A Quick Review of 2024

A lot can happen in one year

Starting with Life

With friends in SF turning 31!

At the end of 2023 I moved back to San Francisco. After slowmadding across much of the U.S. and parts of Europe for three years, I decided it was time to re-establish life in one spot.

I’ve always viewed San Francisco as being the best place in the world to live. The benefits of urban walkability, moderate climate, and easy access to nature really do personally outweigh the common cons that most people see in affordability, homelessness, and a high transplant community. I have committed to living in the city for the long term and one of my goals this year is to find more established relationships with people that live in the same neighborhood or vicinity.

My friend Vicky gets married in Belize!

Life has however noticeably slowed since staying in one spot. Part of living in one place is establishing a routine and after a few months, but I was getting kind of sick of working from home, surfing mostly alone, and then not having much to do after work hours. While I used to have distinct memories and through each place I visited while slowmadding, in 2024 everything felt like kind of a blur in-between big vacations and trips.

My girlfriend and I traveled quite a bit for three destination weddings and big hikes (doing both Kauai and Half-Dome). This next year is one where we finally only have one wedding on the calendar, and I’m quite grateful to be able to reclaim our travel schedule for ourselves this year.

El Salvador in May 2024 with 8 to 10 ft waves

Interview Query

Interview Query is going fairly well. And a lot of it is based on how I personally feel about the business. My last post detailed what’s happened in the past five years, but looking back at 2024, we’re starting 2025 in a much better spot than the year before, and 2024 was also a MUCH better spot than when we were in 2023 (though I can’t say the same from 2022 to 2023). So overall, I can’t complain, even if sometimes I feel restless about moving faster.

This year I’m very happy that our team is incredible. I spent a lot of last year set in the same rhythms as before, trying to find underdeveloped talent and getting lucky maybe 20% of the time but then 80% of the time regretting hiring most people. I’ve since started to understand how important it is to find the right person for the right role and to not have any shred of doubts about anyone when bringing them on.

From the beginning, a difficult part of being a bootstrapped lifestyle business was establishing the line for whether to take profits or reinvest into the business. And many times I attributed bad decisions on my part to financial insecurity, for example choosing maybe a slightly worse candidate because they were cheaper. Going forward, I’m happy with the existing team, the direction we’re going with the business, and very much learning that it only makes sense to hire the best talent.

We have a strong three year trajectory even as the rapid changes of AI solidify that nothing is set in stone. As the cost of generating content has effectively gone to zero, it’s made our company realize the decreasing marginal effect of charging for access to content. But simultaneously our opportunity space has gotten a lot bigger. We are now first movers in a space at the forefront of understanding which skills will matter in this post-AI workforce. We’re excited to be building engaging learning experiences at speeds never seen before.

Personally I feel re-engaged into working on Interview Query as long as I can see growth opportunities in our sights. And getting back to building again makes everything much better.

Writing

I’ve gotten a bit more bullish on writing on my Substack and filming Youtube videos this year. I wrote 27 newsletters in 2024, a new record. Nowadays I have a nice set routine in the mornings. I use Flow, set a timer for 30 minutes, and just start writing. It blocks every other app on my desktop and I spend a lot of time sitting, staring out the window into the view of the rolling hills of SF, and if 30 minutes go by on Flow then I get to mark my Streak in my app as done for today.

In January I caught a big break on my Youtube channel and released a video that wasn’t about data science and was something I enjoyed writing and filming about. I had noticed a few things in the tech job market: new grads that couldn’t get jobs, friends in tech that were super rich, and the burgeoning AI market, and I and wanted to share where I was seeing the trends going.

And after publishing, for the first time I broke 100K+ views on Youtube within the first week (and currently at 200K+). What’s changed is that I am finally producing content that overlaps my personal interest and secondarily acts as a marketing channel for Interview Query. There’s a lot of stuff I want to go over in tech, AI, and related topics, so I’m bullish on hopefully creating more of this type of content in 2025.

Secondarily writing some of my Youtube scripts with Claude has been incredible. I am almost embarrassed by how much Claude writes versus what I write, but the amount of output can’t be denied. I still do much of the idea generation myself, but I have to say AI really helps getting me through the finish line. I still have fears of losing my own sense of style and voice, but those are hardly worth caring about when I can produce so much more.

I still personally believe that long form writing is the long term path towards sustainable development throughout my career. I’m not sure where AI fits in that, but there’s still something incredibly rewarding long term in building your own brand, voice, and outlet for ideas and thoughts. When I think back to different ways I can excel in my career, becoming a better writer almost always seems like the end state.

Finances

In February 2024 after a few months of apartment hopping in the city I bought a multi-family unit with my parents in the Central Richmond.

It was kind of an extreme directional purchase but part of the calculus was that my parents wanted to live in SF part of the year as they got older. They came and visited me in SF for the first time when I had an apartment and immediately were astounded by the richness of Golden Gate Park and the plentiful amount of Chinese food restaurants within walking distance, and immediately started looking at open houses.