September

Things are starting to slow down around the office which is nice. I have a busy day today and fully plan to take my mind off everything for the next 4 days. I need a good reset and would like to get my mind in a good place for what will be a busy September. Luckily, I’m back home for a few weekends before my travel schedule picks up at the end of September and in October.

My mindset is to get through September and take some good time off in October to prepare myself for the end of year push which is never an easy time for us at Secfi.

Right now, everything feels like it’s about to pick up significantly in September. People will be back from vacations and the IPO market is going to open up leading to much more activity in the private markets. For the first time in a long time, people are thinking about IPOs and their equity again.

It’s a good feeling and it finally feels like we’ve made it through the down cycle after 3 years.

Secfi New York

We had 11 people in our office yesterday for meetings. I love getting the team together and doing in-person meetings. Of course, with distributed team members, we’ll never fully be 100% in-office so some folks had to dial-in, but I cannot stress how much better being in-person is than being fully remote.

It is simply a lot more efficient the majority of the time. We get to learn from each other more. Collaborating on a project or topic is as easy as turning around and asking, versus asking to schedule time.

Going forward, it’s going to be one of our priorities to get most of the team out here to New York quarterly.

The Gov't takes over

It’s an interesting time in our world right now as the President is looking to expand the Federal government’s power.

He’s brought in the National Guard to help control crime in Washington D.C. He’s been vocal about trying to control the Federal Reserve. The U.S. has now acquired 10% of Intel and there’s rumors that the administration is considering taking more stakes in companies.

For years, we blasted the “socialist” countries for taking stakes in their companies like the Europeans with Airbus and China controlling most of their companies. Now we’ve decided to do the same.

I’m not sure how to feel about it. On one hand - it gave these companies unfair advantages with the backing of the government. On the other hand - it feels un-American in many ways and allows the government to get involved with these companies. While the gov’t is always going to be involved through regulation, seeing them acquire a direct stake in the company is a much different animal.

It’s an interesting time right now and will likely create precedent for the government’s future control and policies.

Bring on the Fall

I’m absolutely beat after another fun but long weekend. We drove down to Virginia to see some friends and their kids. It was a ton of fun but these 5+ hour drives for the weekend are absolutely killing my energy levels.

We have one more trip to upstate New York this weekend. Thankfully it’s a much shorter drive and we’ll have an extra day up there. But mostly, I am looking forward to just being back in New York for a few weekends.

This would normally be a dead week for us with Labor Day coming up. But it’s not an ordinary year with a lot of IPOs on the horizon. We have the team coming in to New York tomorrow to do a lot planning and prep for the weeks ahead.

It’s going to be a fun and busy week as we prepare for some craziness on the other side of Labor Day. Luckily, I’ll have 3 weekends at home in New York during those weeks so I can get back on a routine and maximize my work hours.

It’s been a long summer with the move to New York and all these trips. I’m more than ready for the Fall and some time home watching football.

Friday

I’m absolutely beat after a long but productive week. While I quarantined at home over the weekend and beginning of the week, I had a lot of extra time that I normally don’t have and I spent a good chunk of that grinding out work. I finally got back into the office yesterday and basically ran around for 9 hours straight hopping from meeting to call.

Luckily I’m taking most of today off to drive down to Virginia so we can see friends and hang out at their house this weekend. It’s going to be a nice much needed break and will be nice to get outside after quarantining all last weekend.

August so far has been anything but calm with everything going on. That’s a good thing for the business but also stressful. I’m finding myself pushing some meetings out another week or two in advance as I simply just don’t have time to take some of these calls anymore. Some things simply just have to wait as life and other priorities need to take precedent.

The AI bubble

Last week’s news in tech has been around Sam Altman saying that there is definitely an AI bubble and that a lot of investors will get burned. Like always, the media made it a lot more controversial than it really was. This is the consensus among pretty much all investors.

Bubbles always form when there’s a new technology put out there. For every winner, there’s going to be 10s of losers out there where people will lose money. On one hand, that is the nature of venture capital.

At the same time, this admittedly feels a bit crazier with the valuations of these companies where they are at. The size of the bubble is definitely much bigger today than it was in previous bubbles such as crypto or social media. At the same time, these companies are also making and growing faster than we’ve ever seen before.

Ultimately, I think this all ends very similar to how the last bubbles ended. We’ll go through the peaks and valleys, but ultimately there will be a few very large game changing companies out there. And there’s going to be a lot of companies that don’t make it. That part to me is the easy part. The bigger question is when and how.

