2020 Newsletter
Me, 4 months pregnant (I’m 2x the size now), on the creek on our dream home!
Hello friends,
Welcome to my inaugural newsletter on the last day of 2020 - I hope to share the kinds of things I'd talk about if we were to catch up over tea.
Pregnancy
I became pregnant this summer around the time the wildfires were ravaging the West Coast. I didn’t feel especially ready, but it was an intentional decision. Intellectually speaking, it was an optimal choice for me:
My parents are my best friends and I want my children to grow up with them and make memories with them living their most vivid lives. Today, my parents are the sort of people who physically train for their trips to Europe by doing 15 mile hikes with backpacks loaded with weights. In turn, I’ll want to know my grandchildren and fully plan on out hiking them in my 50s.
The expected value of the health of the child seems to best between 25 and 30, especially factoring in that Justin and I are financially able to support a family now.
With most decisions I can estimate how much I’ll like it based on how I’ve enjoyed similar experiences. I have eaten many Peking ducks and can be very confident I’ll love eating my next one. TBH, my past experiences watching small humans play with wood blocks wasn’t exactly the most fun thing I’d ever done. However, I believe that becoming a parent will make a different person with a completely set of preferences so there’s no way for me to assess how future me will value experiences. Regardless of emotional readiness, I’m absolutely certain I want to be this person.
Why I’m so confident I want to be a parent (err, it gets personal): The winter after I turned 21, I started having panic attacks about death. Most of time I can’t really comprehend it and there’s a mental block that feels safe. If I’m in just the right (or wrong?) mood, I can tumble over that block and take a peek into oblivion. This was totally terrifying and I turned to books to try to help me find peace - the denial of death (from my friend Yifan) was the most helpful and it argues that one of the purposes of society is to construct a hero quest that if you complete, you can tell yourself that your life was worth living. In calmer moments, I play around with very noble ambitions (Muskian tasks come to mind) but when I’m in one of these moods, the only thing I’ve thought is - all I want in this life is to love and be loved.
Because this was such a planned decision, JP and I read a dozen books on parenting but a couple of things still took me by surprise:
First trimester was the worst - I haven’t finished 3rd trimester yet or given birth but those combined seem like they’re maybe 20% as bad as first trimester. I’ve heard for some women it’s NBD but for me it was basically like waking up with a bad hangover with overwhelming nausea every day for 2 months straight. Silver lining, it turns out all those restrictions on what you can’t eat don’t matter when you’re too nauseous to want to eat anything at all. To make things worse, miscarriages are very common (arguably as high as 40% from first detection) so most people don’t say anything and just deal with it privately.
Everyone including strangers have been incredibly protective of me now that I’m obviously pregnant. Store clerks bring me cushy chairs, friends offer to walk on the side of the street with cars, people open doors (haha at one point Justin got scolded for letting me open a door). So many congratulations!
Although my reasons for becoming pregnant were rooted in a rather cold feeling commitment to making optimal decisions, I became overwhelmingly excited after my 20 week ultrasound. Something about seeing him (it’s a boy) swimming around on screen made it so real. I’ve decided my baby has the cutest face profile I’ve ever seen. I’m inspired to watercolor animals for his nursery. I’m super excited to meet my baby!!!!
House
JP and I snatched up our dream home after looking at at O(100) homes the past two years. Before COVID hit, we’d tour houses for fun in all the local neighborhoods and fantasize about hypothetical lives in hypothetical houses. This gave us a lot of clarity that we’d found the perfect house - later I actually realized - it’s exactly what I’d aspired to in high school (inspired by a friend’s house in Los Altos) and proclaimed I wanted. Side note: as a youth, I said wanted to work by the wall st bull (done, freshman year internship with SecondMarket), raise my kids in a house just like my friend’s (on-track with baby baking and the house purchased), and become a billionaire (errr ?????). The house is a comfortably oversized cottage - vaguely British feeling with a steep wooden roof and lined with flowers. We’re not far from downtown but on nestled at the end of the private street with a creek so I can pretend we’re somewhere rural. A couple of things I learned along the way:
It was worth taking our sweet time checking out houses and neighborhoods. Our preferences shifted pretty dramatically over the course our search. We’d developed eagle eyes for fake nice versus real quality, which helped a lot in gauging value.
