2025 review
One of my favorite annual rituals is writing this review. It forces me to slow down, look back at what I actually accomplished, where my life is heading, and all the little things I tend to take for granted. I started doing this in 2023, kept it up last year, and I’m hoping you’ll enjoy the 2025 edition as much as I enjoy writing it.
Travel
Growing up, I remember watching National Geographic and Discovery Channel with my father, hungry to travel, to see the world, to be anywhere but the neighborhood I grew up in. Looking back, I’m convinced that his curiosity lit the spark in me. I owe him for that, while he did not mean to, he set me on a path that shaped my entire life.
I collected every travel book and magazine I could find. I knew more about distant countries than I did about Bulgaria. I can still recall how our neighbors, whenever we bumped into each other, would test me on capital cities around the world. Learning about exotic destinations was one of my all time favorite activities.
Fast forward to today, and this year alone I have:
Visited Japan four times
India eleven times
Malaysia twice
Taiwan once
Austria, Slovenia, and Bulgaria once each
The U.S. (New York and Chicago) once
South Korea once
Indonesia twice
And I happen to live in Singapore, which still feels surreal when I say it out loud!
Today many of my friends grew up traveling or relocating across countries because of their parents’ careers. To them, travel feels ordinary, even unremarkable. Add to that how much cheaper, safer, and more accessible travel has become, and it’s easy to understand why people sometimes treat it as a mundane logistical inconvenience.
Then there are people like me, those who worked their way into this life, slowly, painfully but intentionally. We don’t take any of it for granted. We know exactly what it took to earn the right to explore the world, and we treasure every moment of it.
In fact, the two experiences that have made me more optimistic than the average person are traveling the world and working in tech.
Traveling, because every culture you step into has wonderful people. Even if the culture as a whole isn’t your cup of tea, even if you can’t imagine living there, it’s impossible to be racist when you’ve tasted the best of a place through the people you’ve met. Once you have friends everywhere, the world stops being abstract. You understand it better. Down the road, you become truly a global citizen and feel grateful for the peace and prosperity many of us are fortunate to enjoy.
And tech, because you spend your days building the future. You use tools that only a tiny fraction of humanity leverages, and work on problems that actually matter (at least some of us…). You get to see, with unusual clarity, what the world might look like a decade from now. Technology has been the engine of economic growth for centuries, and the last real vehicle of social mobility.
Still, when I think about what shaped me most, my mind returns to travel and perhaps the most important lesson it taught me.
Over a long enough horizon, you tend to achieve most of your goals, as long as you work hard, stay in motion, and learn from your mistakes.
Today, I live the life I dreamed of twenty years ago.
And once you internalize that, your ambitions become more intentional. You only get a handful of decades to chase the things that matter. The meaningful goals take time, and the cost of choosing the wrong ones is high.
Be careful what you obsess over as a child. You might just end up spending your adulthood living it. 🙃
Now, a few of my favorite traveling moments this year.
Japan
Japan has always been a special place for me. I grew up watching One Piece, Naruto, and Bleach. My father, my brother, and I still talk about anime and Japanese culture to this day, despite coming from a completely different world. As a kid, Japan felt so far away that I wasn’t sure if I would ever visit.
Today, I get to visit Japan regularly and experience that world firsthand. It still feels surreal. There are moments when I’m walking through Tokyo and I’m suddenly aware that I’m living inside a dream my younger self was too afraid to even mention. I’m deeply grateful for that. I wrote more reflections on my slightly confused, borderless identity here.
And this year, Japan became even more special. A group of my closest friends flew in and surprised me in Osaka, and together we travelled through Kyoto, Kanazawa, Nagano, and Tokyo. It was one of those rare trips that stays with you, not only because of the itinerary, but because of the people and the memories we created together.
USA
These days, the U.S. is a place that attracts a fair bit of criticism (some of it deserved) but it remains one of my favorite countries to visit. A few months back, Clarissa and I ran our first marathon together, and not just any marathon, a World Major!
Running a marathon in the U.S. is like being plugged into the best parts of American culture all at once. The organization was great, the atmosphere is full of good vibes, and the people are unbelievably friendly.
Finishing the race was hard for both of us, but for very different reasons. I was dealing with a back injury that made every kilometer extremely painful. Clarissa had to break through a mental barrier about what she believed she was capable of, and I couldn’t be prouder of her for doing it!
