What do you optimize for?
A simple yet absolutely non obvious question
The land of the free
World changes, people change, things change. Everything constantly changes, but do we? Do we learn and adapt? Or do we simply let life happen past us?
Every so often, probably not often enough, I take on the introspective mindset and try to analyze where I stand and where I am going. This past fall it happened again but this time it was a very different feeling. For the first time since 2014 it was not visas making a decision, it was me making up my mind freely. It is, frankly, a fascinating yet overwhelming situation where I could no longer hide behind “oh I can’t do that because of the visa”
Uncomfortable truth
Throughout my whole life I have always thought that one day I wanted to start my own company. Yet I never was a true full-stack builder who would prototype the UI with simple backend and put it up online. Only recently did I realize the discrepancy between how I saw myself and how I behaved. After a a few conversations with trusted friends and mentors, I finally understood the importance of a simple question:
What do you optimize for?
It took me a while to process the above and allow myself to dig deeper into myself to understand. Initially I denied that it could have been anything other than entrepreneurship. How can that be? Isn’t that something that I have always wanted?
The truth is, however, that for the past 5 years I have been optimizing for the ease of immigration albeit without forsaking technical growth. It is for the ability to be able to move freely and not worry about a lottery system deciding whether I work in the US in a given year or not. Some may fear becoming subject to IRS’s “worldwide income taxation rules” yet I cannot put a price on the freedom of movement.
Brutal awakening
The moment came the evening before Thanksgiving last year when my college friend, Linh, messaged me about a CTO search for her startup Logivan in Vietnam. As crazy as it sounds, I spent my whole Thanksgiving day thinking how I could influence and help reshape the trucking industry in Southeast Asia. The excitement of brainstorming an industry entirely foreign to me made me realized it was high time to learn something new. Time for becoming intellectually curious again.
What followed later was a period of self discovery and exploration where any idea, any market, any industry sounded cool to me. From ideating enabling real estate investments in Poland at scale with my brother in Whistler to discussing the state of personal investment opportunities in Eastern Europe along with legal implications of all of the above. Even though none of it has panned out yet due to regulatory headwinds, it made me realize that I deeply care about solving real world problems through technology.
How do you position yourself?
I have not fully figured it out yet where do I want to get besides a vague “startup dream” that I have had for a while let alone how do I get there. Yet I got a lot of good advice lately from my close friends as to what to consider when picking up the next project for it to be meaningful. One of the key quotes worth sharing is to focus on finding opportunities where you are responsible for the core part of the business or the core technology/architecture of a given team as this is where vast majority of technical growth is hidden.
I have recently been reinvigorated by trying a hackamonth at Instagram where I learnt more about the intersection of ML with product at scale and interactions with Ads systems. One can say that working on Ads may be boring but it is an extremely complicated system which needs to deliver at scale that is highly non-trivial to build.
What comes next
In an effort to rediscover myself, I spent the past 3 months exploring what it is that drives me; the thing that keeps me wide awake at night. Through numerous conversations with friends from different walks of life I realized that I get excited by the intersection of technology and business. It is the thrill of identifying and solving a real problem through tech that is my ultimate motivation.
One of the most common piece of advice I heard from other founders is to look into the root causes of the entrepreneurial desire as that path is incredibly excruciating yet can be rewarding for the very few. As such I am planning to explore what industries and problems fascinate me more to broaden my worldview.
Even though I am very early on in the journey, I highly recommend to anyone out there who is struggling with burn out to take a step back. Reevaluate what matters to you, go out there, and try new things as with change comes the innocence of getting exposed to something entirely new. It is scary but staying stagnant in your 20s is even scarier.
