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2024: Year in Review

Some years you win, some years you build character. This year, I experienced both.

2024: Year in Review

This is my seventh year-in-review1.

I write these mostly for myself—to document memories, to reflect on the year, and to say thank you.

2024

Some years you win, some years you build character2. This year, I’m thankful to have experienced both. I’ve won. I’ve learned. I’ve grown. A lot!

I rang in 2024 with family in Montreal, Canada. Beautiful city.

A few weeks later, I went on a ski trip to Kilington, VT with a Kalman, Rohit, Sam, and Ilan. It was brutally cold. But lots of fun.

ski

Some more Q1/Q2 highlights: hiking trips to upstate NY, traveled to Miami for my Ramp team's offsite, and went to the Drake concert with my sister.

Around this time, I was promoted and became a staff engineer and manager at Ramp.

I currently lead our core spend product: cards, policies, spending limits, expense intelligence, and more. I’m extremely thankful to work with such a talented and strong team.

In 2024, we shipped shared spending limits, several product feature revamps, and helped scale our core revenue-generating product to more customers than ever before.

shared limits

Ramp continues to grow very fast. Ramp friends: if you're reading this, thank you for such a great year!

Outside of work, I continued to make a handful of angel investments. I love supporting friends working on ambitious problems.

In addition to investing, another thing I started doing more seriously this year is helping friends think through career decisions. Over the past year, I've referred many folks to their current roles.3 It feels so good to receive messages like the below.

referrals

At the end of April, I accompanied my dad on his work trip to attend the world’s largest trade show, the Canton Fair in Guangzhou, China. We also visited Shanghai and Hong Kong.

canton fair

I never understood the phrase “China is the world’s factory” until that trip. 500k+ buyers, 25k+ suppliers. Millions of different products on display. The scale of manufacturing in China is incredible.

My trip to China probably deserves a post of its own, but here are some highlights:

  • Ate lots of delicious food (roast duck, dim sum, fresh seafood, and more...)
  • Explored a large part of Guangzhou4 by foot (wet markets, street food, shops, etc.) and got a feel for the culture
  • Got extorted5 by a driver posing as the Uber I ordered in Shanghai
  • Visited the AirWallex6 office (thanks Yuhan!)

crab

In May, I turned 23. Time flies.

The rest of summer '24 was great. Some quick highlights:

  • Went camping for the first time in upstate NY.
  • Spent July 4th in Lake George with family. Rented a boat.
  • Ran the JPMorgan 5K in Central Park (3.67mi, 6:49 pace)7
  • Attended the India vs. Ireland cricket match in LI. Cool to see cricket expanding into the US.
  • Spontaneously flew out to California to attend a retreat hosted by my friend Jordan8.
  • Started and launched a software side-project with a close friend for fun to get back into building the 0→1 muscle. We ended up growing revenue decently fast and it proved to be a great training ground for learning sales and GTM.
  • At the end of the month, my family and I dropped off my sister Nesa to college at Michigan—go blue!

michigan

In September, I decided that I wanted a change and ended up leaving NYC to spend time in San Francisco till the end of the year. Shout out to everyone who came out to the informal "going-away" dinner in NYC. That was a fun night.

SF was great. I got a sublease in North Beach for 2 months.

cali

Most importantly, I learned more about what some of the smartest people in the world are working on. Thanks to everyone (Varun, Aryan, Jack, Ishaan, Yash, Molly, Nathan, Aditya, Alex, Atreya, and so many more...) who made my time in SF so great.

I ended the year over a short vacation with family in the Bahamas, where I went snorkeling for the first time.

Focus on the inputs

If I had to pick one lesson I learned this year, it would be to focus on the inputs (work, process, system) rather than the end outcome. There were many times this year where I became too outcome-driven and it led to a lot of unnecessary stress.

The Bhagavad Gita captures this idea succinctly:

You have the right to work only, but never to its fruits; let not the fruits of action be your motive, nor let your attachment be to inaction.

— Bhagavad Gita, Ch. 2, V. 47

Once you shift your focus to the inputs rather than the outputs, you can: (1) make meaningful progress without unnecessary pressure, (2) build consistency in your actions, and (3) align with the intrinsic value of the work on its own. That itself is incredibly powerful.

Simply put: you've gotta do it for the love of the game.

Thank you to everyone—my family, friends, mentors, peers, coworkers—for such a great year.

Here's to the next!

If we haven’t met yet—or we haven’t caught up in a while—please reach out! I'd love to chat.

Footnotes

  1. [1] While I do spend a lot of time writing privately, this is usually the one time a year I decide to publish something. I plan to change that starting in 2025 by publishing more of my writing here. Hold me accountable! ↩

  2. [2] Steve Jobs famously said a variant of this quote. I think this is a good way to think about the past year. I came into 2024 expecting it to be an absolute breakout year in terms of some of my personal goals - but I was reminded that good things take time! ↩

  3. [3] If I can be helpful, please reach out! ↩

  4. [4] I was very impressed by Guangzhou as a city. People are generally happy and economically prosperous. More so than Shanghai. Very clear that there has been a lot of wealth created and/or concentrated in Guangzhou given its importance to global trade and commerce. ↩

  5. [5] Goes without saying, but if you ever order an Uber in Shanghai (or anywhere), make sure to not get into the car with the driver if the license plate number and name of the driver doesn't match the Uber app. We unfortunately found this out the hard way. Our assigned Uber driver actually was some type of "aggregator" or agency for taxi requests. They forwarded our information to a different taxi driver, who then tried to extort us for a much higher fare than the app showed. ↩

  6. [6] AirWallex has a large team in Shanghai. Work culture exceeds 9-9-6, which was a bit shocking for a company of that size. Probably a core reason why they've been able to expand their product surface area so quickly. ↩

  7. [7] Pretty slow, but not bad considering I hadn't trained. I probably shouldn’t have run a “mock” 5K the day before. ↩

  8. [8] Jordan's writing is fantastic. Read his 2024 review here. ↩