More than a million people lined the streets cheering us on. The energy was unbelievable! Along the way, we met so many people that I walked away with a new insight: while the US isn’t perfect by any means, from all my travels, it has the highest rate of quality conversations with strangers per capita in the world!
Europe
I often dunk on Europe for its obsession with “quality of life to a fault” and its growing detachment from the importance of economic growth and progress in a rapidly changing world. But the truth is: it’s still my birthplace, and it’s where many of my closest friends live. I care deeply about it. In my humble opinion, a world where Europe is strong is a world with a healthier moral compass.
This year we visited for the first time Slovenia for our friends Jan and Natasha’s wedding, and it was incredible. Slovenia is one of those non-obvious gems, you get the beauty of Switzerland and Austria, but with better prices and, arguably, friendlier people (I admit my Balkan bias runs deep). We squeezed in a hike where friends from across Europe traveled to meet us, and it turned into one of my most cherished memories of the year. In fact, some of the conversations from that trip inspired this essay I wrote here.
We also made it to Austria to see friends who had visited us earlier in Japan. It was my second time there, and seeing it partly through the eyes of locals gave me a more balanced perspective, not just as a tourist. Vienna is a wonderful city, but it does feel a bit stuck in the past. I wrote more about that here.
Work
This year, I reached a major milestone: I became CPO at Docquity. A few years ago, I wrote an essay about my journey from 0 to 1, and I still think everything in it holds true. My path into product wasn’t random, it was intentional, almost engineered, for two reasons.
First, I’ve always agreed with Naval that the two most valuable skills in any career are building products and selling. Everything meaningful flows downstream from those two capabilities. In my previous role, I had already done a fair amount of selling and even wrote about what that experience taught me. So product became the natural next frontier.
Second, I genuinely believe I’ve developed strong intuition and taste for building software. To earn the role of CPO, I had to prove that intuition in the real world. I launched several products with limited resources, under real constraints. Those experiences gave me confidence that I can deliver.
I still have a lot to learn, the science, the art, the discipline of building products at scale. But I’m happy of the trajectory I’m on, and my learning velocity.
Writing
I started writing seriously during COVID and have gone through many experiments since then. I tried short posts, long essays, videos, audio, anything that helped me understand what I enjoyed and what actually resonated. I paid close attention to both the writing as a hobby and the feedback loop the internet gives you.
Today, I think of content less as a game of traction, though I’ll admit it’s a fun game to play, and more as a bat signal I send into the sky. Most people ignore it, and that’s perfectly fine. But a small number of like-minded people see it, reach out, and eventually become friends. The internet flattened geography. Now I can meet people who think like me in every corner of the world.
This year I’ve also been experimenting heavily with writing alongside AI, and it’s been quite enjoyable. It helps me brainstorm, articulate complex ideas, challenge my assumptions, and research tricky areas. As a result, I’ve been writing more long-form than usual, giving shape to some of the deeper ideas I’ve carried around for years.
If you want to follow the journey, you can find me across three main platforms:
Substack, where I publish long-form essays
Investments
Over the past few years, I’ve been supporting my wife and her company, A01, as they prepare to launch Awann. To be clear, Clarissa and her partners do 99% of the heavy lifting, I only help with digital marketing here and there. The project officially goes live early next year, and it’s been incredible to watch it take shape.
Awann is a collection of luxury villas in Phuket, Thailand that are truly something else. The quality of materials, the architecture, the interior design, these are things only the founders of A01 could pull off. Their attention to detail still surprises me. I often go to Clarissa for advice on complex product decisions because her design intuition is on a completely different level from mine.
Supporting her on this project taught me a lot about building and branding luxury villas, far more than I expected. And I have a feeling this won’t be the last time we create something in this space. Awann might very well be the blueprint for a few more projects to come.
If you’re interested in owning one of these stunning properties, feel free to reach out!
Looking back, this year felt like a bridge, between who I was and who I’m becoming. Between old dreams I finally got to live and new ambitions that now feel within reach. I want to continue building hard things, travel to wonderful places, and keep on writing.
I’m grateful for where I am, aware of how far I’ve come, and excited for the decades ahead. If the past is any indication, the next chapter will be shaped the same way as this one: set ambitious targets, work hard, surround yourself with great people and be impatient with action but patient with results.