Rainy New Year’s Eve 2025

It’s raining hard in San Francisco.

Most New Year’s plans got canceled. Not dramatically. Just… rain.

A friend of mine running a seed-stage company had an enterprise contract canceled today. ARR took a hit. And the timing is brutal: just weeks before their seed round. Stuff like that doesn’t ruin your night, but it sits in the background and changes the mood. Founder life.

At home, my wife is recording pitch videos for a startup residency application. We did around 30 takes. One finally made the cut. I was the director, filming in our living room like it’s a set, except the set is full of boxes.

Right after that, she switches into bug-fixing mode so she can record a demo video showing new features. Founder life is constant context switching. You’re pitching, building, shipping, and somehow also worrying about lighting.

Our new condo still looks like we’re mid-move. Packaging everywhere. Cardboard stacked like furniture. We moved to a new continent a month ago and it still feels like we’re catching up. She keeps reminding me we need to clean before midnight.

So I do a quick Whole Foods run for coconut rice ingredients. Simple New Year’s dinner. Then I come back to deal with the cardboard problem.

So much has changed in a month.

Everything here is new. Not just the place, but the systems. The American way of doing things is direct, no fluff, extreme agency… and also endless options. Insurance is the perfect example: pick a plan, pick a PCP, pick a deductible, pick a network, and suddenly you’re an hour deep comparing two things that look identical.

I spent three days researching a smart scale, which is honestly impressive because the scale’s main feature is confirming gravity is still employed. Then I did the same for a couch. Too many choices. It’s overwhelming. But it’s not our first reset. We’ve moved countries four times across three continents. We’re used to change. We even like it. It’s just exhausting in the moment.

I start cleaning and it turns into a workout. We live on the 4th floor, so throwing out boxes is basically stair training with cardboard weights. By the time we’re done, I’m sweaty and weirdly proud. Workout done for the day.

Speaking of workouts, I can feel I’ve lost muscle this month. Temporary housing, apartment hunting, running the company, learning how life works in the US, and settling into one main meal a day. I’m lean though. Probably around 10% body fat. Next year is muscle season. That’s the plan.

SF vibes are different. Crazy ideas, crazy ambition. It fuels you — in a good way. You start thinking 10x bigger without noticing. The serendipity here is real. You bump into unicorn founders casually, like it’s normal.

I assigned a Cursor agent to implement a new feature for the trailer-generation PoC I’ve been working on.

We also did a full refactor recently. Roughly 40,000 lines removed, 20,000 added. It’s wild how much code lingers when you move fast, especially through pivots. The product changes quickly, but the code doesn’t disappear unless you go hunt it down. I’m always deciding how general to design something versus how tightly to build for what we need right now. New year, new leaner codebase.

We’re starting 2026 with a long run: Marina to Crissy Field, then across the Golden Gate Bridge. Recently we did a 10-mile run through Golden Gate Park and it was surreal. And the fact that it’s basically in our backyard still doesn’t fully register.

Rain keeps pouring. Everything outside looks gloomy. Feeling a bit homesick too. I miss sun, warm weather, and friends and family back home. The real weather tonight is this mix of homesickness, ambition, and exhaustion.

It’s almost midnight. We can hear fireworks, but we can’t see them. Worst weather to celebrate the new year, but we still joined the loud neighborhood countdown.

It’s half past midnight now. Cursor pushed a PR. I’m going to review it, merge it, and call the year off.

Goodbye 2025.
Rain still pouring. Fireworks still invisible.
And the codebase a little cleaner than it was yesterday.