Every year, I do a reflection / planning post. Here was last year: 2020 -> 2021

And here goes this one:

2021 Reflection

What a grind of a year. Highlights:

  • My son is walking & talking.
  • My wife still loves me (and we’re having another kid next month).
    • We started a weekly meeting that’s some mix of planning & therapy.
      • We’re (sometimes) proactive, not always reactive
  • I helped 5 people get their first coding job through a pooldash apprenticeship program.
  • I doubled my salary & love my job even more.
  • I became an accredited investor & wrote my first angel check
  • I sold a lot of crypto and spent it on:
    • Angel investments
    • The IRS (taxes)
    • pooldash (mostly to pay junior engineers)
    • replacing my salary for 4 months while I worked on my own projects
  • I helped dozens of friends make risk-free money mining Helium
  • We started a new small-group at our church
  • Many of my friends are starting to realize their potential & are becoming the leaders the world needs.

Lowlights:

  • I failed at my Pooldash goal (wanted 500 subscribers, got 110). The product is hard to work on, and the junior devs aren’t learning as much now that I’m part-time again.
  • I gained 10 pounds of fat (whoops!).
  • I broke my foot (yesterday).
  • I didn’t read as much as I wanted.
  • Our car got stolen.
  • I don’t like social media anymore. The engagement-optimized algorithms make it difficult to just stay in touch with friends… I waste lots of time scrolling 10-second videos.
  • I’m tired all the time & have trouble being as thoughtful as I want (I’ve forgotten people’s names & significant things about their life during conversations).
  • An old friend (who I don’t keep up with) died unexpectedly. He had young kids, and the news really rocked me.
  • I’m not writing as much.

Observations:

  • I thought a lot about where I wanted to focus my time (and where not to).
    • This paid off, but I’m getting diminishing returns on time spent introspecting.
  • At work & home & church, my focus is increasingly outward (to magnify others, not myself).
  • I love angel investing.
    • I had one person tell me I should start a fund, and several people ask me to invest crypto for them (I told everyone “no”).
    • I’m not sure that I have the patience or rigor to invest other people’s money.
    • Crypto bull markets are way more fun than crypto bear markets.
  • I still spent too much time thinking about meta-problems with pooldash (business model, technical implementation)
  • I mixed friends & finances a little bit with the HNT thing, and… I didn’t hate it!
  • I have a lot of strong, altruistic motivations behind my actions… but I rarely state them explicitly.

2022 Planning

What I want

  1. I want my sons to be kind, wise, and strong – this is my prayer every night. It’s a very weird time to be raising young men, as the world is unclear on what it wants from masculinity. Toddlers, however, need very clear direction. I want to be an example for them, and to surround them with other such friends.

  2. I want to help people even more people, but indirectly. In the past year, I’ve gone very deep with a small number of people. However, I’m getting spread thin, so I need more leverage to keep this ball rolling. I want to focus on creating cultures where others can thrive & contribute. This is a common thread across my job (I’m L6 at Coinbase), my church (I now lead a small-group), and my family (it’s growing!).

  3. I want to have fun & learn more. Many of my failed attempts to read more & work harder were solo-efforts, so I want to try making this goal more social. I’m interested in starting radically new habits & continuing the trend of building in public (like this blog, and pooldash).

  4. I want to make more asymmetric bets, and (in the spirit of goal 2) to help my friends participate. I had my first 1000x return this year (with Helium), but it was difficult to describe to friends early because it’s a weird sort-of mix between investment & project & fun technical exploration. I had many join in once I provided an easy entry-point, and this year, I want to provide that for everyone that wants to participate in crypto.

How I’ll get there

  1. I’ll keep spending lots of time with my family.

    • I’ve got 4 months of paternity leave coming up soon.
    • We removed our TV, bought more books.

  2. I’ll talk more about the why, and less about the what or how.

    • I need to get comfortable voicing my aspirations and showing people why I’m motivated.
    • I’ll avoid ruinous empathy by not always assisting with everyone’s personal problems.
    • I’ll set ambitious goals, lead by example, and let people rise to the occasion.

  3. I will start a monthly Youtube channel where I explain a complicated thing to normal people. I might get a new friend to join me each episode. We’ll read a complicated book or paper or something that I’ve wanted to learn anyways, and learn it so well that we can teach it to others.

I’ll also simplify the Pooldash architecture & deployment using a new product, Serverless Cloud. It’s still very early and possibly unfit for production data, but the framework will improve over time, and it’s currently impossible for junior devs to be productive on the backend. It’ll be more fun to build this way, and I can be a pioneer in the space (especially in the data-modeling department).

  1. I love helping early crypto protocols grow by mining and staking, but it’s technically complicated, so most people don’t do it. My friends & I think we can build a dead-simple staking service that makes it easy for our friends (and strangers) to stake crypto alongside us… So we’ll look into that.

I also have several friends building exciting companies, and I want to invest my time & money to magnify them when possible.

Closing Thoughts

I want to spend less time contemplating problems alone, and more time building a better future together.

Me, my wife, and my 2-yr old son, sitting in front of a bail of hay.