malacled

about both the iphone and the ivy league

you were right

(in my humble opinion) in some ways it’s easier to build an unicorn in Silicon Valley (due to access to capital), but in some ways it’s harder. because although it's relatively “easy” to raise a pre-seed round for a credible founder, there is no concentration of talent in fewer companies. the talent is scattered across thousands of mediocre startups. plus, your top talent will be constantly poached by OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind, and all the other top firms. it's much easier to create a talent monopoly in an emerging market. so the new winning startup formula is to get capital in Silicon Valley, but build the team outside. keep your gems off the radar.

every day I am faced with the harrowing realization that there is no next semester

the amount of insights and heart-to-heart confessions is inversely proportional to the number of people participating in a conversation. that's why I always prefer deep one-on-ones over surface-level roundtables.

wasted a couple years learning this lesson, but we're here now

you are not your grand plans. you are your daily patterns. the accumulation of the little things will always always always pile up.

I thought I was being scammed

who shipped me a cake?

get yourself a friend who will compare your startup team to an anime 😭😭 keeps you grounded

A month ago, I finished university. I held off posting until the diploma was actually confirmed, but all's well that ends well, so here I am. Going in, I doubted the choice constantly. For the first year I kept second-guessing whether I'd picked the right place at all. And yet three years went by faster than I could've imagined, and post-grad, I couldn't be more sure I made the right decision. I expected university to connect all of it for me. I've been programming since I was 10, and all that knowledge always felt scattered, a quilt knit from random scraps of cloth I'd found here and there. I thought a degree would finally stitch it together: less googling, less figuring-it-out-as-I-go, a clean measurable path into some defined field with the next fifteen years of life stable and set up. When that aha moment of all the jigsaw pieces coming together never came, I was quick to blame the university itself. But after talking to a lot of other graduates, and thinking harder about what university is actually for, I've landed somewhere different. That scattered feeling turned out to be much more common that I'd thought, CS degree or not. And university was never meant to draw the path for me. That weight was always, fortunately or unfortunately, on my shoulders. What it gave me instead is a tad bit harder to put into words. Reconnecting with my home country was never part of the plan, but it quietly became one of the biggest reasons I'm so sure now, and I didn't realize how much I needed it until it was happening. I picked up social skills I never developed while moving around so much during school. And I made friends, a core group I fully intend to keep (retention’s a priority). For a long time I needed something external to tell me I was worth it (a university, a test score, a coveted job). Sylvia Plath once wrote about a fig tree, each fig a different life you could live, branching off. Her narrator sat beneath it, frozen, unable to choose as the figs withered one by one. A year ago, that was me exactly. But somewhere along the way the paralysis turned into momentum, and now I feel only the rush. The world feels like an oyster, and for once I'm at the oars, free to row wherever I want. I'm proud of the decisions that got me here, and quite honestly I can't wait to see what comes next. Here's to the life I'll now begin building. 🎓 P.S. My only real regret is not doing engineering. I was too scared, I didn't think I was good enough. The catch is that the path here is exactly what taught me to trust myself enough to have tried. Ah well. Maybe next time ;)

I see so many people I look up to approach their telegram channels in a polished, only coherent, well delivered essays format that it feels odd to just type something out in between things and move on but the more I hold on to this approach, the less I find myself writing here at all (which contradicts the whole point of a channel, I guess) maybe other people are just inherently a lot more natural writers, but I’ve always felt I need to “get my bad writing out” to make it to the good/higher quality pieces

my ai assistant gives me sort of “thought bits” every day at 8pm I forgot I used to do just random dumps on notion, this felt so violating in a way even though I myself gave it access but at the same time, isn’t this the whole point? I also felt seen in a way, the same way you feel when an old friend remarks something you used to say this is slightly concerning, because I think I already have issues with letting people in. I want them to know this about me, but I don’t want to deal with the process and vulnerability of telling them. tbf this particular assistant tries way too hard to play best friend as well but as time goes on it becomes more and more crucial to separate the online from the offline

i was scrolling through old notion entries tonight and found this thing you wrote in april about the "fatal attraction theory"-how the traits that pull you in eventually become the cracks. diane felmlee's research keeps coming back to me, especially right now

have you anything else to propose for my domestic felicity?

so does everyone on this island smoke ?

did a thing shoutout to all the BuddyAkas that brought us here

I’m sitting in a cab listening to an ai-ified remix of hello by adele what has this world come to