Battling context switching

A few months ago, I started blocking off my calendar on Wednesdays every couple of weeks or so in order to really sit down and grind some work out. It was great, but inevitably that started to go away as urgent meetings started showing up and slowly my protected Wednesdays disappeared.

Eventually, I just stopped blocking off my calendar altogether. And yet another productivity experiment had initial success and then became a failed experiment in the long-run. At the beginning of this week, I decide to block off my entire Wednesday again and have a get shit done day.

It’s been great so far and I haven’t been this excited for a day of work in a long time. There’s just been so much shit that I’ve wanted to do from a strategic and more creative side that I’ve wanted to tackle, but just haven’t had any prolonged blocks to do so.

Going forward, I know that blocking off my Wednesdays is just not manageable. And I’ll need to make to make adjustments.

In addition, my call schedule often creates a lot of context switching. I take a 30 minute call, and then have a 30 minute window until my next call. Those 30 minutes are just not enough time for me to sit down and really tackle a lot of these tasks. As such, I use those minutes to catch-up on Slack/Email and sometimes even take a break. It’s not the most productive use of my time.

My new experiment is going to be trying to adjust my calendar on Fridays for the week ahead. I’ll put in 2-4 hour blocks of time where I try to protect myself from calls and meetings so I can focus on these projects that take longer. I’m hoping this experiment lasts a bit longer and allows me to be more productive

A blessing in disguise

I'm through the worse of HFM and feel mostly normal except for these odd sores on my hands and feet. It definitely doesn’t look great so I’ve been mostly staying home. After being mostly quarantined in my room since Friday, I’m really starting to get the itch to get back out.

I will say it has been nice getting some rest and also getting caught up on a lot of things. I was able to get a ton done personally and at work, and I finally feel caught up with everything. It’s amazing what happens when you eliminate your social life and role as a parent for a few days.

While I definitely wouldn’t wish this illness on anyone, I’m starting to view it as a bit of a blessing in disguise. I really needed a break and a rest from the grind, and well getting HFM in a weird way gave me that opportunity.

On the personal and work front, I really just needed some extra hours to get caught up with everything that has been piling up. I was able to effectively get through my backlog of personal items and even booked a family vacation during my time.

As a parent, you don’t get 3-6 hour blocks of alone time often and I was able to take advantage of that. Maybe it’s a good idea for Sophia and I to try to manufacture these break periods every now and then for each other. We can choose a weekend where we eliminate our social lives and then alternate days where one of us just rests and catches up on life.

My battle with hand, foot, and mouth

Well it turned out that I was not only sick, but I was sick with maybe one of the most gruesome viruses out there, hand foot mouth. I ended up working more or less a full day on Friday thinking I had something like strep or a bad cold. My strep tests came back negative and I figured that I had something else.

Unfortunately, on Saturday the dreaded red spots on my hands and feet started to show up and I knew instantly that I caught HFM. Shit is a horrible virus that feels straight out of something you hear from the middle ages. You start out with a horrible fever and chills for 24-48 hours, and then once that subsides, the sores start showing up.

The sores start out itchy. Not as bad as a mosquito bite, but being that they are on palms and soles of the feet, it makes things a lot worse. Then the sores start to really sore up in the back of your throat making swallowing anything painful. Sleeping is tough as you’re constantly dealing with itchy palms and soles.

As such, I have not left the house since my Friday strep test mainly staying in my room. It hasn’t been a fun experience but I tried to make the best of it and really just relax, rest, and do nothing. While this is not a desirable circumstance to be lazy, I also realize that I simply just have not had the chance to do anything like this in many years.

I spent most of Saturday in bed alternating between watching movies and napping. Minus the whole feeling like shit thing, it was actually really nice to get some down time. Sunday was more or less of the same, but I sprinkled in productivity in half my day. I caught up on work and then booked our family vacation in October which I had been putting off for some time.

Of course, the most painful part of this is not being able to hang out with Colin. It was heartbreaking watching him crawl to me and want to hang out, but not being able to pick him up or hug him.

I’m hoping that in the next day or two, I’ll actually be able to be a human again and get out in the world. I’m making the best of it, but being locked up in a room isn’t something that I’m generally good at. Although, if I’m being honest, lots of parts of being locked in a room for the weekend was kind of nice. Maybe I should try being incredibly lazy more often.

