# 2025 Year in Review 12/31/25 I’ve written private journal entries most new years, but in the spirit of writing more in public & on this blog (and amid some poorly-timed holiday writer’s block), I’m going to do my “year in review” here. ## Work ![[IMG_2858.jpeg]] ![[airbnb-hack.png]] ![[IMG_3426.jpeg]] ![[IMG_3491.png]] ![[IMG_3592.png]] ![[IMG_3652.png]] ![[IMG_3743.png]] ![[Pasted image 20260102002748.jpg]] I had the most fulfilling work year I’ve maybe *ever* had. We grew the team and hired more senior+ engineers to work with me on payments & crypto. I’ve stopped being a bus factor in a bunch of places. We’d kept lean for a long time (we still are, in absolute terms) — inspired by a quip from an investor about payments abstractions being built wrong if more than a few engineers work on payments — so this was a hard-earned, meaningful quality-of-life upgrade. There’s a bittersweet tinge to the shift; a growing proportion of the most exciting work on my team isn’t mine to directly IC, I have to both avoid micro-management and keep a sufficient ear to the details & maintain platform standards. To be a layer removed can often feel like the combo of being a human wiki and prompt engineer. But that’s also where the job is [[AI code is legacy code from day one#^b32d89|trending]] all the way down. --- Crypto came in handy in the context of our traditional payments roadmap! Specifically, we started using Bridge for “[[Why Wise and Airwallex aren’t worried about stablecoins#^4bb2eb|stablecoin sandwich]]” in the context of long-tail international payments.  Years ago, while rolling off Coinbase, I asked my incoming hiring manager on Payments: why *wasn’t* crypto replacing status quo rails? I got a great (maybe obvious at the time) answer anchored in how B2B payments actually work. I didn’t think this gig could come full circle to crypto, but stablecoins helped close the loop. Stablecoins were also involved — separately from the aforementioned sandwich — in a “new bet”, that I got to incubate and ship on Payments in collaboration with friends on the Treasury team. ![[IMG_2860.jpeg]] It started off as a winning hackathon project, got some funding for us to lock in at an Airbnb in Boulder and get it production-ready, and we’re ending this year with alpha customers and real volumes. --- I shipped a new platform — adjacent to the payments platform I’ve driven in my time here — that is now organically sucking up payment volumes as a consequence of its function (in short: a cross-bank, intra-product, payments network). When I first joined, my teammates — as a matter of both [team](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/pavel-asparouhov_what-i-learned-taking-ramp-bill-pay-from-activity-7130943124100542464-k656) culture + whitespace at the company — came up with a few platforms that continue to produce massive leverage for the rest of the company & new projects; [payments](https://builders.ramp.com/post/payments-platform), [workflows](https://builders.ramp.com/post/workflows), comms, AI, etc. I found this inspirational, but wondered if the whitespace was filled. Three years later, I’ve gotten to witness this new platform (among others) enable a bunch of valuable and sometimes [eccentric](https://x.com/0xdaedalus/status/2000674762226569249?s=46) use-cases, saving months in effort and complexity and lowering the bar for cool new things. So while it’s just one more thing that shipped this year, it was an inadvertent completion of another one of my goals: to deliver brand-new *leverage* that would make the next N things measurably easier to do + be a long-term component of the company’s success. --- ![[IMG_3603.jpeg]] I traveled a bunch — SF and Miami with the Payments team, CDMX with the International Platform team, New York a few times to HQ (for the yearly kickoff and later Ramp Hacks), SF and Miami for [A Very Stable Conference](https://writing.kunle.app/p/announcing-a-very-stable-conference) and [Fintech Nerdcon](https://www.fintechbrainfood.com/p/nerdcon), Boulder for our skunkworks project. --- This year on the job felt like a grand culmination of all the previous ones; I’m proud, but also grateful for the good fortune to work on the things I work on, and the teammates that made all of this happen. In company parlance, “job’s not finished.” ## Life This was a more intense “life” year than most. My most significant life change this year was a sad one: my long-term relationship of over 3 years came to an official end. I won’t say too much else here; but this was the only relationship I’d ever been in of this duration and depth, so it’s the most serious life change on the list. I’m now faced with more time and degrees of freedom re: where to go next. ![[IMG_1770.jpeg]] ![[IMG_1575.jpeg]] ![[IMG_0258.jpeg]] ![[IMG_1121.jpeg]] ![[IMG_1654.jpeg]] ![[IMG_8342.jpeg]] ![[IMG_2776.jpeg]] I’d broken my lease mid-last year to kick off