and DHH are two of the most opinionated people on Twitter that I follow and I have seen them go after it quite a few times on Twitter. I was fully expecting a gloves off fist fight between them on various topics ranging from capitalism to Uber and I was ready to be entertained.

To my surprise, they agreed much more than I think anyone anticipated. While each held their own opinions and thoughts on how the world works, or should work, they both made several great points on some controversial topics.

The podcast was one of the best I’ve listened to in the last few months and I learned quite a bit from both Jason and DHH. I was driving so unfortunately was not able to take notes, but there were several points that I wanted to highlight that I thought were worth noting:

• The agreement that healthcare and education in the US is absolutely awful and that the U.S. needs to copy exactly what works in Europe. We can debate capitalism vs socialism all we want, but some things are done better from a socialist standpoint such as healthcare and education.

• DHH’s beliefs that Marissa Mayer bragging about working 100+ hour weeks is absolutely bonkers and that as a society we would be better off working much less so we can enjoy life.

• The debate on wealth tax. I found myself siding a bit more with Jason on this topic as I believe creating a wealth tax where you have to value all assets will cause much more headache than good. The rich will just find loopholes to pay less on the wealth tax. I don’t believe valuing assets will be as easy as DHH makes it sound.

• The agreement that tech companies should be broken up as they have become monopolies. This has been one of the more interesting debates going on in this Presidential election. To my surprise, both Jason and DHH seem to agree that these companies should be broken up to encourage competition and spur innovation. I have been a bit on the fence as I believe the major issue is with data, but the angle of allowing more competition made me lean towards taking the position that these companies should be broken up.

• Jason and DHH do a great job of analyzing the issue with data and how these large tech companies are using our data. I have always been a bit more on the relaxed side of things in regards to data and privacy, but this conversation got me thinking quite a bit about privacy. There were some great solutions brought up such as forcing tech companies to allow users to opt out of their data being collected.

As I reflect back on the nearly 2 hour podcast, I realized how much content there was in this podcast. It truly was one of the better listens and I look forward to listening to it again soon so I can digest it a second time.

The San Francisco housing situation

I was born and raised in the Sunset district of San Francisco. This city is more than just a tech city. It represents culture, diversity, and tolerance. The city has a rich history that any San Franciscan should be proud of.

We also have our complaints and rightfully so. It has handled the influx of money from tech horribly. It was allowed the homeless situation get beyond the point of repair. With all that said, it is still my city and I am still proud to be born and raised here.

I would like to raise my kids in the city one day. Unfortunately, it’s looking more and more likely that we won’t be able to buy a house in the city anytime soon.

It’s a sad realization and something that Sophia and I have been dealing with. We are currently in the process of moving to a bigger apartment next door. While the space is perfect for couple, we know that in the next few years we’ll need to be looking for a bigger space for our kids.

Of course that is down the line and perhaps things will change in a few years.

Maybe the city will figure it out and do something to make available more affordable housing. I for one won’t be betting on that.

Perhaps the better route would be to consider raising our kids in another country for that international experience. Maybe down the road we can finally move back and purchase a home when we are a bit more stable financially.

Either way, it will be interesting to follow the San Francisco housing market in the next few years.

The SF homeless situation

I’ve been swamped and stressed with work all week. I feel like I’ve been playing catch-up for 3 weeks and it’s been a rough last week. I’ve been pulling double digit workdays this week and my list of things to do is not getting any smaller.

Balancing work and personal life seems impossible at time, but sometimes you just need to take a step back, breathe, and realize that everything is going to be fine. I’m going to head up to Tahoe tomorrow to get my mind off things and use Sunday morning/afternoon to try to get caught up.

On to the next…

I wanted to write about the SF homeless problem, but from a different angle.

The situation is well documented and it does not take long on Twitter or on news sites to find people complaining about the problem. It is a bad situation that is getting worse and it needs to be addressed.

Perhaps I will write about that a different day, but this post is about empathy and human suffering that I felt compelled to write about.

I was on walk down Market Street yesterday as I was trying to clear my head yesterday. I was in a particular weird mood… I was stressed and absolutely exhausted. Things in my mind were not exactly rosy.

It didn’t take me long to really hunker down and focus on the immense human suffering happening on the streets of San Francisco. There was a homeless person living out of a cart, bag, or with absolutely nothing pretty much everywhere you turned.

It’s sometimes easy to write these people off and assume that this was self inflicted. On other the hand, we really don’t know anyone’s story. Abuse, neglect, and just downright shitty situations could and perhaps is even the likely story here.

As much as we like to deny this, we’re not that far off from these people. Some of us make the birth lottery. Some of us are born with more opportunity. Some of us are just lucky.

I was watching an elderly woman sit on her cart on Market yesterday. Her entire life was on this shopping cart and I noticed 2 bowls of instant ramen that was likely her only meals that day.

