Musings
活着 12.13.25
There is a short story by 余华， 活着， meaning To Live. The story is narrated by an old man named 富贵 (Fugui), who walks slowly in the countryside with an old cow. Fugui was born to wealthy landowners, spent his youth in brothels and lost his family's wealth through gambling and vices. After his father died in a fit of rage, Fugui became a farmer, deciding to live humbly as a good man. When his mother fell sick and he went to town to find a doctor, he unexpectedly became captured by the KMT as a hostage. When he returned, his mother had passed. Over the coming years, he'd experience the Great Famine, Cultural Revolution, and struggled to keep his family together; he gave his daughter away to afford school for his son, then she escaped and returned. Yet when the town official's son needed blood donation, a careless doctor overdrew his son's blood, leading to his death. The town official would later commit suicide during the Cultural Revolution. Years later, his daughter married, but did not survive childbirth. Left alone, Fugui buys an old cow that was about to be slaughtered, gave the cow the name "Fugui", living the rest of their lives together.
富贵 means wealth. When I first read this story, I was angered that life isn't fair; each time when it seemed that things were looking up for Fugui, misfortune occurred. He was at the whims of the vicissitudes of life, unpredictable. You could say that he deserved to struggle because he squandered his youth and mistreated women. Yet he lived, and his daughter, who lived with integrity, did not. At the end, Fugui wonders why he lives despite his errors, and others did not.
I thought of 活着 recently because I was discussing Sisyphus with friends who are building companies. We independently experienced the Sisyphean pushing of a boulder up a hill. Just when you feel you have mastered something, the terrain shifts beneath your feet, and you are faced with a new challenge. It is continual learning. It is unsettling. It is exciting.
We build RL environments. GRPO is currently the paradigm for RL training and it heavily relies on outcome-based verifiable rewards for agents to learn to complete tasks. This works in time bounded/episodic tasks, but life is infinite-horizon; you can't score the full trajectory or compare trajectories in a group. We derive meaning from process rewards, essentially self-rewarding.
My mother said recently, "one year in your life is equivalent to ten years in other lives. Enjoy your life." I am 29. I feel I have lived a lifetime and more, and my life is richer for it.
To Live is to strive. To create meaning in a world that does not impart it. To lean into and experience every n=1 moment in life, to relish every moment. To do our best each day, knowing we may fail, rise up and try again.
While company building may have been a catalyst for my personal transformation, the Sisyphean push extends to every aspect of life. I believe it is core to the human experience, and it is a beautiful analogy to be embraced. If sleepwalking through life is like sitting on a stand up paddleboard watching the scenery pass, living in wakefulness feels like surfing above ocean waves.
I love living.
china 11.23.25
I grew up in the bustling streets of Beijing, between the second and third inner ring roads right in the heart of the city. There was pollution, traffic, and never-ending crowds and energy. Across the country, you'd see entire metropolis erected overnight, railroads built, hutongs evicted with families displaced to make way for urbanization.
Growing up in China in the early 2000s was a once in a century experience. I witnessed the dotcomboom (with ~a decade's delay compared to the US), real estate boom, the rise of the urban middle class, technological innovation and the birth of some of the world's largest technology companies that served a single market.
My family currently resides in Beijing/HK. Living in Silicon Valley and catching up with family back home, I'm often surprised at the parallels between the two countries in AI adoption, execution and focus. Yesterday my mother used Doubao to ask about acupuncture risks, and sent the conversation history to me on WeChat.
In the race to AGI, capital flow, talent and product access have been following implicit (or explicit) geopolitical boundaries across Europe, America and China. We are in the midst of a global power struggle over AI that looks like the early stages of a cold war.
It is unclear what the future will hold. While wars take prominence in history books, in reality history is long periods of peace punctuated by short periods of war. I hope the future is cooperative and collaborative.
I truly believe that we are living in a moment in time that has never existed in human history. We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to build generational companies and co-create the future. What we action on in the next few years will lay the groundwork and shape the course of global economic development for the next century.
aliveness 11.06.25
There is nothing that feels more exhilarating, energizing and fully alive than building with a team towards a shared goal.