a bunch of travel. In between traveling, I stayed at home with my parents (for the first time since before college) & worked remotely from a WeWork. I’m really glad I did it, but I’m also ready to get myself a place, (lightly) plant some roots, and build some routine and regularity again. --- ![[IMG_3247.jpeg]] I’ve now spent a lot of time in Nashville, as a result of my ex having spent the last two years doing grad school here. I actually really liked it as a place — great food, warm culture, pleasant neighborhoods and people — and it’s a place I could see myself coming back to someday. --- ![[IMG_2734.jpeg]] ![[Pasted image 20260102001746.jpg]] ![[IMG_1604.jpeg]] My brother has been in Texas for a while now; starting with a few gap years before med school, working as an EMT and later at a research lab, and we have other extended family out here. I spent a lot of quality time with them and gratuitously couchsurfed + took advantage of company WeWork budget. Later in the year, an alumni community I’m in had its annual retreat an hour out of Austin, a week before my brother’s whitecoat ceremony; another excuse to be back. I spent a bunch of time in Dallas, Austin, and Temple. I really enjoyed it here - similar to Nashville, the food is great, pleasant neighborhoods and city centers, a nice big lake in Temple, and I tend to bias in favor of hotter, more humid weather. I’m also growing partial to car-oriented cities for whatever nebulous reason. I like Texas (and with Nashville, maybe “the South” more broadly). --- ![[IMG_5213.jpeg]] ![[IMG_5314.jpeg]] ![[IMG_1677.jpeg]] Italy and Switzerland were great; I have nothing more to add other than to say that enjoyed all the cliche things to enjoy about the places, the transit situation is great, and I’m rooting for Europe to figure out all the things. I want to go back and spend more time doing leisurely things there. --- ![[IMG_2161.jpeg]] ![[IMG_2187.jpeg]] ![[IMG_2173.jpeg]] ![[Pasted image 20260102020013.jpg]] ![[Pasted image 20260102021923.jpg]] I loved Singapore like almost nowhere else I’ve been abroad. Something about a developed, English-speaking, vaguely Western (but with Chinese/Indian flair) city, with a high degree of cleanliness, good food, transit, ambience, people, etc - was really really good. Ya Kun Kaya’s butter sugar toast. Lots of malls (Orchard road?). We also went to “[Asia’s first Audio Cafe](https://zeppelinandco.com/)”, which I found out after the fact was home to some of the world’s best in-ear audio equipment, and tried out some of their upper-end monitors and DACs. I don’t exaggerate when I say that this was the absolute highest — borderline psychedelic — quality in which I’d ever heard a bunch of my favorite music, and I sorely regret not paying the hefty amount it’d have cost to take the equipment I tried home. I don’t even know if those things in particular did it for me, or something else — I sort of wonder if there’s a subconscious nostalgia for the years of my childhood I spent in Bangalore at play — but Singapore was a place that made me seriously wonder if it’d be worth moving here and settling down for an extended period of time. --- ![[IMG_2214.jpeg]] ![[IMG_4054.jpeg]] ![[Pasted image 20260102011108.jpg]] ![[Pasted image 20260102011109.jpg]] ![[Pasted image 20260102011109 1.jpg]] ![[Pasted image 20260102011109 2.jpg]] ![[Pasted image 20260102011109 3.jpg]] ![[Pasted image 20260102015358.jpg]] ![[Pasted image 20260102021236.jpg]] Thailand might have been the most *intense* of my travel destinations this year. We started in Chiang Mai, where it took me all of a few hours to get into a (stupid) accident with my rented scooter and become stuck with road rash for the rest of the trip. We briefly attempted the hospital (I serendipitously crashed tens of feet away), but given the wait time + my brother having previously been an EMT — he got a bunch of supplies from the local pharmacy and treated it himself in our hotel room. It was an ambient hassle and source of anxiety for the rest of the trip, and I kept track of the injury and its healing with ChatGPT for a few months after. Chiang Mai was otherwise pleasant; hospitable people, good food, elephants, etc. I found all the temples to be really charming and serene. We soon moved to Bangkok, which I found to be much more jarring. My first shock in Bangkok was that the way to use the local Uber equivalent, Grab, was to be backseat passenger on someone’s moped. I held on for dear life and spent a bunch of time in a mix of fearful and angry over-reflection: how could people value their lives so little as to go along with this? There’s no way this is reasonably safe. Why do some societies end up this way? I might have been overreacting, but I’m not sure. I was also taken aback by the general traffic chaos and even more, by the electrical line cable hell. More unsolicited judgement from me. There was reprieve