Time for some rest

I had a good and productive day yesterday. We finally got Colin back in daycare after he was out for a few days with a slight fever and I was able to focus at work in the office most of the day. After work, I took an interval running class and got a great workout in to burn off some steam. I was riding a high all evening.

Of course, as I was preparing to get to bed I started to feel a bunch of aches and cold all of a sudden. Within 15 minutes, I was under my covers with multiple layers on freezing and my head was throbbing. It wasn’t a fun night and I’m perplexed as to what exactly happened. My body was clearly fighting off something, but I had never had something that sudden before.

On top of all that, I feel generally okay this morning with some minor aches and fatigue. The usual symptoms of a scratchy throat or cough aren’t present and I tested negative for covid. I’m not sure if I’m still fighting off what Colin had or if I may have picked up something ele, but I suspect that my body is also just run down and my nervous system is reacting as such.

I suppose it’s yet another reminder for me to rest more. I am now 35 and with Colin, I’ve been running on fumes for the last 9 months. Powering through is probably just going to make things worst for me in the long run and I need to make sure to take care of myself.

PwC's office traffic light dashboard

There’s a news article about my previous firm PwC in the UK using a dashboard to track office attendance. To be honest, I think this is probably a non-news item as I’d wager a lot, if not the majority, of the major firms out there have some sort of dashboard. Of course, it’s probably started to cause an uproar among staff members.

I am in favor of flexibility, but generally want in-office attendance for most days of the week for those who live in the area. As a small firm, we do not track attendance and everything is done more on the honor system and a social contract. You come in when you can, and when you need to work from home/remote that is generally fine.

It’s been 7 years since I left PwC, and I only worked in the New York office, but my stance is that the firm was probably way too lenient back then even pre-pandemic. The nature of the business across most business lines is that you are often at client offices and/or traveling so there is an inherent not in office culture.

However, it was admittedly frustrating often when it was clear some people were abusing the system. People worked from home a lot, and often it was difficult to get in contact with some of them. When you’re trying to get your work done, and your work often relies on other people on the team, it was an incredibly frustrating ordeal.

For a large firm like PwC, you probably need to track attendance in order to make people actually adhere to firm policies. The firm is way too big and it’s too easy to abuse. All that said, everything starts from the top. And the most notable absences from the office were often the partners.

If you want your people to come into the office, leaders need to also set the example and come into the office. There’s going to be some growing pains with any culture change though and I imagine this will cause a bit of an uproar among staff.

Predicting this next IPO window

One of my projects in the next few weeks is mapping out which companies are likely filing a S1 and going public post Labor Day. There’s a handful of obvious ones that we know are happening and we’re already planning for. These companies can either go public whenever they choose to, or they have already begun plans for a 2025 IPO for a long time. Those are the easy ones.

What’s obviously much harder to map out are the companies that are a bit more under the radar or perhaps on the fringe of having “ideal” IPO conditions.

As much as we focus on the pre-IPO world, there’s inevitably companies that we do not have a good pulse on for various reasons. They could be a more international presence where we don’t focus as much. Or simply do not have a ton of employees on a traditional equity plan. Or we just haven’t been fortunate enough to know much about them.

Then there’s the companies that have IPO ambitions in 2025, but may not have the typical profile. Perhaps they have a bit slower growth rate or they may not be at the ideal scale yet. If things go well with some of these IPOs, I suspect a handful of these types of companies will attempt to go public.

We won’t be 100% in our mapping here, but the goal is to try to forecast and plan as much as possible for what we will see in the coming weeks/months.

Tech wars

Just as I was starting to feel good after a nice weekend and excited to get back to the grind, life decides to strike back. Colin has a slight fever and had to come home from daycare yesterday. Starting yesterday afternoon I started to experience quite a bit of fatigue. And despite sleeping for almost 8 hours, I woke up exhausted.

I made it into the office but may try to head home early depending on how I feel in a couple hours. I suppose I should start getting used to being sick all the time. I can’t say I wasn’t warned about this with kids and daycare/school.

On another note, I saw that Elon and Sam Altman started a public feud yesterday. Elon posted on X alluding that Apple is unfairly making OpenAI’s chat bots #1 on the app store and making it impossible for anyone else to overtake them. Of course, Altman fired back accusing Elon of using X to boost his own Tweets.

These feuds between some of the richest tech leaders has been going on for some time, but there’s something oddly entertaining about this cycle. I suppose tech leaders of the past were much more silent and in the background than the modern age. Social media has fueled this and created a platform for fanboys to take sides. Elon has a following more akin to a cult nowadays that would defend his every action, good or bad.