The two valid strategies in a seller’s market are get a reasonable house for the perfect price or get the perfect house for a reasonable price. Life is about trade-off and this like the CAP theorem of home buying.
The mortgage matters arguably more than the housing price - the effective rate we would have paid in terms of $$$ per month over 30 years varied by 20% between the best terms and normal terms whereas the market is efficient to not have houses mis-priced by anywhere close to 20%.
The fact that I think this is a most interesting thing I learned while indicates a shift from preferring to think about form, structure, and meaning to where to get cheap turpentine (It’s a Picasso reference). If I bought a house in my early 20s I’d probably prefer to be thinking about something in the vein of the influence of industrial design on housing styles.
Personal goals
AHAHAHA HAHAHA - yeah those didn’t happen in 2020. See the bullet on 1 trimester pregnancy. That said, I’ve gotten my energy back and I’m back in the groove of things:
Learning Spanish via Duolingo every morning and Pimsleur at night. I remember trying both these products 10 years ago and not being very impressed then. Wow, they’ve become incredible since - it’s as close as effortless as learning a new language can get. I just do what the flashing lights tell you to do on it schedule it tells you to do. I find that I’m surprised to encounter Spanish ex a sign or playlist song and actually understand it! You should invite me on any trips to Latin America or Spain.
Developing an extensive theoretical (and personally useless) understanding of wine. We shape our buildings and they shape us. Aka, the dream house we bought comes with a centerpiece wine rack with UV treated glass, temperature and humidity control but I’m (1) pregnant (2) fairly allergic to alcohol. I was originally going to fill it cheap bottles as decorations but the nerd in me just can’t do it so now I’m off reading wine textbooks and watching YouTube videos of wine regions and wineries. If you come over in the after COVID times, I’ll cook you dinner and you can watch me LARP being a somm as I chose you a theoretically perfect bottle of wine.
Work and professional
The end of 2020 means marks two years as a manager - I work harder than I did for arguably less recognition than when I was an IC but it’s 100% the most fun job I’ve had. The big payoff is that I work with the team I’ve always dreamed of working on. I’m still learning but I’ve gotten to experience a variety of situations, make a call, and see how it played it out. Some of the things I’ve learned or shifted my opinion on:
Bottoms up decision making → Tasting menu decision making: I used try to involve my team in every consequential decision and set up extensive processes to ensure we had a consistent decision making process that anyone, not just me the manager could participate in. I’ve shifted towards the POV that good decision making is a service and a benefit that the manager provides (rather than a privilege they have snatched away from the team).
Management as a performance based occupation - I do a lot of “stuff” that matters day to day but seem to only slightly affect outcomes in the end. A lot of success actually comes down to nailing a few big items. Some are obvious such as representing your team during performance review or hiring. Others are less obvious, like which presentations are business poetry that simply need to exist versus which will sway a key decision. My trick is I work very hard upfront to make all the “stuff” effortless (or at least delegatable) so that I can spend 10x as much on ensuring the big moments go well.
Looking ahead to 2021 - I’m excited for
Our little froggie (our nickname for our upcoming baby) is due mid-April!
Post-COVID we’re still planning on having a wedding
I’m effectively GCing a bathroom addition to make a 2nd master for the parents (and I have a vision for converting our formal living room into an equinox-esque gym. Will report back on learnings.
I’m trying to do a better job of learning from the advice of others (rather than yoloing and learning things the hard way myself). If you’re vaguely older than me or know people you’d be willing to make an intro to (I’m 28), I’d love to find time to just hear about how life has played out the past several years and get life advice.
I know for many its been a difficult and disorienting year - I’m grateful for the kindness and support I’ve encountered this year. If there’s anything I can do to offer it to you, please don’t hesitate reach out. And if you've received this, I'd really love to hear a few words from you on how your 2020 went!
Thanks,
Kathy
P.S. Thanks to Pete Huang whose tweet inspired this and Khurram and Lingtong who gave me feedback!