Week one

We’ve just ordered coffee at a cafe in Carmel and are looking for a place to sit. That’s when I receive an alert on my phone and notice a bunch of unread mail from my inbox. In my inbox there’s an email from my new health insurance plan, one from my stock broker letting me know that there’s been a change in my stock plan, and a couple from services I use informing me that I no longer have Google perks. It’s my first day as a Xoogler, and I’ve been cut off.

We end up sitting next to someone who helps small businesses, and after informing them of my current status, I get a lesson on protecting myself, my intellectual property, following compliance rules, and all the mistakes new ventures make when they first get started. I am on my own.

Notifications on my inbox continue throughout the day but are mostly from recruiters. On the car ride back from Carmel, I let Aarti know that I’m feeling a little overwhelmed. She brings up the fact that it’s only my first day, and I can figure things out on my own schedule. My goal for the first week– no, the first month– should be to have fun.

And so I keep that in mind as I proceed through the week. It stays with me as I read a few papers from 2008 that I had nearly forgotten about, run a number of machine learning experiments and document my learnings, trace down a bug to an issue with ARPACK, which was written in FORTRAN 77, learn the ins and outs of structuring a Delaware C Corp and the tax implications, discover a few additional nuances of the use case I am exploring from the end user, come up with an initial plan to get to a minimum viable product (MVP) or early prototype, create my first GitHub pull request for feedback, check out a product demo of the new Apple Vision Pro glasses, discover a cafe near the Presidio, get a haircut, start drafting a new short fiction piece, start reading a new novel, receive compliments on my progress in kickboxing, discuss the prospect of coaching a new improv troupe, and ignore over 100 recruiter emails.

Having fun… check.