A Late 2021 Year in Review
Remote working, Interview Query, personal finances, and goals
It’s a late 2021 year in review but 2022 started out badly when I got Covid for a week. Then somehow I got an even worse cold a few weeks later that lasted 10 days. So overall I’ve felt miserable enough in 2022 to grant myself some new life to reviewing 2021 again.
Also in light with recent war events in Ukraine, I will state that I’ve felt an even more tremendous gratitude while reflecting on this past year and my life. And so it’s been a great exercise in really re-centering everything when I might feel frustrated.
Here’s a high-level breakdown of 2021 for me:
Working and traveling remotely
Built out a team and grew Interview Query
Update on personal finances and FIRE
Habits and 2021 Goals
Goals for 2022
Working and Traveling Remotely
At the end of 2020, I moved away from San Francisco and a house I had lived in for four years, to travel and work remotely with my girlfriend. This was also the first time we were living together, which made the shift that much more special for us as we went from visiting each other on the weekends to moving in together into Airbnbs.
We didn’t plan on being nomads out the gate. The only real goal in February 2021 was to move to Hawaii to surf and hike on the weekends, hangout with some friends that were already there, and try living in a new place for three months.
But after 4 months in Oahu, we decided to continue the remote living. Our summer was packed with four weddings, constant bouncing around, and mostly crashing around in parents basement. I ended up driving the entire west coast twice, from Portland to San Diego and then back up to Seattle! And Cindy and I even flew back to Hawaii in Maui as a best man for my friends wedding for a week. Needless to say, we were pretty tired of not really having a home base for 3 months.
Then in the fall, Cindy and I finally settled down again and moved to New York for 6 weeks and stayed in Downtown Brooklyn. And like snow birds we moved out to LA at the beginning of November to round out the end of the year.
What remote nomading has been like
Living remotely has been a great experience but does requires a certain kind of commitment towards continuously early planning. Months in advance, we would have to decide a location, find an Airbnb good for remote work, and then figure out travel dates and moving logistics.
For example when we were planning to move to LA from NYC, I was negotiating with multiple Airbnb hosts for exact dates within our budget, figuring out how we would get a car from San Jose down to LA, and all the time deciding which airlines to take to optimize our airline point redemptions. Personally I think if one person doesn’t actually enjoy planning, it would be a very complicated life. Also maybe this is obvious, but we don’t have any kids or pets, which I’m sure adds some high overhead to everything.
I would say if know your constraints (budget, amenities, dates, location), then it’s much easier to just apply those constraints immediately in your search and find a monthly long home quite quickly. Our own constraints are usually:
< $3500 / month
Strong Wifi
Washer / dryer
At least a bedroom (no studios because you need that Zoom call separation)
Nice neighborhood to take walks around after work
Additionally it helps to be more minimalists. When we first moved to Hawaii we brought two suitcases each. Now I’m very selective about what goes into my bags. I’m also buying specific items that can be compartmentalized for travel. And I’ve mostly stopped using Amazon Prime entirely.
Forming Community
In the in-between, both Cindy and I are fortunate that we can live at our parents or sibling’s homes for short stints in-between long term Airbnbs. Usually I try to time them with going back home for birthdays or holidays for at least a week.
Living with Cindy for the first time was also great. Previously before this, Cindy lived in Milpitas and would stay over at my place on the weekends in a place I also shared with 5 other people. Having our own place together gave us a sense of what our routines and division of responsibilities should be. Who cooked more often and who needed to clean. How we were specifically going to set time for us to go on dates and talk instead of just always being around each other.
One tricky part was developing a community outside of the two of us. In Hawaii, we were very lucky to have friends that were already embedded in the community. And surprisingly we developed new friendships by meeting friends of friends. Having activities where you can go surfing or hiking together really helped form those connections.
While we would also have friends that would visit us at different locations, I felt having existing people you know in the area definitely made the experience better. Staying in NYC made it really easy to meet up with friends every night. But driving an hour in LA traffic to meet up with people created a tough barrier towards establishing connections.
In Hawaii we formed a few new friendships that we continued to meet in other cities as well. And I think if you’re nomadic in general, you’re very open to trying new activities and interested in socializing to create connections for the long run. These “nomad friends” we met were also Asian, worked in tech in SF for a few years, and the same age as us. So it felt pretty natural to hangout and continue to see each other in fleeting moments for the next few years when our locations matched up.
How long can we keep it up?
There’s no set date yet until we’ve decided to stop living out of Airbnb’s for the moment. With home prices at an all time high and rent prices breaking through pre-Covid prices, it’s really hard to justify either buying a home or signing a year long lease. The economics of living out of Airbnbs is actually not that bad and I’ll talk more about these costs later down the blog.
One thing I’ve noticed though is that most people we met last year who were remote nomads have started to settle down a bit and sign leases.
We spent January and February in Salt Lake City this year. And in the next few months we’ll be going to Santa Cruz to be closer to Cindy’s family (and good surfing) for two months. And I’m still excited to test more and more places.The main deciding point will be if we eventually tire out of remote living and feel a need to settle down somewhere to really build community. But for now - it’s quite easy to get Airbnbs even in places like San Francisco for a few months at a time.
