2025
in pursuit of greatness
Last year, I wrote that the theme for 2025 would be exploration. It lived up to that promise, moving at a beautiful, breakneck velocity of change.
Founder Mode
The defining change of my 2025 was leaving Warp to start my own company. I’m immensely thankful for the exceptional team I worked with at Warp and the opportunity to rewrite the future of software development.
As a founder now, every morning and night has presented a challenge I’ve never faced before. It is exhausting, humbling, and yet there is absolutely nothing else I’d rather be doing. I’m excited to share more about the company in 2026.
On that note, we are hiring founding engineers! Let me know if you or anyone you know are interested in building at the intersection of AI and the physical world. (More info here)
Standup Comedy Swan Song
Before fully entering founder mode, I decided to have a last hurrah (for now) in my standup journey: I produced my own show, Love Language Models, at the Caveat theater in the Lower East Side. It was a night of surreal milestones: my first time performing a 30-minute set, my first sold-out show, and the slightly terrifying experience of doing comedy in front of 18 of my coworkers. I’m endlessly grateful to have shared the stage with my brilliant friends Adam (@etymologynerd) and Irene (@theirenewoo), and for everyone I’ve met and gotten to learn from in the New York comedy scene.
Looking back, years of performing standup comedy served as a surprisingly helpful training montage for starting a company:
You repeatedly fall down then drag yourself right back up for what’s next.
You sell an idea to a room full of people, often facing immediate judgment or rejection.
If an idea doesn’t work, you iterate quickly until it finally does work.
To succeed, you ultimately have to spot the unique insight. As Paul Graham notes in “How to Get New Ideas”:
The way to get new ideas is to notice anomalies: what seems strange, or missing, or broken? You can see anomalies in everyday life (much of standup comedy is based on this), but the best place to look for them is at the frontiers of knowledge.
Goodbye to All That
I moved three times this year, the most significant being my departure from New York City back to the Bay Area. My two years in New York were vibrant, chaotic, and loud. (After living on Canal Street for a year, I think I have developed the superpower of sleeping through literally anything.)
Leaving was bittersweet. I found myself returning to Joan Didion’s essay “Goodbye to All That,” perhaps the definitive essay on the New York exit:
You see I was in a curious position in New York: it never occurred to me that I was living a real life there. In my imagination I was always there for just another few months, just until Christmas or Easter or the first warm day in May…
New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. To think of “living” there was to reduce the miraculous to the mundane.
Didion was right that New York felt like living in a dream, but I found that the “mundane” was exactly what made the city real to me. I’ll miss carrying home $12 bags of 50 frozen dumplings from Shu Jiao Fu Zhou, standing in line with friends for $40 Broadway tickets on a snowy winter morning, and balancing boxes of poached pear pizzas from Mama’s Too on the subway. I’m excited to start finding the mundane in my new home in San Francisco.
In Pursuit of Greatness
Amidst the journey of building something new, I felt especially inspired by those who have truly mastered their craft. I visited the Charles M. Schulz Museum and was struck by the fact that he spent 54 years iterating on his comic strips. I found sparks of that same fire in the singular discipline shown in Jiro Dreams of Sushi, the raw competitiveness of the athletes in Court of Gold, and the relentless grit of Jon M. Chu in his memoir Viewfinder, in which he reflects upon how his Bay Area upbringing and startup mentality shaped his filmmaker career.
While controversial to some, Timothée Chalamet’s quote from the SAG Awards in February stuck with me throughout the year:
I know we’re in a subjective business, but the truth is, I’m really in pursuit of greatness. I know people don’t usually talk like that, but I want to be one of the greats.
If 2025 was about the velocity of change and the courage to start, 2026 is about the discipline of the craft. It’s time to move past the era of exploration and focus on the pursuit of greatness.
2025 Wrapped
📚 19 books
🖼️ 12 museums
🛸 42,320 miles over 23 flights
🧋 5 boba drinks (The lowest in my 5 years of writing Substack posts by far… Recession indicator?)
💀 At least 7 apps that did their own stats recaps, which is too many. I did not need to know I was in the top 0.1% of viewers of YC’s YouTube channel.
Incomplete list of things I enjoyed in 2025:
Books: Viewfinder (Jon M. Chu), The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (Agatha Christie), Klara and the Sun (Kazuo Ishiguro), The Idiot (Elif Batuman)
Movies: 12 Angry Men (1957), My Neighbor Totoro (1988), Your Name (2016), Wake Up Dead Man (2025), Ne Zha 2 (2025)
Theater: John Proctor is the Villain, Sunset Boulevard, Death Becomes Her, The Outsiders
Museums: Sanxingdui Museum (Guanghan, China), Guggenheim Museum (New York), Tenement Museum (New York), Charles M. Schulz Museum (Santa Rosa, CA)
If you have 30 seconds to spare, I’d love if you could reply this email (or in the comments) with a quick note about where you are in the world today, 1 highlight from 2025, and 1 thing you’re excited for in 2026.
Happy new year everyone, and may the Force be with you in 2026!
I had a baby in October 2025 and I’m looking forward to seeing how that changes me as an artist !