Life update
You can read my goodbye email I wrote here.
It’s been a very busy period in my life, with ups and downs.
I’ve wanted to write about some of the things that have happened for a while now. But somehow, as the list of things I’ve wanted to write about grew, it somehow became more difficult to start. Kind of like what happens if you try to pour too much cereal at once – everything just gets clogged up and nothing comes out.
Regardless, I’ve decided to just start writing again. For some reason I’d become a little nervous to write – nervous about how I’d be perceived. Maybe a spillover of the fact that when you start a new job (something that’s happened a few times, as you’ll see below), you’re desperate to prove your value, so you become ultra-sensitive to ways in which you could be perceived.
But I’ve re-realized, in some sense, that I began writing mostly for my own person reasons (using it as thinking tool, and a way to “get out” certain thoughts). I still want to write because I think I have valuable things to say, but I don’t want my writing to be attached to any kind of desired outcome. So I want to shake that outcome-dependence a bit. I just want to write for writing’s sake (especially since I actually do a large volume of writing in my professional work). So hopefully this could be a return to that original goal.
Anyway, this preface is long enough already. Here’s what’s happened over the least two-ish years:
- I quite my job at Praelexis as team lead.
- I turned
30,31, 32. - I joined Primer, a fintech in the digital payments space, as a senior backend engineer.
- I finally submitted by thesis, defended and graduated with my PhD in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Stellenbosch University.
- I packed up and moved from Stellenbosch after 11 years of studying and working there.
- I moved to a beautiful apartment in the heart of Cape Town.
- I started a new relationship (and my partner has since moved in with me in Cape Town).
- I took a hiatus from cycling, which was my primary physical hobby for close to 10 years.
- I started boxing.
- I left Primer after an unexpected opportunity to become a CEO of a small boutique quantitative finance research company (Hudson & Thames), which was founded by a former colleague.
- After disagreements with the founder and a general sense of discontentment at H&T, I left to become the Head of AI at OpenBB, a tech startup adjacent to the quant finance space (the scope and TAM has grown a lot since then)
- I’m currently leading a small, but very sharp AI team inside of OpenBB, and couldn’t be happier.
Three job changes, a PhD, changing where I live, major pesonal life changes, and more. It’s been an extremely busy two-and-a-bit years.
Each of these events is worth writing about, and I intend to do so about some of them. There’s been a lot of personal growth, and a huge amount of learning; both on a personal and professional level.
It’s been a while, but it feels very good to finally put this out there.
Hopefully more to come soon.