Heading North

Previous years: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, and 2019.

At the end of each year, I like to write a year in review. In large part, they’re a way for me to remember — it’s fascinating to read them three, four, or five years later and see how my life and thinking has changed over time. At the same time, they’re also a way for me to share a more detailed update with those who happen to be interested.

Unfortunately — if you are one of those people who happen to be interested — this year may have been one of the least interesting in recent memory: I didn’t drop out of college, become the first employee at a startup, or live in the wilderness for 100 days. Instead, I spent the entire year in one state, doing relatively ordinary things: I began the year at school, finishing up a few final requirements; then, I returned to the startup I worked at two summers ago, instead now as a full-time employee. No new cities lived in, no new companies worked at.

That said, I have exciting plans for 2025, and I can see myself maybe reminiscing on the relative simplicity of this past year if the upcoming one shakes out as well as I hope it does. So, here I am, writing this, so I don’t forget.

January – March

At school, I kept busy with courses in probability and cryptography, and complemented the quantitative with a class covering contemporary tech policy. I enjoyed discussing issues like Section 230 reform and net neutrality, and I found it interesting that I was one of the only students in the class with a technical background.

The winter months are my favorite time of year in LA: whenever I’d start stressing about something, or be worrying about this or that, I’d pull up the Weather app and look at the temperatures in my hometown in Pennsylvania. Then I’d go outside.

A morning of immaculate coastal riding down the 1 — dancing bunches of California poppies to our left, dazzling blue ocean to our right — brought us to Santa Cruz by the early afternoon…

“Cycling Across California”

April – June

Upon returning to UCLA for the start of spring quarter, I realized that the next few months would likely be my last few months in Southern California for a while. So I began more deliberately working through my informal LA bucket list. Some highlights included:

• Seeing an LA Phil performance at Walt Disney Concert Hall through their student ticket program

• Hiking in the Santa Monica Mountains with Peaks and Professors⁷

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  Peaks and Professors, as its name suggests, is a club which organizes local hikes led by UCLA professors.There are also chapters at other schools — I found about UCLA’s through my friend Ben Brooks who went to USC.

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• Participating in a Dinner for 12 Strangers
• Enjoying a delicious vegetarian meal at the Culver City Hare Krishna Temple
• Seeing one of the UCLA Planetarium’s weekly shows
• Taking the bus down to the border and visiting Ensenada, Baja California

• Bikepacking from LA to San Diego⁸

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  In fact, I made it all the way to San Ysidro. I was hoping to bike into Tijuana, but I’d unfortunately forgotten my passport.

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• Joining one of the Port of Long Beach’s summer boat tours and seeing the containerships and cranes
• Enjoying a performance at The Geffen through their student ticket program
• Spending lazy afternoons among the blooming jacarandas in the sculpture garden

• Taking an Intro to Acting class in the Theater department⁹

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  As part of the class, we were told to watch the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2018 production of Romeo and Juliet on YouTube.I actually really enjoyed it — probably the first time I’ve ever actually enjoyed Shakespeare — although maybe it’s just that high school AP Lit isn’t as conducive to developing an appreciation for the classics vs. a very chill, spring quarter “Introduction to Acting” class comprised almost entirely of graduating seniors.

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At the end of the quarter, my family flew out to attend graduation-related activities at UCLA. We met up with our relatives in the Los Angeles area and enjoyed dinners together at trendy Westside restaurants.

The next weekend, I was up in San Francisco participating in a healthcare + AI hackathon hosted by the Out of Pocket newsletter team. My hackathon team won the “Most Practical Application” prize, and after the announcement went out, some newsletter readers reached out about turning our hack into a product. Although I haven’t been working actively on the project since the event, it’s a promising avenue that I’m looking forward to pursuing more intently in the coming year.

July – September

Back in San Francisco, I settled into familiar routines. Long rides on the PCH gave way to meandering excursions among the redwoods in Marin and the Peninsula; climbs into the Santa Monica Mountains turned into morning ascents of Hawk Hill and the occasional trek up Mt. Tam. I returned to Caldera, the blockchain startup I’d worked at last summer, as a full-time employee, continuing to focus on fullstack engineering with some smart contract work here and there. And I took my annual summer pilgrimage to Pennsylvania to run in my high school cross country team’s alumni meet.

October – December

The last few months of the year were filled with travel. In October, Caldera hosted an offsite in Montreal — my first time in Canada in over a decade. Although the prevalence of young Canadians I’d meet in San Francisco who’d left their homes to work tech jobs here in the States sometimes made me wonder whether there was something wrong with the country, I was pleasantly surprised. The streets were clean and the infrastructure was functional; Montreal had pleasing public plazas, beautiful European-style architecture, and excellent bike lanes; the fall weather was lovely.

November brought me to Bangkok for Devcon, an Ethereum conference, where I met up with friends in the space whom I could’ve seen in San Francisco or New York. It was my first time in Asia. I enjoyed the warmth of the locals, the delicious food, and the thrill of being on a new continent. Unlike my stay in South America last year, though, I didn’t spend much time outside of the major cities, and I was struck by the relentless march of globalization: almost everyone I spoke to spoke English and the malls were full of Western shops. If I’m back, which I hope to be, I want to spend more time outside of the large metropolises.

2025

As I write this, and as I reread 2023’s Year in Review, I realize that I fell a little short this past year, to the extent that I didn’t do anything unequivocally “big, new and risky” in 2024 despite writing that I would do so; to the extent that I alluded to starting a company of my own but didn’t end up doing that. In that respect, 2024 was much less “interesting” than I implied it was going to be.

I imagine daily life will actually be less interesting, though. While I do not yet viscerally understand the day-to-day experience of my founder friends, they have given me a better sense of the immense responsibility inherent to the journey. People will rely on me to steward the creation of something valuable and hopefully important. If things go as well as planned, I will be responsible for making decisions that have ramifications beyond myself and my immediate circles. I will be responsible for any outcome that is not a massive success. It will be hard work, and in many cases, it will not be interesting. Concurrently, the opportunity cost of living in the wilderness for 100 days, spending two months in Argentina, or even taking a week off to bike from San Francisco to Los Angeles will increase substantially; these “interesting” experiences will become substantially less accessible.

This is just one tradeoff of choosing this path. But over my last five-or-so-odd years in the space — having seen so many friends embark on their own founder journeys, and having lived through the early days of a few early-stage startups myself — I think by now I have the best understanding I’ll ever have of what I’ll be getting into short of actually doing it. And I think life will find a way to become interesting in other ways, too, that I don’t see or understand yet. I am excited to see how.