I don’t know how she got to this point or her story. The look on her face was something I’ll never forget. She just sat there. Gazing straight ahead. Minding her own business nearly emotionless.

I had this sinking gut feeling that she was just sitting there… waiting for death and her way out of this tough life. It was a look of pain and suffering I won’t ever get rid of in my mind.

I am very lucky to have the life I do. I hope the good fortunes continue, but I will remain grateful for everything I have today. Not many people are so lucky.

Monday musings (on a Tuesday)

I’m a bit scatter-brained today as I catch-up on my work life after taking the long weekend off after a long two week sprint. I had a lot of thoughts throughout the day and just decided to write down a bunch of random unrelated thoughts today.

I woke up today to Robinhood notifications to many of my stocks were at a new all-time high. I cannot believe how many mornings I’ve woken up to these notifications throughout the last months. My entire portfolio closed up 1.76%.

Bloomberg is now squarely the #2 in the race. It was pretty obvious to me many months ago that Bloomberg was going to make a real run at the Democratic candidacy. He has too much money and backing to not be in the consideration. The real test for Bloomberg comes tomorrow at the debates.

There is such a crazy divide among the democratic party between the ultra-left leaning (Sanders) and the more moderate Dems (Bloomberg, Mayor Pete, Klobuchar). This divide may ultimately be the reason why the Dems lose the election later this year. Can Bloomberg/Mayor Pete unite the party if they win the nomination? It does not look good.

DoorDash has won the battle for favorite food delivery apps in my phone with their partnership with Lyft offering free DoorDash deliveries. The food delivery wars is one of my favorite battles going on right now. Consolidation is inevitable, but until that happens, the race will be one fun to watch and great for my wallet as a consumer.

Damn good weekend

I wrote about most of my weekend activities yesterday. I capped off the weekend at a BBQ yesterday catching up with a lot of old friends from college. Today, I did a quick day trip to Kirkwood.

I am beat from the long day of driving and snowboarding, but it’s a fulfilling exhaustion. I had an amazing weekend and I feel great. Best of all, I didn’t do more than 10 minutes of work.

I’ve had a long 2 weeks and needed a great weekend to take my mind off of work. I’m back at it again tomorrow, but I am ready.

The urge for bad habits

I’ve had an amazing weekend so far.

Thursday was Sophia’s birthday so I decided to buy her tickets to Lazy Bear. I am huge foodie, but generally stay away from these over hyped expensive restaurants. At most of these places, I always leave still hungry and the dishes generally do not live up to the hype. The double whammy.

Lazy Bear was one of the few high-end Michelin rated joints that I would always recommend people to. The experience of a dinner party is one of a kind and each dish had me wanting more. I couldn’t be happier with Lazy Bear and will definitely be back sooner than later.

On Friday night, Sophia and I cooked dungeness and a porterhouse steak for our surf and turf Valentine’s Day dinner. It was the relaxing evening that I needed to recover from a long week.

Yesterday, we went on a 7.5 mile hike in Oakland Regional Park with some friends and burnt off what we ate the last night. I’ve caught up on sleep the past 2 nights and I feel great writing this.

R&R weekend is going swell so far, but it hasn’t been easy. Starting yesterday, I had this sudden urge to check e-mails and get work done.

I work hard 5-6 days in a row and my body and mind is adjusted to thinking that I need to continue this trend. Call it bad work habits, but it’s something that’s hard to kick.

My inner self is at times looking for excuses for doing work. Last night, it was Sophia saying she needed to send a work email, so I used that as an excuse to check emails and then start my tax return for my LLC.

If the 2010s was the era for excess screen use and social media, my bet is on the trend that the 2020s will be the return to the present moment.

The rise of wellness and meditation apps is kickstarting this trend. The continued issues with social media and excessive phone use affecting our children will take this trend to the next level.

Wellness apps and start-ups that help take you off your phone and computer will continue to be rolled out. Social media will be (hopefully) used to connect people in person again rather than as a medium for people to chat behind screens.

This will be a new age. One in which people focus on being present and enjoying time with each other. Video games and instant communication will not go away, but people will learn that life is right here, right now and not on your screen.

Much needed R&R

Unfortunately I’ve missed a couple days of writing. We had some big meetings towards the end of this past week and I worked 12+ hour days to help prepare so writing has been one of the last things on my mind.

I’ve largely controlled my hours this past year so I can balance the grind of being a small start-up and not burning myself out. This week got out of hand, but we accomplished a lot and really set the stage for this upcoming year.

There’s a lot to be excited about in 2020 for Secfi. I am so grateful to be part of this team and I am beyond excited to write about this adventure this next year.

With that said, I am exhausted and plan on doing as close to nothing as possible in regards to work until Tuesday. I hope to relax, spend time with friends, hit the slopes, and write about personal things.

I’ll be even better and more excited to hit Tuesday morning running because of this.