an idiot in motion goes further than a genius at rest

This week at Forus - Our provider team visited NYC clinics for MA Appreciation Day - Filming something exciting ;) - We love our interns! @justinemach_ - Staying active in the office @djainious

back to the alma mater 🤍 firstmark loves @ColumbiaEntrep

the dog days are not over @forus

every sunday, i’m bringing 40 of @Columbia’s best builders to a new startup / vc office in nyc. at core, we spent the past few months looking for columbia’s top technical talent, creators, and future founders and putting them in the same rooms. thanks @xai and @BainCapVC for helping us making our first sunday happen! dm me if ur down to host us! we’re always looking for new friends in nyc.

the best saturday morning nyc date

just wrapped up week 2 at @forus ! after spending an incredible summer in sf, it’s so exciting to feel the same startup intensity and growth in nyc what an amazing team and an amazing office… more to come soon

so excited for this! deep vulnerability is hard to find in founder/investor-led content yet so important for learning from each other. congrats to @apartovi and the @neo team 🚀

Another @Columbia collab last night @justinemach_

every time i’m on a plane back home to asia i love making long lists of everything i want to do and everyone i want to see top of my list this summer is - to spend as much 1:1 time with my little brother as possible - ride motorbikes to vietnamese countrysides i’ve never visited - do some deep reflection on how i’ve grown within the past year in college + summer in sf

I think ambitious people should treat life in “seasons” rather than trying to balance everything every day. A few years massively overallocated to work. A period getting seriously fit. A year or two nomading. Then family takes priority for a while. Then maybe at 35 you go completely insane again and spend four years building a new company, and so on. The mistake is thinking every metric needs to stay green all the time. Most great outcomes (building a company, writing sth serious, training for an event) need uninterrupted runs, not daily moderation. Sometimes work should suffer cause you’re travelling, sometimes your social life should suffer cause you’re building, sometimes career progression should slow cause family matters more. That’s fine. And tbh it probably makes life more fun too. You get actual chapters and completely different versions of yourself instead of spending 40 years maintaining the same perfectly optimised routine. A few intense years in one city, a weird nomad phase, an obsession that takes over your life, then something completely different. Probably much more memorable than one very long well-optimised Tuesday. It's why I encourage everyone to think of balance in years, not days. A good life can look horribly unbalanced on some random Tuesday and still be very balanced over 10 years.

love when @Columbia ppl in tech come together especially when it’s at @NotionHQ courtyard

airtable's acquisition is another incredible story of an incumbent jumping ship to the agent era before the wave leaves them behind. we've watched intercom pivot to fin and box rebuild itself agent-first. airtable's answer is hyperagent, and howie went all in. we shot this episode just a few weeks before the acquisition!

i’ve learned to understand myself best by reading a great variety of fiction + philosophy. here’s the books i’ve finished/started in the past month: - flowers for algernon (a man's story of receiving an operation that turns him into a genius) - before the coffee gets cold (what would you change in your life if you could time travel?) - notes from the underground (a lonely, bitter man's confession and rebellion against reason) - i who have never known men (a girl raised in an underground cage grows up in an empty world) - a room of one’s own (virginia woolf on a woman's need for intellectual creativity beyond society's structures) - tenth of december (short stories on ordinary people and empathy) - the courage to be disliked (a long conversation between a philosopher and a young man on how to free yourself from others' judgment to think and live for yourself) - how to rule the world (stanford startup culture... expose? this one is controversial) - east of eden (an interwoven, multigenerational story of how two families wrestle with good/evil/freedom of choice) - 21 lessons for the 21st century (how to navigate tech, politics, and meaning in the present)