Starting Up

Previous years: 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, and 2019.

Putting together a personal “year-in-review” at the end of each year has become one of my favorite annual rituals. Here’s 2025’s:

January – March

• Began the year in Arizona with some friends from high school.¹

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  Shoutout to Sam[‘s parents] for letting us use the condo in Scottsdale! We had an awesome time.

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  Day hiked down the Grand Canyon, ate at the turquoise McDonald’s in Sedona, and did an overnighter in the Superstitions east of Phoenix. Arizona presented a completely different biome from anything I’d ever experienced (for one, I’d never seen wild saguaros before). Once again amazed by the immense biodiversity of the USA.

• On my way back to SF from Arizona, stopped by UCLA.²

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  Thanks Ariv for letting me crash on the couch!

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  Dropped in for the first lecture of Terry Tao’s³

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  Unfortunately, I never got to enroll in one of his classes when I was actually a student (he only teaches graduate classes now).

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  course on analytic prime number theory (after this, I think the last item on my LA bucket list is to see LeBron play). The next morning, went for a bike ride on the beach in Santa Monica and stopped by my favorite food truck for lunch. By the afternoon, smoke from the Palisades Fire was beginning to obscure the sun. Ended up on a friend’s rooftop that night, stunned and mesmerized by the view of the bright orange flames, stark against the dark night sky, devouring the hillsides just a few miles away.

• Later in January, headed up to Sacramento for a day to attend my UCLA roommate’s graduation from the California Highway Patrol Academy. If you’re ever driving in the East Bay, keep an eye out for him on the freeways. I unfortunately did not receive a get-out-of-jail-free card.

• Ran the 1500 meters in my first official track meet since maybe high school?⁴

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  Thanks Riley for dragging me over to Berkeley for this!

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  Finished in 4:43, which translates to just a tad over five minutes in a full mile (1609.3 meters).

• After taking a weekend course with Bay Area Motorcycle Training last December, spent a morning in March filling out paperwork at the DMV and officially got my M1 motorcycle license.⁵

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  I was originally inspired to get a motorcycle license after experiencing them (as a passenger, not as a driver) in Bangkok when I visited last November. Not only was it many times faster than taking a car, but the experience of weaving and zipping through the city in the open air was absolutely incredible. (I have not yet purchased a motorcycle of my own, though.)

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April – June

• Kicked off April with the “annual” long-distance cycling trip, now in its second year. Alex and Elliot flew out from New York to join Cooper and me out west. We started in Monterey and covered the miles we skipped last year — down Highway 1, past the Bixby Bridge to Pfeiffer State Park, then continuing on until we hit the roadblock just north of Regent’s Slide. To get around the closure, we went inland, through Carmel Valley over to the Salinas Valley. After a night in King City, we headed back to the coast via a gorgeous, grueling climb over the recently-reopened Nacimiento–Fergusson Road, then popped up to the southern end of the slide before turning around and heading south once more, past Cambria and Morro Bay to SLO.
• The Thursday after Easter, after multiple months of weekly morning rides up Hawk Hill, the line at Arsicault Bakery on Clement and Arguello was finally short enough that I decided to stop in and see what the fuss was all about. I got a chocolate croissant. It was absolutely delectable.

• Finally took the leap and left my job at Caldera in May. Took a month off to travel, first to Hawaii (my first time on the islands⁶

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  Growing up on the east coast, it never really made sense to go to Hawaii, given the 6-hour time difference and 11-hour flight time. You could fly from New York to Cairo in less time!

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  ). To get a sense of place, I picked up a copy of Dreams from My Father from the Barnes & Noble in the Ala Moana Center. Was thoroughly impressed by Barack Obama’s writing, as well as some of the clearest, cleanest beaches I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading on.

• After Hawaii, the family headed to LA to celebrate my brother’s graduation from USC. Perhaps as expected, it was a higher-budget production than UCLA’s. There was a very cool drone show.

• Headed to Peru for two weeks where a group of eight of us⁷

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  Advait, Alex, Elliot, Justin, Noah, Richard, and Rohan — thanks y’all for making it work and coming along!

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  hiked the Salkantay Trek to Machu Picchu. It was awesome to be back in South America, where we could practice our Spanish and live well for less. We connected with locals in Cusco over games of street chess; enjoyed sumptuous dinners of lomo saltado, coca tea, and (for some of us) cuy; and savored stunning, snow-capped Andean landscapes. On our way back to the States, we stopped in Lima for a few days, where Alex and I brought Elliot to meet our friend Juan Jose, who’d helped us cross the Peru–Ecuador border back in December 2023.