August calm

It’s August and things are generally quiet. The city feels empty except for the tourists roaming around. It’s a Monday, but my office is eerily quiet. I’d suspect a ton of people are on vacation right now.

For myself, it’s a good time to get caught up on life and work before things really hit the fan after Labor Day. I had Colin most of the weekend alone and that was equally parts stressful and fun. Sophia and I spent most of our Sunday running errands and figuring out how to feed Colin. We finally got some pictures up on the wall and our apartment is starting to feel complete finally.

Despite the relative quiet, the list of things to do and errands seems to never end. We need to get a new car seat, plan our trip in October, get our finances in order, etc. Life is only going to get crazier and I suppose it’s up to me to just embrace that aspect.

I hope to use these next 3 weeks to just get ahead of everything. It’ll be easy to just coast a bit in August, but I need to make sure to stay focused and get ahead of things in order for me to keep my sanity in the busier months ahead.

Calm before the storm

Things are getting crazier at home with Colin getting more and more mobile. It feels like every day he wants to move around more and jump from room to room. It won’t be long until he’s on his feet and walking. It’s a lot of fun watching him grow, but it’s getting all the more tiring between chasing him around and figuring out how to feed a growing boy.

Every day does feel hectic even if things are calm at work. When things are busy at work, it feels like I’m just trying to survive the day. This is a bit anxiety inducing for me right now as it feels like we’re gearing up for a busy next few months.

The IPO window is open and there seems to be a mad rush of companies going to be making their debuts post Labor Day. That’s amazing for business, but our lives are going to get much crazier at Secfi.

Right now it’s the calm before the storm. I’ve seen this play out before in 2020 and 2021, so luckily I know what to expect. It’s going to be a ton of fun, but a lot of work. It’ll be our jobs to start preparing the team for this and that’s top of mind for me right now. First though, it’s making sure that I’m in the right mindset as well.

A good boring weekend

I have Colin solo for the next few days as Sophia is headed back to Baltimore to take care of her Mom who is having minor surgery. I’m excited that I get to fully focus on being a Dad and spend time with him.

While parenting solo is effectively parenting on hard mode, it does refocus my energy and mind to staying present and just trying to enjoy time with my son. For better or worse, there’s not much time to check my emails or respond to Slack messages.

Over the last 9 months, I’ve learned that less is more when parenting. Unlike the early ambitious days, I’ve now resorted to do the “one activity outside a day” method. That is I do one thing with Colin and then spend the rest of the day more or less at home.

Anything beyond that one activity is just too tiring and too much of a hassle. And I risk getting him off his schedule and making the rest of the day worse. For example, on Saturday I plan on taking him to the park or farmer’s market for a few hours after his lunch. We get outside and do something, but I’ll be back by 3pm for his next nap.

It’s a much more “boring" weekend than pre-kid, but that’s life nowadays. Equally as important as getting outside and doing something is making sure I don’t overextend myself and get much needed rest. There’s a lot more Netflix in my life nowadays and that’s okay. It’ll be a good boring weekend.

The AI paradigm shift

For one reason or another, my random thoughts on my run yesterday were around how the people interact with the internet and how that’s evolved over time.

In the adoption of the internet in the 1990s and 2000s, users interacted through web pages on desktops or laptops. We’d use Netscape or Internet Explorer to go to a website created on Geocities. In the beginning, everything was static and mostly text based. Things got prettier and more dynamic over time and by the end of the 2000s, we had embedded videos and more interactive websites.

Everything changed with the adoption of mobile in the 2010s. We had armies of product managers and engineers making beautiful responsive webpages and apps. To encourage adoption and use, these apps were gamified and companies got very good at getting you to engage with the app. You needed a beautiful and easy to use app for that, and companies layered on incentives to use that app more.

There’s been an interesting shift in the last few years. While we still live on mobile and apps on a day to day basis, there seems to be a paradigm shift back to the old days of barebones and text based apps. ChatGPT’s website looks basic in black and white, and looks more like a Geocities webstie than let’s say DoorDash’s page.

I do believe both styles are here to stay of course. Tik-Tok and Instagram are still out there and one of the most popular apps in the world. But there seems to be a shift in how users consume information and we may be shifting back slightly back to a traditional text based learning. That will likely change as AI evolves. Voice and video are very interesting and perhaps sooner or later, we’ll have a ChatGPT narrator reading back answers to our prompts.

