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Hassaan Markhiani

👥 Working in person is pretty fun (Mar '24)

I went to Seattle for a work onsite. I truly enjoyed being in an office and collaborating with teammates. I miss working from an office. The cherry on top was seeing my brother and hanging with him. I miss him having him in my life. It sucks that he lives so far away. On the flip side, it's truly a blessing that I get so much facetime with my sister. That might not always be the case. I need to keep that in mind.

I don't invest individual private companies much. It's difficult to have success, so I typically opt for private funds. With that said, I decided to invest in Groq. They've been gaining popularity recently with the performance of their LPUs. On top of that, the founder seems like a badass that'll find a way to succeed no matter what. I'm hoping that results in some gains.

Shreyas Doshi gave a talk for strategy bites at work. I eventually discovered his LNO framework and started implementing it into work tasks. It hasn't fully clicked, but it's a good way to force thinking about the downstream impact of my work that I'll do.

I decided to join the small bets group and attended the small bets foundation talks. I've recorded the takeaways I'd like to remember here without any formatting. Treat work time as an investment asset. Make detailed educated hypotheses to test. Asset stacking. Current :: Skills - programming, math. Attributes - humorous, attention to detail, craftsman, dad, immigrant, poor childhood. Interests - sports (basketball), business, FIRE, anime, hip hop, poker / gambling, AI / ML. What’s missing? :: Skills - marketing, writing, networking. Attributes - strong conviction / intuition, bias towards action. Sunk cost fallacy around time spent building cost. I feel obligated to use software skills to pursue future business opportunities. I should view time spent building skills as optionality for future opportunities. Imagination is overrated. Sitting and using imagination is good for optimizing a specific problem. People tend to be surprised by what they end up doing in the future. Have inspiration generators, like Twitter with intentionality and specific time or play and follow random interests and random opportunities. Failure is overrated because it’s hard to get good learnings.

I got the motivation to do a side project with my siblings: ai powered storybooks for toddlers. Unfortunately, I barely found time to work on it. I came across a tweet that said it's only possible to do three big things in life at time. One of them is forced to be sleep, so you’re only really left with two big things. For me, it’s work and family. This has made it a bit easier to justify not being able to find time for side projects to myself. However, I can't tell if I'm huffing copium or it's facts.

I had a small injury scare. I reinjured my back similar to my major disc herniation injury from last year. It was difficult, but I decided to stop hooping until I consistenly work on my core. The last thing I want is to sustain a major injury right before Lilah arrives. That would put me in the doghouse with no sympathy haha.