• In mid-June, packed up the essentials and drove down to San Diego, where I officially started working on Harbor with Albert, my cofounder and good friend from Michigan. Leveraging Albert’s deep experience in the medtech space, we’re building software to run clinical trials more quickly and efficiently.

July – September

• Spent most of my days building product in the living room of our apartment in the suburbs⁸

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  Our neighborhood in San Diego was evidently quite polarizing back in the day.

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  while Albert prototyped and demoed to potential customers using Lovable. We’re writing lots of full-stack TypeScript with Next.js, tRPC, and Drizzle — more about it on our company blog if you’re interested.

• The SF roommates visited San Diego for the 4th and we took a short trip down to Mexico over the weekend. Stayed in a lovely oceanview, beachfront Airbnb in Rosarito and saw the axolotls at the Tijuana Aquarium.⁹

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  “My coworkers were all super freaked out when I told them I was going to Tijuana but it was actually totally fine!” remarked one of the guys after the trip.

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• Caldera launched its token. Was very exciting to see the post-TGE staking smart contract I wrote securing double-digit millions of dollars in assets at its peak.
• Published an npm package with some bits of code I wrote for efficient list reordering in the Harbor web application. It is now depended on by the tldraw project and (as of this writing) has been downloaded over 200,000 times.

• After finishing the prerequisites at CCSF earlier this year, spent two hours in a nondescript office building in Kearny Mesa one August morning taking the California Real Estate Salesperson Exam. Now the proud holder of DRE license #02302312.¹⁰

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  As I am not currently attached to a responsible broker, I am unable to actually practice for now. Focused on building a different sort of business for the time being!

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  Next license on the list might be GCP? (i.e., Good Clinical Practice — a certification needed to run clinical trials).

• Attended my high school cross country team’s alumni meet in August. Ran just a bit slower than last year; happy I wasn’t too much slower!

October – December

• The defining geographical difference between San Francisco and San Diego for me is the canyons. If San Francisco is a city of hills, San Diego is a city of canyons. So just about every other day in San Diego, I’d go for a six-mile run in the canyon near the apartment, usually around the end of the day. The canyon cuts westward towards the ocean, and at its entrance, there’s a beautiful view of the sunset if you’re there at the right time. For maybe the first time in my life, I physically witnessed the seasonal tilt of the earth. In June, when I first started running the canyon, the sun would set in the northern horizon, vaguely towards Del Mar. Sometime in November, I realized it was now setting much further southward, towards La Jolla. Pretty neat!¹¹

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  I had a similar experience when I was on the Pacific Crest Trail in Summer 2022 — every evening I’d see the moon’s phase slowly change. On the other hand, when not in nature, I can go many days seeing neither moon nor sunset…

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• Paid UCLA another $130 to get the most recent year’s grade distribution data from the Records office and uploaded them to uclagrades.com, a site I created a few years ago for students to visualize course grades. The site now averages about 50,000 pageviews per month and peaks at 200,000+ monthly during enrollment periods (still hosted for free on Vercel, for now… but I may need to upgrade soon).
• After a little over four months of continuous building (on pretty much a 10-10-7 schedule), we (i.e., Harbor Labs LLC) closed our first customer at the end of October — a midsize medtech in San Diego — and recognized our first revenue in November.
• In mid-November, we applied to YC and got an interview. We flew up to SF and met some of the partners in person in their office in the Dogpatch.
• Unfortunately, we did not get into YC this time. They told us they wanted to see more revenue and live usage in a real study with real subjects (as of this writing, our first customers are designing their initial study schemas on our platform but no studies are live with subjects yet). We will get this done and apply again in the spring.
• Moved to a new place in Point Loma to be closer to the beach and to the airport.

• Ended the year with our company’s first month (December) of positive cash flow!¹²

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  (not November because we issue our invoices on net 30 terms)To be fully transparent, neither of us are taking a salary, so the company expenses on the books currently only reflect Google Workspace, our desks, some cloud costs, Albert’s new laptop, etc. — no living expenses included. Because of that, we haven’t truly achieved “ramen profitability” yet. But we’ll be there soon — hopefully with just one more customer!

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2026

One of the highlights of putting together these “years in review” — besides going through my photos and reliving all the memories from the past 365 days — is reading what I wrote last year and seeing how the current year played out against my expectations.

To friends in San Francisco: Albert’s place in San Diego has been a refreshing change of scenery these past few months. This city is quieter; I feel more focused; the weather is better, too. But there are many moments when I find myself missing the city; I still keep a room ready in the old Cole Valley flat for whenever I’ll be back. I’m not exactly sure when that will be, but if things play out next year the way we’re hoping them to, we might just be back. I’ll see you then.