# 2025 Year in Review 01/02/26 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 I had the most fulfilling work year I’ve maybe *ever* had. ![[IMG_2858.jpeg|]] ![[IMG_3592.png|]] ![[airbnb-hack.png|]] ![[IMG_3426.jpeg|]] ![[IMG_3491.png|]] ![[IMG_3652.png|]] ![[IMG_3743.png|]] ![[Pasted image 20260102002748.jpg|]] We grew the team and hired more senior+ engineers to work with me on payments. I’ve stopped being a bus factor in a bunch of places. We’d kept lean for a long time — inspired by a quip from an investor about abstractions being broken 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 IC myself. I have to both avoid micro-management and keep a [sufficient](https://paulgraham.com/foundermode.html) ear to the details. To be a layer removed feels like 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 on our traditional payments roadmap. I finally got to integrate 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 originally think this gig would come full circle to crypto. ![[IMG_2860.jpeg|]] Stablecoins were also involved — separately from the aforementioned sandwich — in a product incubation I helped lead between Payments and our friends on the Treasury team. It started off as a winning hackathon project, got funding for an Airbnb in Boulder, and we’re ending this year with alpha customers, real volumes, and we hired a full-time lead to focus on it from here. --- I conceived of and shipped a new platform — adjacent to the payments platform I’ve driven in my time here — that is now organically sucking up payment volumes & increasingly serving as a strategic lever for everything we build. In short: an inter-bank, intra-Ramp, payments network — for greater interoperability between all of our funds flows, and towards closed-loop payments. 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, and whitespace at the company — came up with a few platforms that continue to produce 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 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. 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. --- ![[Pasted image 20260116133045.jpg|A Very Stable Conference]] ![[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), [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 these things, 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 end. I won’t say too much else here; this was a long, important relationship. 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 broke my lease mid-2024 to kick off a bunch of travel. In between traveling, I've stayed at home with my parents (for the first time since before college) & worked remotely from a WeWork. I’m glad I did it, but I’m also ready to get myself a place, (lightly) plant some roots, and build some routine again. There's only so much of that you can do both on the road, and at your childhood home. --- ![[IMG_3247.jpeg|]] I’ve now spent a lot of time in Nashville, as a result of E 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; gap years working as an EMT and later at a research lab, and then med school. We also have other family out here. I spent a lot of quality time with them, gratuitously couchsurfing + taking advantage of company WeWork budget. An alumni community I’m in also had its annual retreat an hour out of Austin; another excuse to be back. I spent a bunch of time in Dallas, Austin, and Temple. ^340522 I really enjoyed it here - the food is great, pleasant neighborhoods, 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 I enjoyed all the cliche things to enjoy about the places, the transit situation is great, and I’m rooting for Europe. 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 - was 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. I sorely regret not taking the equipment I tried home. I don’t even know if those things did it for me, or something else — I wonder if it's a nostalgia for the three years of my childhood I spent in Bangalore — but Singapore was a place that made me seriously consider 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 was the most intense of my travel destinations. We started in Chiang Mai, where it took me only a few hours to get into a (stupid) accident on my rented scooter and spend the rest of the trip with road rash. We briefly tried the hospital (I’d crashed a few feet away), but given the wait time — and my brother’s EMT background — he bought supplies from a local pharmacy and treated it in our hotel room. It became an ambient hassle and source of anxiety for the rest of the trip, and I tracked the injury with ChatGPT for a few months after. Chiang Mai was otherwise pleasant; hospitable people, good food, elephants, temples that felt calm and serene. From there we went to Bangkok. My first shock was that the default way to "Grab", the local Uber equivalent, was as a backseat passenger on someone’s moped. I held on for dear life, in a mix of fear and anger: how could people value their lives so little as to go along with this? There’s no way this is reasonably safe. The traffic chaos and the electrical cable hell everywhere amplified that feeling. There was some reprieve at MBK, a mall selling factory copies of expensive clothing for pennies — a fun reminder of how bad I am at haggling. We visited an art museum / craft market I liked, and later watched some Muay Thai, which was cool. We briefly walked through some of the seedier parts — Nana Plaza on the way to a tailor my brother found on Reddit, and later Khao San Road. The