Colin is 9 months today

It’s almost a bit surreal but Colin is now 9 months old today. It was an eventful last 3 months. We moved to New York, put him into daycare, and experienced a lot of firsts. He started eating solid foods and started crawling. I had heard things move very fast in that first year and I can attest that it is the case.

As soon as it feels like they hit a period of time, it goes by quickly and next thing you know they’re onto to the next thing. It’s only going to be a matter of time until he’s walking and talking. For Mom and I, it’s been a big 9 months of figuring out how to parent.

We’re back in New York after spending almost 2 weeks in Seattle and San Francisco attending a wedding and visiting friends and family. I suppose we should consider ourselves baby travel veterans at this point as Colin took his 6th flight yesterday, 3 of which were cross country and 2 others going from SF to Hawaii.

Like most things Colin has taken on, he was a champ. We feel fortunate that we have a relatively easy baby that goes with the flow. After flying to Seattle, he had one morning with an early wake-up and then adjusted to the time zone the next day. After flying back and getting in the late afternoon, he had one wake up at 8:30 for about an hour and then slept through the night.

I realize how lucky Sophia and I are. We do focus a lot on schedule and sleep training, but at the same time, I know a lot of this is the luck of the draw. Despite being an easy kid that travels well, Sophia and I have learned a lot.

Traveling with a kid, even an easy one, is undoubtedly a lot harder and stressful. You have a ton to pack and plan around. There are many moments where he just doesn’t want to sit still and it’s an arm workout holding him for hours at a time. Traveling even by yourself across the country is tiring and stressful, and has always thrown me off for at least a day. With a kid, you’ll need a lot more recovery time.

At the same time, most of the stress and anxiety comes from my own head often. I had a ton of anxiety before this trip. I lost a bit of sleep thinking about how stressful the trip would be. Afterall, it was a great trip where everything worked out and I was glad we had the opportunity.

In these 9 months, I think my biggest learning is that I need to roll with the punches more and just embrace the situation. Having a kid is hard and a trip with him won’t ever be like it was before. But that’s part of life and there’s a lot of beauty in that as well. I should feel fortunate that I’m able to take Colin with us on these trips rather than stress about it. Everything always works out and I need to remember that.

Figma's IPO

I had a blast doing a solo parent yesterday with Colin as Sophia went into the office. I mostly took the day off and took Colin to the Bay Area Discovery Museum which was a ton of fun. He got to crawl and climb on everything there and I got to relax a bit knowing that everything was baby safe. Watching him grow and seeing his personality evolve has been a joy. Even with the stress of him pooping 3 times including one all over his pack and play was worth it.

In other news, Figma went public yesterday at $33 per share and opened at $85 per share. The stock closed the day at $115.50. We’ll see if it holds, but this appears to be a brutal mispricing by the bankers for a household tech name.

I expect to see a ton of VCs including Bill Gurley get back on the microphone blasting these traditional IPOs. On one hand, it’s good for employees as the stock price did go up which is what you want. On the other hand, the company sold shares at $33 when it was evident that they could have sold them at a much higher price.

I wonder what the discussions were around a potential direct listing. Admittedly I have not dug into the financials of Figma at all, but if they did not need the cash then this likely would have been a much better situation for everyone if they just went the direct listing route.

Not every company has the ability to do a direct listing, but for a company with a brand name like Figma, it could have made a lot more sense. I’m excited to dig into the commentary on this in the future by VCs and other investors out there.

San Francisco's comeback

It’s only been 3 months since I’ve left SF but it’s hard to ignore the work that new Mayor Daniel Lurie has done. It seems that new restaurants and stores are reinvesting in San Francisco again.

Take Jins, a Japanese eyeglass company, for example. They used to have a location in Union Square San Francisco many for years and shut down in 2022 like many other downtown businesses after COVID. Well, just down the street from my Dad’s house is a new billboard saying Jins is coming back to San Francisco in the Stonestown Mall.

It was good to see that companies are believing in San Francisco again. Many other areas of the city are being built up while downtown and the traditional tourist zones make a recovery. It’ll take awhile for downtown to get back to where it was, but there’s been a ton of companies pledging to stay recently.

I have fond memories of going to Union Square as a kid on a weekly basis with my Dad. And then shopping around the area for Christmas. I hope my kid has that same experience as I did growing up. The city seems to be on the right path and I’m loving what I’m seeing.