New Mountains to Climb
It’s been nine months since my conversation with 
Cindy Wu . Someone who’s been to Y Combinator, dedicated 14 years to building Experiment, works at Vercel, and came back for a Recurse Center batch during her pregnancy. What are the odds that this would happen during my time at the Recurse Center, right when I had decided YC was a goal I want to achieve?
A turn of events
It’s night time at home, November 24, 2024. It’s time to have the call which took two weeks to prepare for. After engaging in small talk for about 15 minutes, I’ve been able to take away the sense of nervousness in me. I am ready to get into talking about my journey to become a founder and questions I had for her. With my Notion page armed and ready, power outage! Internet reception is bad. Why? There’s no Wi-Fi and mobile network is nonexistent. Why? This filled me with so much frustration, so much anger that I could not place on a particular thing. Why? Who do I blame for this? Do I have someone to blame? Do I just carry on? What do I do? It took me two weeks to come up with these questions. Why is this happening to me right now? Bitterness, anger and confusion consumed me. Blaming the country I find myself in for how things are happening to me. By the time I got hold of my conscious self, I had walked for two full hours with no destination and it was 11pm. Thankfully I had Sebastian to talk to over the phone to help place my emotions.
I reached out to Cindy Wu and we rescheduled. It was a wonderful conversation. If I didn’t have the circumstances I did at the time, I wouldn’t be able to:
- write. A skill I learnt by sending async updates at RC because of my internet connection
- reach out and talk to new people over the internet, and in person
- be inspired enough to share my newfound passion for building with others around me
Gratitude is all I feel when I think back on it. I’ve grown so much in 9 months than I have in years and it’s all thanks to this canon event. Thinking I could control everything around me was a young me’s ideology. We cannot control the weather (unless you really, really want to), all we can do is dance to the best of our ability and learn along the way.
It’s been 280 days since she asked me the question, which kind of people do you like to hang out with? Knowing what type of company to venture into Y Combinator kept me up at night. I had no problem at all with drive and passion. I just couldn’t figure out what to direct this to. I had no mission. I couldn’t find a Golden Fleece to board the Argo for. For 3 days, I spent every minute, awake and in dreaming, soul searching. During this time, I had an epiphany.
As much as I love to hang out with my favorite people, I love something else even more. Something that brings me even greater joy. That is music. Music is everything to me. Music is the one thing that gives me the excitement of a child. I enjoy listening to all kinds of music with Gorillaz and Kokoroko as my favorite bands.
The Recurse Center has a day called Impossible Day. The point is to think of an idea, an impossible one, and work on it. The point is not to complete it. We are not even meant to get close. The point is to tackle it. I decided to try making music with code, unaware that it was already a thing. The most fun I’ve had in years. This made me realize I could build any company I wanted. I just needed time and patience.
I needed to know how to sell. Building a SaaS is something I am not a stranger to. However, I struggled visualizing the audience I would be building for, making it a blocker to learning quickly. In order to practice sales and product learning, I started Lucia, my home bakery. The adventure was one of pure thrill, coupled with excitement and dread. To call it an easy adventure would be very, very far from the truth. It took a lot of stress, a lot of self exploration, a lot of vampiric nights and witch-hour mornings, lots of disappointments, lots of triumphs, life beating me down, overcoming hurdles, running into debt, almost quitting 3 times, having to confront people in a way that wasn’t natural to me, speaking to people in person and asking about things that I made and getting their feedback: good, bad, kind and harsh. I thought progress would be evident after a month. It took 9 months. Even though it took this long, The growth I’ve experienced over these nine months runs much deeper than what I would have achieved if success had come easily from the start. Selling 600 Cinnamon Rolls (+ 3 other flavors) and growing to a point where I couldn’t handle the demand was not something I couldn’t seen coming when I started this. This was me planning the start of the company and my first pop-up.
Out of the innumerable things I learned, some things were pretty concrete. I learned patience. I learned to execute small and improve with speed. I learned to write and communicate. I learned to identify my ego and keep it separate from my executions. This journey has taken me to the top of a mountain. And through this, I didn’t just climb mountains, I became a mountain climber (literally and figuratively). If I had to pick one thing out of everything I learnt, it would be that all I need to do is keep showing up and keep practicing. It’s not really about progress, it’s about the practice.
I now have the conviction to climb the mountain to building the iPod of tomorrow. It was an impossible dream. Growing up, all I had was an MP3 player, the type that corrupts your files after about 4 days so you had to listen to partial music. This was my best friend. With 2gb of storage and a pair of earphones, nothing felt impossible. If I am going to spend the rest of my life building things, I would like it to be things I care about. Things that carry my obsession and passion. Great things. In order to do that, I would need exposure to great people and great products. If you are reading this, I am accountable to you. I would like to ask your help in finding exposure in whatever form it may come.
Thank you for taking the time to read this. In 5 years I will look back at this with glee, knowing I didn’t give up and you are one of the reasons for this. Thank you again!