Hey friends,

As some of you know, I’ve been dreaming of a trip for the past six years. I haven’t had a strong idea of what I wanted to do on the trip besides that I wanted an extended trip around the world for an indefinite amount of time. Circumstances have never been right to take the trip until now. So bittersweet as it is, I wanted to let you all know that I’ll be leaving the country beginning on the 31st of January. I purchased a one-way ticket to move to Sydney, Australia.

Why

This trip has grown into somewhat of a life mission. Using Bezo’s regret minimization framework, it’s something that I would certainly regret not having done ten years from now. Frankly, I don’t entirely know what I want to get out of it besides getting to know what life and people are like in other parts of the world. I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to take many trips in the past years but still...

I’d liken the YC Interview to half boxing match, half investor pitch. My friend Shao and I began the YC journey only 2 months ago when he emailed me asking if I wanted to apply. Having a lot of respect for him as a developer I agreed to grab some pho with him over lunch at Turtle Tower. He showed me a project he was working on that spun up a VM in the browser and spawned interfaces (cloud IDE/terminal) in separate browser windows. I was skeptical for a second but quickly saw value in it if it could all be in one window and could be spun up in one button click. We filled out the application, filmed a video together at Hack Reactor, got the app reviewed by a couple friends and then we sent it in. No expectations. To our surprise, a couple weeks later we got the generic email inviting us for an interview two weeks later on Monday, April 28 2014. We were off to the races!

There were many...

I’ve felt restrained lately through no fault by my own. The feeling is that I’m not getting to create and build as much as I’d like. This is coming off the coding bootcamp I took last year where the world was literally my oyster. I felt more empowered than ever before to create any product I wanted to. A sharp contrast to my current job as a software engineer where I spend much more time in the process of creating production code as opposed to true ‘building’. My writings here will be to play around with new ideas. To have some time to myself to experiment with new business ideas, philosophies, strategies and potential explorations.