logs

Back in 2022, I had been working on my startup for around half a year when I decided to start writing a log for each day to help document the journey. I forget the exact context/structure I was trying to emulate, but I do recall the original motivation was spurred by this one guy’s startup postmortem. I liked the way he mapped through day by day what happened with the startup, and I felt that it would be cool to have a similar live mapping of our startup, regardless of whether it lived or died. And here I am, recollecting what happened during the startup via those logs, nearly 4 years later, and the startup is indeed still alive! Oh and btw, that guy that I was inspired by? His name was Aman Sanger, and after his startup died, he pivoted to an idea which he later called Cursor.

Knowing myself, I think I tend to worry about optimizing a little bit too much. This noncompete is definitely a much needed break from grinding hard each day, but I also know that I will feel a strong desire to maximize all the aspects of having a noncompete period vs working. So I’m trying to combat that a bit, but at the same time I do think it’ll be cool to document the day to day of what I end up doing during this period. I never really did this for this past era of my life, just because my days were just dominated by trading and I can’t exactly post any of that online anyways. But this’ll be a good way to keep my writing chops at least somewhat warm as well as help satisfy my desire to keep everything logged somewhere for the future (I don’t want to lose my memories of what will happen forever).

The start of my noncompete is not particularly hard to figure out: my last day was 7/7, so we’ll call day 1 of my noncompete July 8.

Day 1: Wednesday, July 8, 2026

People ask me if the first day after quitting felt weird, and the answer is honestly that it did feel weird, but not in the ways I expected and definitely not nearly as weird as I might’ve originally thought. I started the morning off by dropping Sophia off at the airport early in the morning for her flight to Hawaii, before I moseyed my way back home and took a fat nap which was nice. What actually ended up feeling weird was this strange sense of paranoia that I might be missing stuff at work, but there was no way for me to check. I have no company phone/laptop, so if there were indeed things for me to look at/figure out, I didn’t have any way to do so. What ended up not feeling weird was not going into work. I’d been thinking about my noncompete for so long at this point that when it finally came, I sorta just knew what I was going to do that day that had nothing to do with work (I’ve been procrastinating on an infinite pile of things to do). And honestly I’m a little burned out. So the break was nice, not weird.

I capped the night off by hanging out with Omar — we went to the gym, grabbed some food, and ended up doing a long walk by the water. It was nice to do something like that with a friend. That turned out to be a false ending, as I then stayed up until 4am playing video games.

Day 2: Thursday, July 9, 2026

My former boss was visiting NYC, so I met up with him and a former coworker whom I’m also friends with. In between, I got my perm, which shortened my hair to lengths and curls that I hadn’t had since I started working. I didn’t really intend for that to happen, but the fact that I’m entering and leaving my job with the same perm despite having long hair the entire time I was there was sorta poetic but definitely unintentional.

Overall felt like a very NYC day. I’ve always believed that the pro of NYC is that you get to live in a city where it feels like you’re on vacation. You have easy access to lots of cool restaurants and stores. The only issue was that I never actually had the mental energy to take advantage of this. So today, between shopping, dinner with friends, intraday cool haircut, and movie to cap off the night, ended up being one of my best days in NYC. I also got to try out a really cool and expensive sound system/headphones, which was nice.

Day 3: Friday, July 10, 2026

Today was my big party day. Leading up to it, I was getting a little worried that there weren’t actually going to be that many people. Seemed like a lot of key characters were going to be no shows, and for some reason the number of people that are on the partiful seems to dwindle with each event. But perhaps that’s nothing to worry about, I am grateful that the people who did come came. And I spent some time prepping the apartment for the party, but since I had done a lot of cleaning/vacuuming the previous day, it ended up being much less of an ordeal, which was relieving.

Day 4: Saturday, July 11, 2026

I had to rally for my friend Justin’s birthday party, which was an open wine bar. I then ended up in St Mark’s for dinner, where we all listened to my other friend angrily rant about Stanford for several hours before the alcohol wore off and left me feeling like death. I probably need to take a bit of a break from drinking, not feeling the best at this point. But overall no regrets, I think starting the noncompete off with a bit of irresponsible debauchery is nice, particularly because the cloud of work previously always prevented me from doing stuff like this. Perhaps prevent is a strong word — it certainly made the consequences much worse.

Day 5: Sunday, July 12, 2026

I promised myself that I would wait until after my party before doing anything productive, and today is the first morning where I don’t have a ton of commitments/things to do. So, I ended up using this time to sit down, figure out some TODOs, and write my previous days’ logs.

For lunch, I hung out with my friend Katon, as we hadn’t seen each other in over a year. Interestingly enough, I saw his startup’s ad in the subway the other week — always cool to see a friend’s startup out in the wild.

After that was the first time I’ve had since my noncompete started to really sit down and start cranking out some travel planning. There definitely was a bit of procrastination as the task of planning/figuring out what to do with large swaths of my life is a bit daunting, but I finally was able to sit down and crank out a lot of research/emails and managed to get my first replies within just a few hours. So that was really cool, and I’m happy I got to get the ball rolling.

Day 6: Monday, July 13, 2026

Another day of meeting up with friends interspersed with bouts of productivity. Planning my fishing trip remains the priority, and I continued doing more research, having mini panic sessions with ChatGPT about whether this was optimal or not, and still continuing to plow forward with my plans. I hung out with former coworkers for lunch/dinner/drinks, so the day definitely still felt full. Somewhat unexpectedly, it has not been hard finding stuff to do during my noncompete like most would’ve guessed (myself included). Rather, it’s been surprisingly stressful as it feels like I don’t have enough time to do everything I want to do, but I can’t complain about it too much as this is all stuff that I am having fun doing.

Day 7: Tuesday, July 14, 2026

First day in a while without a defined lunch that I needed to attend, but I did have a cafe work hangout with my friend planned in the afternoon. I really like this one Japanese grocery store near my apartment called MOGMOG, and so I took the opportunity to walk there and pick up some nice groceries to cook at another time. But I was pretty hungry at that point, passed a restaurant I liked and ended up eating there instead so stuff didn’t go quite to plan. By the time I got back, it was surprisingly close to when my friend wanted to hang out, which reminded me just how long food can take if you’re trying to cook for yourself. Granted in this case it also “required” me walking to a grocery store, but all of that combined with cooking/washing dishes does take away a lot of productivity time. I’ve got to think about how to structure this, at least right now while I still feel busy with stuff so that I don’t get stressed losing an hour or two each meal.