Coming up soon I’ll be traveling to:
March 10th to March 28th → Sayulita and Mexico City
March 28th to May 27th → Santa Cruz
June → Vancouver, BC
July → ?????
Interview Query in 2021
In 2021 we focused on growing our team and really building out more iterations of the product. We released an interview experience and salary discussion board, multiple choice challenge assessments, an interactive Python and SQL editor, and curated playbooks for interviews.
We grew our team from just Shane and I to 2.5 full time engineers and multiple marketing and operations hires. If I were to recap each year:
In 2019, the first year of starting Interview Query, I learned how to build a side project while working a full time job.
2020 as the year where I quit my job and learned how to grow a side project with Shane into actual income generation to financially sustain our lives.
2021 was then the year we learned how to grow a team, hold meetings, and scale out our work beyonds just the two of us. This meant holding team offsite, learning how to manage, and figuring out how to use our time effectively for prioritizing the most important tasks.
This was also the first time that we really decided to reinvest into our business. This was a difficult concept to swallow because we realized as a bootstrapped business that it meant spending our own money to increase growth while reducing our overall profit margin. But growth comes with costs, and I think Interview Query really isn’t met to be one of those one-person million dollar businesses. We both still have ambitions for continual improvement and expansion of our data science platform.
Focusing on the core product
Last year was tough for a couple reasons besides growth pains. One difficult thing was figuring out which directions we wanted to take the business. When you're building a business at an early stage, it felt like there were a lot of inflection states and different directions we could take the business. And mainly this resulted from a lack of focus on a short and long term vision.
For example, in the short term, our goal is almost always to help data scientists pass interviews and get jobs. But in the long term, there was a lot of talk and thoughts about different avenues to grow our business’s total addressable market (TAM). We thought we could tackle recruiting, because that helps us increase our market cap. Or maybe we would pivot to data science education like Datacamp where we could sell to businesses.
This consistent lack of long term vision caused me to spend more time condering different future plans and lose focus on the short term plan that mattered on the day to day. I stopped making Youtube videos for a while because I lacked motivation and felt like the grind wasn't worth it. But I think if I kept on putting out videos, the compounding effect of getting better at Youtube would have showed gains on its own.
I realized since then that it’s very helpful to align focus towards a singular goal even if it’s only for a quarter or two. This shorter term vision helps with planning. Now Shane and I sync up for planning every 6 weeks so we can re-evaluate, run projections, and remind ourselves of our long term vision and goals.
This every-6-weeks-planning-session is to allow us to avoid constantly running around with our heads chopped up, changing the business strategy or the spec for engineering projects. So far it kind of works - we can’t really stop everything from popping up out of the blue, but I think batching the planning process is helpful.
This year I’m also doubling down on our core strategies of content marketing, Youtube, and building out the best data science interview preparation product out there. We will still try to expand and try releasing new products that make us revenue, but they’ll always be focused on getting data scientists new jobs. While I think a lot of our content is useful beyond that for just general data science learning, I don’t think we’ll make any big pivots outside of what we’ve already done so far.
FOMO Everywhere
No matter what though, I did feel a lot of FOMO in 2021 with crypto projects and web3. It’s hard to stay focused on one thing when there’s so many different people “getting rich” and projects blowing up around you.
Overall I’m very happy where we’re at still and imagine our business as a “Cruise Ship Business”. I want growth to be linear and consistent so it can affords us a good enough lifestyle to maintain flexibility in a large portion of our lives outside of work.
Plus it helps that it’s still interesting to work on!
Personal Finances and FIRE
The last two years have been extremely fortunate for me and anyone else who owned some crypto or equity positions in the market. The stock market went crazy in March 2020 and I only sold some tiny positions (which were mistakes ofc) and then the crypto markets went crazy last year and I held on to not sell for a while but eventually did sell some positions when my ETH and BTC became over 30% of my portfolio.
Since then however I’ve started buying back into crypto. And we’ll see how that goes. The two big worries most people have is on inflation and figuring out exactly where to put their cash. This year I learned a few cruel facts about growth stocks (Fuck BYND) and am now placing less bets into individual stocks and slowly moving cash into ETFs and index funds. Since I plan on making portfolio adjustments only once a month, my strategy isn’t very useful for highly volatiles assets. Except for I guess crypto because of HODL!
As for my FIRE journey, I’m still very far away. I did a “Rich Life” exercise last month where I imagined what my rich life goals were (home price, types of vacations, what I would spend money on in a recurring basis), and then got different target net worth numbers for what I would have to hit in order to completely stop working to support that life.
All in all, I think it’s a useful exercise to do, but if I know that even when I achieve this “target number”, I probably still can’t stop myself from working at least a few hours a day. I think FIRE is a tough concept to wrap your head around. I currently feel “retired” right now where I enjoy my work and flexibility and wouldn’t make any major changes.
