2024 Year in Review
Here we go again...the last day of 2024 so time to publish the Year in Review in classic, procrastinated fashion. For those that have followed me or remotely care, I've done this for 10+ years — writing these help me pause time for a brief moment and reflect on the past year.
Here are a few resources I found helpful in recapping this year (major shouts to the authors here)
The Year Compass thing is actually pretty dope. It's a free PDF that gives you a simple framework to work through a review. My wife (begrudgingly haha) and I are about halfway through. It's fun enough to do together but not daunting or self-helpy enough to feel cheesy. Shouts to the team that tweaks and publishes that every year (support them here).
Table of Contents
Personal Highlights
Work Highlights
Reflections
Photo Dump
Personal Highlights:
My little sister got engaged and is getting married next year while my other, youngest sister graduated from George Washington!
My wife and I vacationed on the Plum (Plum Island, MA) visiting my aunt and uncle checking off a few bucket list items as my wife finally got to go to Brimfield (one of the biggest antique shows in the country)
Hosted some awesome parties at our house in Clintonville including a big Browns Home Opener watch party, Thanksgiving with both sides of fam, and Christmas Eve dinner (prime rib)
Watched in awe as my wife revamped our entire house (built new shelves, re-did bathroom and vanity, built me an outdoor kitchen, etc, etc, etc)
The only thing I can claim contribution to is the backyard reno involving planting some sod and moving some dirt
She plans on posting more of her works so more to come soon!
Spent lots of time with both grandparents and took my mom’s Dad (aka Tommy B the scotch whisperer) on a fun trip to the Grand Hotel in Warren, Ohio
Visited Stanford / California with my wife's family and got to check out the old stomping grounds in Mountain View, CA where I went through 500 startups
Got to go the MASTERS thanks to a last-minute act of god from some great friends
Witnessed the Guardians ALCS Game 5 live in Cleveland (long live Big Christmas)
Traveled to Athens, OH for a board meeting with the Entrepreneurship Advisory board I'm on at my alma mater Ohio University
Obligatory Court St visit
Excited about what they’re doing there for empowering entrepreneurs
Logged 100+ runs, stayed relatively healthy physically and mentally
Shot my best golf round ever (74) and ended the year as a single-digit HDCP (8)
Work Highlights:
Rapchat crossed 10M+ total creators on the platform, collectively generating 100M+ plays just this year
Fully embraced AI-assisted coding using Cursor and am convinced like everybody else that AI is going to change the world in ways we can't comprehend
Can confidently code 10x faster and navigate across different languages, frameworks, domains at a pretty insane clip
Contributed over 350 times to our Rapchat repos on GitHub (6+ languages)
Personally packaged a release on every major platform including iOS, Android, Web, API, and Services (first year coding anything in Android)
Released Rapchat Platinum - a new membership tier that enables creators to distribute music they create on Rapchat to streaming services like Spotify and generate revenue via streaming royalties (Platinum unlocks unlimited distribution plus everything in Rapchat Gold)
Attended the RevenueCat App Founders Summit in SF with my COO JJ where we got to meet so many of the awesome people from the digital community of app builders
Solidified Rapchat to be default alive as Paul Graham would say…(not the sexiest accomplishment but gives us the latitude to build new, exciting things again)
Worked our ass off as a small but mighty team shipping the most software we ever have
Random Reflections
Creativity and prioritization matter more than ever now that making stuff is easier.
AI may be able to 100x your output but that doesn’t always translate to real value
People are jumping the gun obsessed with AI agents without first building better foundational blocks (AI still writes like shit for ex)
Avoiding rabbit holes is now instrumental to doing better work as 100x more of them will exist
The art will be in choosing what to build not how
A modern day renaissance may be coming: new companies, ideas, and ways of living have a chance to emerge with the advent of AI
My hope is that more people can lean into whatever they’re passionate about on a full-time basis
People are far too obsessed with finding the perfect routine or diet or supplement or Andrew Hubermnan protocol to the point it’s stressing everybody out
As somebody who has fallen for the trap haha can promise doing the best you can and accepting not every day is perfect or not every night is a perfect night of sleep is a much saner way to live
Related: last year, I stopped tracking my sleep and most health metrics outside of workouts for this very reason and have the best year of sleep yet
Doing fewer things, better > doing many things at once
H/T Cal Newport and some of his things from Slow Productivity
Still waiting for a better solution when it comes to sanely stashing content for later consumption
Tried the Matter app and while I like it, same problem of having a massive queue still exists
Same goes for Spotify podcast queue
Personally am interested in building an app layer in between these things to help curate your next read or listen 100x better than current solutions
Have a belief that “radio for anything” will be a strong feature for a lot of B2C platforms (for example: you should be able to find 10 podcast episodes right away similar to your favorite or find 10 blog posts using perplexity similar to your favorite)
My phone stayed on Do Not Disturb (sorry to anybody who tried to contact me this year) — it was the only way I found to preserve some sanity with that device
Hopefully, will work on some new systems so the people that need to reach me can reach me including a landline of sorts
Retro products that slow things down continue to bring me joy:
Getting the newspaper again was one of the best decisions I made this year
Records and real books bring you back to the world
Next up: installing a house phone (and maybe starting The Retro Co)
Twitter and the public town halls of the internet continue to be (often-toxic) and unavoidable yet extremely powerful in sparking public discourse
Hard to ignore what happened with Elon, Twitter, Joe Rogan, the Election, and more
Just wished more people focused on empathy & understanding others over tearing people who don’t agree with them down
Last quick thing before the photo dump: thank you so much to everyone in my life — I am so lucky and grateful for my friends, family, all those that support me professionally, and of my course my lovely wife…MUCH LOVE and HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL 🎉
Photo Dump