I believe it is a fundamentally human need to live with agency, to create and collaborate with others.
Agency is something we have simply by existing. Even in scenarios where people are physically unable, they still have agency over their thoughts.
If you look at all the things you "have to do" in your life, you'll quickly realize most are stories you've internalized — from your upbringing, societal expectations, peer pressure, or some other kind of fear driven storytelling. Unpacking all this, you realize you don't actually have to do much. In fact, you get to choose how you spend every moment you exist. Isn't that awesome?
I've shifted to "I want to", "I choose to" instead of "I have to". I want to work 6 days a week because I love what I do. I choose to live in SF, despite close friends and half our team being in NYC. There is nothing to complain about when I own every decision in my life.
Living with agency means I believe I can solve any problem in my life. Scaling our business, breaking into a new market, leading our team through critical periods, winning competitive deals, reviving friendships, moving across the country over a weekend. Doing what I previously thought wasn't possible, over and over again. I spent my childhood solving Disney puzzles, and life is just a series of challenges that I create. When every day is gamified, living is really, really fun.
favorite things 11.05.25
I tend to make lists. Collections of favorite tracks, quotes, goals and places. Here is a list of things that spark joy.
Building a company is a high entropy experience; this list helps me on harder days.
- chopin, fantasie impromptu
- mondrian, composition with red, blue and yellow
- a good matcha latte with oat milk and honey (half sweet)
- large bodies of water, lake alberta
- printed research papers
- breakfast at tiffany's, moon river
- grey cats with blue eyes
- elegant theories, proofs and explanations for the universe
- eggs of all kinds, softly scrambled
- dairy free desserts
- long form essays and opinion pieces from interesting minds
- chill edm, odesza, big wild, san holo
- lifting
- nina simone
- books on human psychology and cognitive flexibility
- barry's
- dali, the meditative rose
- the alchemist
- north point egg waffles
- a good conversation
negative probabilities 10.19.25
I recently came across the concept of negative probabilities. Negative probabilities are used in quantum computing to represent quantum states. While I'm not a quantum theorist, I'm going to try to present this in simpler terms.
Ordinary probabilities must lie between 0-1, and always add up to 1 across mutually exclusive outcomes.
Negative probabilities allow values < 0. This seems counterintuitive because how can an event occur with a probability below 0?
Consider this shift in framing: instead of imagining outcomes as singular events, consider outcomes as the result of complex pathways with interfering possibilities that sometimes cancel each other out.
Here is an image of the famous double-slit experiment:
In this setup, you shoot particles at a wall with two slits, and behind there's a screen that records where each particle lands (a dot). If you close one slit, you get a normal distribution of dots like in classical probability.
But when both slits are open, you don't just get two distributions added together. Instead, you get an interference pattern of bright and dark dots. This shows that the possibilities from the left slit and right slit are interacting. Some parts of the screen have no dots! This isn't possible if probabilities are purely additive - mathematically, these "negative probabilities" represent interferences where one path cancels another.
I like this concept because it reminds us that reality isn't just "either A or B", but rather "A and B interacting." While we often focus on outcomes through a single slit lens, positive interference and amplification can come from sources we don't expect: hobbies, market dynamics and pathways taken by other people.
In other words, uncertainty is what makes life fun 🙃
explore vs. exploit 10.13.25
Most dilemmas in life can be understood through the lens of the exploration-exploitation tradeoff. I've given this framework to job searching new grads, friends looking for a life partner and more. People stuck in exploration are continuously searching, paralyzed by the inability to choose. People in exploitation mode may want to take a leap, but are afraid to leave what is known.
LLMs typically fail to explore properly, and humans are no different. This tradeoff doesn't matter if we have infinite time horizon, but we do not (which is what makes life valuable in a postmodern sense - will write another post on sense of urgency). We typically alternate between exploration and exploitation phases in our lives. So when faced with decisions, I always ask: are you exploring, or are you exploiting?