I’m also continuing to work on investing less of my time into day to day work in finances, FIRE, and planning stuff. My girlfriend has caught me browsing homes for sale in San Francisco on Redfin late at night or planning out trips that are unpractically far in advance. These activities are absolute time-wasters and probably keeping me from actually achieving the habits I want to make on a day to day basis.
So my goal in 2022 is to give myself the first week of every month to do a bunch of planning, and then stop looking at it until the next month approaches. This means no looking at stocks, crypto, expenses, Airbnbs, basically any planning or any kind until the first week of each month. We’ll see if this even works, but I find myself falling into the blackhole of planning all the time.
Personal Expenses
Touching up on living out of Airbnbs, I did spend probably a good amount of my time last year living at home which helped cut living costs. On average in 2021 I spent <$1K/month on housing amortized.
But on average across the Airbnb’s in Hawaii, San Diego, NYC, and LA, our costs were around $2.6K to $3K per month together. NYC was on the high end of costing around $3.8K/month for rent for a modern 2 bedroom unit in Brooklyn and then in Hawaii we found a 1 bedroom apartment for $2.6K/month. So overall, I think pretty good for us given we didn’t have to pay for things like utilities, toiletries, and furniture.
My spending in general jumped back up post-Covid. Having a business also does make the accounting for personal expenses much harder but generally I didn’t mind spending more money on things that I valued.
Lastly, in 2021 I made my first big monetary donation. I gave money to the Coalition of Rainforest Nations. This was recommended to me after reading a few articles on effective altruism and the best way to contribute towards stopping climate change. I’d like to write more on the subject but I figured out how to set up a tax-advantaged charity account, and it’s made it much more of an incentive to donate now because I can think about offsetting my gains on certain stocks whilst also seeing the return on how my money is being spent in donations.
Habits - Reading and Writing
In the latter half of 2021 I started experimenting with Streaks. It's an awesome, very simple and clean app that's really helped build habits using a combination of notifications and streaks. It's a great example of how you can use notifications and badges that historically has entrapped millions of people into technology addiction, but now for a purpose of building habits.
I myself always shut off notifications and badges for most apps by default, and find myself also sometimes angry at the apps where I felt responsible to turn it on (like Uber Eats to check when my food arrived, but enraged when they send stupid marketing campaign notifications). But Streaks uses the notifications intelligently, and if you stop using the app after a few days they stop reminding you altogether (maybe thinking you’re a lost cause).
However as fun as this app is, I haven’t managed to continuously really dedicate myself to some habits. I’ve struggled with both reading and writing habits as well as an exercise routine.
One of the major difficulties of this nomad lifestyle is keeping a routine with any sort of consistency. For example I enjoy daily exercising when it’s surfing or snowboarding, but when I’m not in an area where I can do either or those things, I find myself just not working out for weeks.
Same for reading and writing. While I have a goal to read and write at least 30 minutes per day before I start work, this gets thrown out the window if I get up early for a surf / ski session. So figuring out how to build these habits with changing routines is something I’m still working on.
Overall while I’d love to set a daily goal, I believe I’d have to make it stupidly easy. Like write and read one paragraph or do 25 push-ups a day. Otherwise it’s very easy to forget and move on with your life. The only question I have is if doing 25 push ups every morning will slowly convince to do the thing I want to do - which is 20 minutes of actual exercise.
It’s hard to understand if these habits really help me build towards becoming a better person, because whenever I do them, I don’t think I feel different. And yet in 2022 while having done exactly 0 of these habits I have managed to get sick for 2.5 weeks so potentially, I can’t even understand how good I feel when I’m doing it right.
Goals for 2022
I set a few goals for 2022 but haven’t stuck to any of them. If I had to decide on a few it would probably be to set some sort of habit tracking.
I want to get some sort of coaching done. Whether it’s CEO coaching or surf coaching, I think at the very least, it will help me understand how to improve the current data science coaching business that I’m running.
I want to get in a writing habit. There are very expensive courses online that seem to guarantee that you will be able to have a writing habit by the end of it. Not sure if I can commit to doing those.
We have big growth goals for Interview Query in 2022. The opportunity cost of not-being a data scientist / engineer in a big tech company is very high right now. For my current seniority level, both my co-founder and I should be making >$300K, albeit being slaves to the corporate machine. While the original goal was to make money while running our own company, now the goals are to continue to grow the business and our value in the business.
Meditation habit. I was pretty good last year and just stopped the last few months. But I can jump back on this one.
Exercise habit outside of lifestyle sports. I need to find a quick twenty minute exercise routine I can do every day at home if I don’t end up going out.
I’m going to keep my goals short so I can try to achieve them. Overall it’s still going to be a struggle. Self-improvement is one of those things that’s so fun to plan but so difficult to implement. I would love any feedback from any of you reading on goals.
Conclusion
Overall 2021 was a great year and I’m hoping 2022 will be just as great! So far it hasn’t been bad besides getting sick. And I’m looking forward to figuring out more stuff with the rest of you.
Expect some more sporadic posts the rest of the year as I try to get back into writing!