latter was where my discomfort peaked: extremely loud, clashing music from every direction, hawkers pushing ping-pong shows, hookers, laughing gas, weed, and everything else at tourists. I remember taking it all in, disgusted, and wondering 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, for example, see parents driving their kids home from school on their mopeds. Coming straight from Singapore — and reading the LKY biography on the flight — probably heightened all of this. Combined with my injury and some natural uptightness, I think I was harsher on Bangkok than I otherwise would’ve been. I feel like a square confessing my love for an uptight place like Singapore and recoiling from Bangkok — but so be it. I’m still nostalgic for it, and I want to go back on different terms: fewer tourist traps, more temples, markets, art museums, mango sticky rice, cheap foot massages to scroll to, and slower days. People I respect love the city and have found it rich and deeply livable. And as with much of the “third world,” there’s a subtle charm that reminds me of India. --- My “creative” hobbies — writing, music, websites — took a backseat for some years in favor of my dayjob. This year, I got back to writing & recreationally building websites. ![[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. Boring facts and work opinions make it all easier, so I’ve started there. A few of these posts went viral on Hacker News, too, which felt pretty good! That’s where it all started for me more than a decade ago. Even more gratifying, though, was seeing coworkers discover + recognize my writing that way. ![[Pasted image 20260102234442.jpg|]] ^4092ab Claude Code — vibe-coding — has completely changed the calculus for me on programming for fun. I shipped eg. a vibe-coded [clicker game](https://lgtm.text-incubation.com), worked with friends & family to help build some of their AI ideas, and I’m able to ship more of the stuff that'd previously be too time-consuming and onerous at the margins to be worth it. ^4f5f38 --- I spent more time on outdoor hobbies that I’d neglected despite growing up and living in Colorado! ![[IMG_0283.jpeg|]] ![[Pasted image 20260102133046.jpg|]] ![[IMG_8872.jpeg|]] Skiing, fishing, 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 nor sleep, and I’m neither shredded nor benching two plates. So there’s a lot left to do here. ## Looking forward  I care about this year more than others. I see it as an inflection point. I want to inflect my commitment to health. I’ve half-assed it, to decent results, for a very long time: I want to go all-in. I figure that hormonally, energetically, in terms of my freedom; there won’t be a better time to make this happen, and all the risk factors that were passable when I was younger (around heart health, longer-term hormonal decline) start to not be so trivial. I want to be more systematic about my gym routine; tracking and enforcing progress, tailoring my diet, and making it one of the few hard commitments I make. This is one of the few areas in which I feel no real ambiguity; I just have to go and do it. ^76e860 I’ve liked my job a lot. It's been receptive to the grandest of ideas and ambition, with little red tape; distribution is baked in, such that good ideas repeatedly have a good shot. Very few of the “next acts” I’ve seen excite me enough to want to replicate them. At year 3.5, this scares me. I feel “safe” and “comfortable” in ways that I instinctively distrust, but the legible alternatives look even less like adventure. I’m not sure the right next step could be anything other than to (metaphorically) [wander](https://www.palladiummag.com/2022/01/06/quit-your-job/) and try to figure out my 10+ year calling; to make bigger, riskier, more meaningful bets with my time and resources. Money is important, and I consider myself on the hook for the financial wellbeing of my family. I've spent my 20s somewhat conservative about risk in the day-to-day (as a function of my nature - I wish it weren’t true), but I then hard-correct into things that “scare” me to compensate. Re: quitting work without something tangible ahead; I’ve long *coped* that I simply need to scope out the abyss, and jump in once everything is ready. I don’t think that’s how it works, though.  This is a hard-correction year, I’m pretty sure. Apropos of everything: I’m overdue for relocation. Living in the middle of nowhere & traveling a ton is a great way to live *if* your job gives you an anomalous degree of scope, you make a lot of friends and partners in the process, and everyone is hyper-textual and on Slack all the time. *If* you're okay satisfying but not optimizing your health. I don’t think I can afford being as “remote” in the next chapter. It's an open question whether SF, NY, or TX are the right place, but I think I’ve done enough CO for the time being (though I anticipate being back, and I do really love it here). Overall: I'm excited! The pressure of 27 is on, I've arrived at a lot of critical junctures, and I mostly feel blessed. --- <iframe allow="autoplay *; encrypted-media *;" frameborder="0" height="450" style="width:100%;max-width:660px;overflow:hidden;background:transparent;" sandbox="allow-forms allow-popups allow-same-origin allow-scripts allow-storage-access-by-user-activation allow-top-navigation-by-user-activation" src="https://embed.music.apple.com/us/playlist/replay-2025/pl.rp-RNMNik7jo5O"></iframe> ![[IMG_4060.jpeg|]] ![[IMG_4062.jpeg|]] ![[IMG_3833.png|]] ![[IMG_3965.png|]]