canon events that got me here

it’s the new year. time to start my unqualified writing that i’m inevitably going to stop doing after a certain amount of time bc if i had it in me to consistently write i would’ve been consistently writing over before this time… but i feel good about this one so here goes.

i was at a friend’s 2023 reflections event last night - and while staring at the blank piece of paper in front of me i was trying to figure out how to structure my reflections. “dear diary“ doesn’t really have a nice ring.

it makes me sad when i realize that i don’t remember a lot of the things that happened over the past year - makes me feel like everything gets muddled. so i started scrolling through my image gallery and calendar trying to make a list of everything that happened that was worth remembering. i started w/ the stuff on top of course - getting seed funding, hiring a team, landing a big enterprise contract, the love of my life getting banned from the united states, etc. and then filled in the months that i was missing. i also made a list of people who’d entered my life this year - and how active they were…

i thought about drawing a line chart of how happy i was month to month, and how high my ego was… and decided against it.

i’ve had a pretty good year - all things considered. very main character-like.

i also didn’t feel like it was a total waste of time - which is typically how i feel after reflecting. so i might write up a system to do better reflections (and in doing so create yet one more terrible standard that no one follows)

timeline of my life

so the last year was pretty good. how did i get here?

it feels pretty unlikely that a kid born in a random northern chinese fishing village no one had heard of would end up here.

the following is a rough timeline of the of the events and people who put me on the path to make me who i am today:

• my parents, obviously shaped me pretty aggressively. my dad was a super-genius who tested out of the fishing village by getting the highest gaokao score in the province, and for my entire life made fun of me for not being as smart as he was which probably put some kind of achievement oriented chip on my shoulder. being rebellious against them also made me mess around throughout my freshman year

  • canon event: doesn’t really exist, leaving for college maybe? not being able to party in high school led me to do an excessive amount of it in college until i met…

• alexis, my girlfriend of the past 5 years. i met her in sophomore year. she thought i didn’t have any career prospects, which drove me to prove i can out-achieve everyone else she knew (cliche I know).

  • canon event: writing a reflection about how i wasn’t going to accomplish anything… making me apply to jobs aggressively, one of which was seen by…

• vinay iyengar & sibley silcox, vinay probably doesn’t remember doing this, but he picked my resume out of a pile and decided i was worth… something? he gave me my shot, put me on map. sibley helped me through that program, and helped me find my next thing after the my job was rescinded

  • canon event: giving me a interview and a chance to be a finalist of the bessemer fellowship. my job in that program actually got rescinded due to covid, which led me to

• mary d’onofrio, who took me under her wing at bessemer, and mentored me for the next year. she knew i wanted to start a company, and helped me land the my dream job and next gig.

  • canon event: taking me in to work on the scaling to $100M report

  • canon event: introducing me to one of bessemer’s unicorn founders…

• dillon woods, who broke basically every rule in the hiring playbook by giving a product management role to a new grad w/o any prior product management experience. he threw me into the deep end where i found the interest that led me to textql

  • canon event: taking a bet on me being able to understand the data at a high level of competence, which led me to being ready to talk to…

• mark hay, my better half and easily twice as smart as me. mark left his however-many-hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year job at facebook to work on the crackpot idea that is “what if we could make every single human a data scientist“

  • canon event: starting textql, which was fine but my visa was now in jeopardy unless we’re able to getting funding from a VCs like…

• nitin pachisia & manan mehta, the first investors who gave us our pre-seed capital and helped me sort out my visa needs, they believed in us, and gave us the space to build and learn.

  • canon event: taking a bet on us when no one else would… which led us to…

almost today… really it leads us to our mid-year seed fundraising, but i’m generally averse to the idea of writing retro-spectively about things that are <6 month old bc things could still change and i’d prefer not to eat my words.

anyways. i wanted to write this bc i liked the way i did reflections yesterday and i wanted to give credit to the people who put me on the path that i’m on today, and without whom, my life would obviously be dramatically different.

to everyone who’s caused a canon event in my life. thank you.