As I turn another year older, I'm reflecting on one of my most meaningful experiences: a trip @greemkim and I took to Amed, Bali. Our previous trips to the island were, frankly, a mixed bag. Amed felt different. Quiet, with a deeply spiritual vibe. Yoga studios overlooking Jemeluk Bay, modern vegan cafés alongside traditional warungs, and 50-meter-deep water a short swim from shore. Greem gets seasick easily, so the chance to practice freediving without a boat mattered. But as we were boarding the plane, I realized the motherboard in my Sony FX3 had died. Thankfully, I still had an iPhone. Smaller, always with me. I could capture candid, spontaneous moments I might have missed with a larger rig. I'm still learning to appreciate what necessity can render possible. Greem strugged enormously with equalization, balancing the pressure in her ears. We spent days in the ocean with little success. I was trying to figure out how to tell her to try really hard not to try. As in Savasana (corpse pose), so much of the practice becomes mental. Then one day we swam out from Lipah Beach further than any of us have ever swam away from shore without a boat. We were alone far from land, but rather than being frightening, the ocean opened up to us like magic: just me and her, marveling at the beautiful green mountains above and the dazzling alien world below. We came across a turtle feeding on the sea floor. “Timmy,” we called him. Without thinking about a record, Greem dived down to hang out with Timmy. She beat her previous personal best and even managed hands-free equalization. What had been so difficult during training happened while she was enthralled by a new undersea friend. I reached a new personal best of 40 meters on one breath. It is only because I've learned to let go that I can go further. There's something very Taoist about that. Greem recorded this version of "Kiss from a Rose" to go with these memories. After a decade of startup grind and seven years of marriage, I feel lucky that Greem and I got to share these days, still in love and free to enjoy them together. Looking back reminds the spirit why life is worth living, and to treasure the precious moments that never come back. Days are long, but life is short. So, live in the present, and don't forget to live with love.

STEAM FRAME. Twelve years after Valve’s VR Room, this is closer to what I had in mind.

Getting Linux on a modern flagship phone (OnePlus15) has been an interesting but rewarding challenge. Turns out difficult firmware work like this is still far from one-shottable by Fable / Astra, etc. github.com/infiniti-mainline…

Deep work anywhere = display glasses (XReals) + split ortho keyboard + NixOS phone

Split ortho keyboard + display glasses (~100” virtual display) + NixOS phone = deep work from anywhere

Catching up and looking beyond the headlines. xitter.cf/i/spaces/1RKjpbVrOBBJw

Small milestone. Your phone has laptop-class CPUs, desktop-class GPUs, and dedicated AI hardware. Yet it’s one of the least programmable computers we own. Got NixOS running on a modern flagship Android phone (OnePlus 15). Still very early, but it’s one step toward putting people back in control of the most personal computer they own. As AI drives the cost of building software toward zero, the app ecosystem itself is due for a reset. We’ll want devices that are programmable all the way down, not just through an app store. If you’re interested in Linux, kernels, drivers, mobile systems, or AI agents on edge devices, I’d be happy to compare notes.

HBS 15-Year Reunion. There is a particular heaviness to this stage of life that I don’t think we talk about enough. Aging parents. Young kids. Fertility issues. Demanding work. Health scares. Losses. Marriages. Divorces. Companies built, companies buried. Dreams that came true, dreams that changed shape, dreams that quietly disappeared when no one was looking. And somehow, there everyone was. Dancing. Laughing. Hugging. Comparing notes. Sharing truths on Spangler lawn. Introducing kids. Remembering ridiculous class lore. Admitting what was hard. Celebrating what was beautiful. Being human, which is somehow still the bravest and most underrated thing. It was incredible to see so many people doing so well. But it was even more moving to be around people willing to be open about the parts that are not simple. The invisible things people carry. The strange math of adulthood. The way joy and grief and ambition and fatigue and gratitude all seem to coexist now, whether or not we gave them permission. No one can make new old friends. That is the strange gift of a reunion: lives unfolding in front of each other over time. People you knew before so much had happened. Before the plot twists. Before the full weight of responsibility. Before life had made all of us more ourselves. I’m grateful I got to spend part of my life in this strange, intense, formative place, and even more grateful for the reminder that time moves, but some connections remain. – at Boston, MA

HBS Magazine @HBSAlumni invited me to write about freediving, failure, and what the ocean taught my mind after winding down the company I had built over a decade. alumni.hbs.edu/stories/Pages… I posted the full essay here:

San Francisco lately. Old friends. New friends. City light. Ocean air. Big ideas. Good people. Finding signal. – at San Francisco, CA

A year ago, in April 2025, I got sober. After a decade of startup grind, I have come to understand that agency, health, and self-command are not separate from leadership. They are part of the foundation. This was never an abstract subject for me. My grandfather died from alcoholism-related complications when my father was young. The story I was told was that even after surgery had taken much of his liver, he still demanded and drank copious amounts of soju. I’ve had a complicated relationship with addiction. I didn’t drink through most of college. But in my early career in New York, alcohol became an easy escape from the grind. I thought I could handle it. I thought: this time is different. Addiction is a quiet, pernicious snake. It weaves its way into your life over years, and then, in the darkness, binds you. For years, I knew I had a problem. But I told myself I was functioning. From the outside, I seemingly was. I was working hard, leading, producing, keeping things moving. But functioning is not the same as being free. Over time, the degradation of my health and mind became obvious. And by then, I feared it was too late to escape. Last April, at the urging of @GreemKim , I quit. I was afraid I was losing something that defined my happiness — the thing I thought kept me sane in this insane world. But I was wrong. Instead of losing something, I got something back: myself. Not quickly, nor all at once. But slowly, softly, bit by bit. My mornings came back. My body came back. My energy came back. I could start to hear my own thoughts again. The joy in the quotidian came back too. Sunlight through leaves, a quiet walk, a meditative afternoon. My sense of agency came back: the feeling that I’m not just being pulled around by impulses, habits, substances, moods, machines, or old stories I tell myself about who I am. I’ve been quiet here for a while. I needed space. And I didn’t want to perform a version of life I was no longer interested in living. With time, I hope to share more again. Not as a highlight reel, but as field notes from the path: rebuilding, health, discipline, creativity, technology, embodied practice, and the kind of human future I want to help create. Because in an age increasingly designed to capture our attention, automate our choices, and mediate our sense of meaning, self-governance is not merely a private virtue. It is how we stay human. And I believe this even more deeply now: if you cannot govern yourself, you will struggle to govern anything else with clarity. Self-command is not merely related to leadership. It is one of its foundations.

Black tie in the Bay. Thanks to our hosts Silvia Console Battilana, @Stanford President Jon Levin, and Nobel Laureate @Pmilgrom. Congrats to the Auctionomics team on the Emmys!

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass | iPhone 17 ProRes RAW Open Gate | 5 Oct 2025, SF feat. music @DesertHollow

Not the Metaverse we were promised, but maybe the one we deserve 🤯. Ariana Grande, Sabrina Carpenter, & Fishstick dancing on a Choppa. @Fortnite #Delulu Early Access LTM

Fortnite taking a page out of VRChat’s book Delulu early access 🤓

Reenergized from the YGL Annual Summit in Geneva—a joy to see old friends and meet new ones. This year I felt even freer to synthesize ideas & connect dots. Thanks @YGLvoices & @wef. Onward to tangible change.