in a trip we made to this mall called “MBK.” This was basically a place where a bunch of factory copies of expensive clothing and merchandise were sold for pennies on the dollar, and so it was fun retail therapy and I enjoyed learning how bad I am at haggling. It added to my skepticism of the city, but I still had fun. There was an art museum that doubled as a place to buy/sell craft, that I enjoyed even more. We ended one of those nights attending some sort of Muay Thai international competition, which was also cool to watch. We also briefly explored some of the seedier parts of the city. We walked through Nana Plaza on the way to a high-quality-low-cost tailor my brother found on Reddit, which, if you don’t know, is a hub for prostitution. I found myself vaguely repulsed by the atmosphere IRL, but nothing that crazy and we were out pretty quick. Later one night, we also walked through Khao San road, which is where my repulsion turned several notches more extreme. It was a sensory nightmare: the music was both extremely and unsafely loud, and entirely atonal, emanating from a bunch of different places that seemed to be competing for auditory bandwidth. There were tons of hawkers trying to pressure us, foreigners, into degeneracy of all sorts: ping pong shows, hookers, laughing gas, weed, other drugs. I don’t know; I just remember taking it all in and being generally disgusted, and wondering in the moment how a society could allow that sort of underbelly to be as accessible and proximate to civilization as they did. It wasn’t very far from that street that you could eg. see parents driving their kids home from school on their mopeds, etc. I think the combo of coming straight from Singapore (very primed on the accomplishments of Lee Kuan Yew in civilizing the region), my injury, my degen-skeptical personality, and my over-analysis of what it takes for a place to civilize and/or collapse (having read the LKY bio on the way from Singapore to Thailand) — caused me to be somewhat hard on the place. I feel like a square confessing my love for an uptight place like Singapore, and allergic reaction to a place like Bangkok, but so be it. But I do have a nostalgia for it, regardless, and I do want to go back and see if living there on my terms, avoiding tourist traps, would endear me to it more. I like temples, markets, art museums, mango sticky rice, and cheap foot massages to scroll to. There are people I respect who’ve found it to be rich with culture and personality, very livable, whose experience I’d want to live out a bit more. In general, the “third world” has a subtle charm with me in that it evokes childhood memories from my time living in India; so I’ll always be drawn to it. --- I’ve always had “creative” hobbies — writing, music, programming — but for the last few years those generally took a backseat in favor of me rising to the occasion of my day job. This year was the year I “got back” to a bunch of them — specifically writing & programming. Music is still in the backseat at present. ![[Screenshot 2026-01-02 at 1.20.50 PM.png]] This blog started to exist, and I figured out new excuses to write publicly that wouldn’t embarrass me by being too navel-gazey: writing about work! I’ve found ways to get in other feelings along the way, but writing about boring facts and work opinions makes it all easier, so I’ve started there. A few of these posts went viral on Hacker News, too, which feels pretty good! That’s where it all started for me more than a decade ago. Claude Code & Cursor — vibecoding — has completely changed the calculus for me on programming for fun. I shipped eg. a vibe-coded [[Home#^3416f1|clicker game]], worked with friends & family to help build some of their AI-age ideas based on their work, and I’m able to ship way more of the stuff that would have been too time-consuming and onerous at the margins to be worth it. --- I went outside way more, and engaged in new and recent outdoors-y hobbies that I’d neglected despite growing up and living in Colorado! ![[IMG_0283.jpeg]] ![[Pasted image 20260102133046.jpg]] ![[IMG_8872.jpeg]] Skiing, fishing / boating, hiking, etc. I’m going to do a lot more skiing this season; it’s fun and I’d like to get good at it. I sucked at fishing, and hiking is mostly a good excuse to go on walks up mountains with good friends when they’re in town. --- ![[IMG_3853.jpeg]] ![[IMG_3852.jpeg]] I’ve been on and off with the gym — long stretches of travel have been bad for both exercise routine and diet, but I try to overcompensate to the extent I can when I’m back home. I’m still trending positively in strength and musculature, but cholesterol is starting to catch up to me, I’m not getting enough sunlight or sleep, I’ve neglected cardio and leg day, and I’m neither shredded nor benching two plates. So there’s a lot left to do here. ## Looking forward  There’s a lot I want out of this year.