Highlights

Professional

  • YC W24
  • Raised seed round from a set of strong and smart people
  • AI grant Batch 3
  • Signed multiple household names in renewable energy as customers (gigawatts in solar/battery projects, billions in financing and AUM), with sizable annual contracts
  • Speaker at Brazil at Silicon Valley
  • Completed SOC 2
  • Recruited highly talented people from WeaveGrid/Google, Brex, UC Berkeley, YC, Department of Energy, Duke and more – for engineering, sales, and operations (full-time and part-time)
  • Spark launching new features bi-weekly, including Aggregates
  • Spark was among 15 of 800 applicants invited to the AWS Energy Gen AI Lab. Video
  • Spark ran its first conference booth at RE+ Anaheim (40k attendees) and was a finalist at their Startup Competition
  • Wrote about vertical AI in energy
  • This year’s birthday project: Proof of concept for a new feature coming in January, and a script for analyzing our production DB (it’s a personal tradition since 2019 to ship something on my birthday)

Personal

  • Hosted a Brex alumni party with my dear friend and onboarding buddy, Sam Kaplan
  • Moved from NY back to SF
  • 8 books. Most remarkable was A Question of Power
  • Attended 2 weddings of close friends since college
  • Visited China again after 7 years, spent Christmas with parents and grandparents
  • Cherishing founder and female friendships
  • Cities: San Francisco, New York, Philadelphia, São Paulo, Anaheim, Palm Springs, Ann Arbor, London, Macau

Learnings

  1. Don’t be shy about sharing a vision and story of the problem you’re trying to solve, even if you haven’t succeeded at doing it. You might just attract people who will help you get there.
  2. Work on the business, not in the business (doing for the sake of doing, but not on the thing that moves the needle)
  3. If you have something someone wants, you have leverage. Own it and act like it.
  4. How you do one thing is how you do everything. Show up, have the conversation, write the message like you mean it.
  5. Charlie Munger’s quote still stands: “The safest way to try and get what you want is to try and deserve what you want”
  6. Don’t jump immediately to the first brute force solution. Sometimes if you just think for a little longer, you might come up with an O(n) or even O(1) approach
  7. Stay in the details and stay technically sharp with the new tools. Operating at all levels starts at 0 to 1.
  8. Self belief and self love will make you better as a professional and as a person.
  9. Cut your losses when you feel like something might not work. Avoid wishful thinking and sunk cost fallacy. You can recognize the patterns. Otherwise you will only delay the inevitable.
  10. Reading books still trumps podcasts and interviews (for me)