Some of the things I did this year:

• 0 – 1 products and startups
• Coffee chats and meeting people
• Relationships and experiences
• Media I consumed (& recommend!)

0 – 1 products and startups

Learning and building projects have been the focus of my 2025. I built 5 full-stack projects, the two most prominent ones being:

• Lemon: Consumer social marketplace addressing modern loneliness through ML-curated IRL experiences. Scaled to 600+ signups, 50+ experiences hosted, and featured on Singapore National TV.
• PageFlow: A lightweight native macOS PDF reader built with Swift + PDFKit—fast annotations without Acrobat bloat. Went mini-viral on launch: 35K+ impressions and 300+ downloads in 1 week.

I built PageFlow in a one-week sprint. It reminded me once again that building products follows a power law distribution, and some products can have disproportionate success. Take more shots. You just need one home run.

Building something 0 – 1 is hard. In fact, it was the subject of my first essay. There are many factors that contribute to that difficulty: fear of failure, procrastination, taste gap… But the biggest one for me is probably the cringe.

Fortunately, building/creating is a muscle. The more you do it, the easier and more natural it gets.

Coffee chats and meeting people

I started coffee chats in November, and I plan to keep doing them consistently in 2026.

Coffee chats are one of the highest-value things I did this year. You get to learn about someone’s life and career, build connections (that often lead to projects and opportunities) and learn about the specifics of their industry in just a couple of hours.

Relationships and experiences

My priority throughout the year has been maximizing my relationships and life experiences. Somehow, they too follow a power law distribution. A handful of people and experiences shape you far more than everything else combined. 

Media I consumed (& recommend!)

Here are the best pieces of media that have shaped so much of my thinking and feelings this year.

Essays

• Ben Kuhn, Searching for outliers.
• Ben Kuhn, A critique of effective altruism.
• Ben Horowitz, Nobody Cares.
• Systematic Long Short, The Prison of Financial Mediocrity.
• Maalvika, being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage.
• Eigenmoomin, if you meet the singaporean on the road.
• David Brooks, The Organization Kid.
• Ihor Kendiukhov, You Are Moving Out Of Your Reference Class.
• Networks, Crowds, and Markets, Chapter 18 Power Laws and Rich-Get-Richer Phenomena. This one is not an essay but a chapter from a textbook.

Books

• Eric Jorgenson, Anthology of Balaji.
• Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.
• Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life.

Music

• Ethel Cain, Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You. Especially Waco, Texas, Nettles, Fuck Me Eyes, Janie, Dust Bowl and Tempest.
• Polyphia, Renaissance.
• Daughter, Not To Disappear.
• Stromae & Pomme, Ma Meilleure Ennemie.

Films

Unfortunately, I did not watch as many movies or shows this year as I would have liked. Still, here are some of my favorites. I will definitely try to watch more movies in 2026.

• Sonny Boy, 2021. 3rd rewatch and it is still as good as the first.
• Princess Mononoke, 1997.
• One Piece Fan Letter, 2024.
• Arcane Season 2, 2024.
• Anora, 2024.
• Look Back, 2024.

2025 has been an amazing year, and I am excited to see what 2026 brings. I hope everyone reading this has had a great 2025. Here’s to the next home run, and I am going to hit it out of the park.