2026 will be the Year of Discovery
I turned 28 yesterday and like years past, I wanted to reflect on this past year and plan my theme for 2026. But 2025 was different; this isn’t a typical growth year to celebrate, this is a year with a clean ending, introspection, and searching for what comes next.
Past themes
The theme system was popularized by CGP Grey in the Cortex podcast. I’ve been using it for years as an alternative to New Year’s Resolutions. Instead of specific goals that are easy to fail, an overarching theme acts as a North Star and guides you in making both major and micro decisions. Themes are malleable - what they mean to you at the start of the year might be very different from where you end up, and that’s the point.
The last five years of themes tells a clear story:
- 2021 Year of Commitment - Raised $3M for Pabio, got into Y Combinator, moved to the Netherlands with Sukriti, lost 10kg
- 2022 Year of Teamwork - Delegated more, hired team, got engaged, worked hardest year yet
- 2023 Year of Relationships - Got married, pivoted from Pabio to FirstQuadrant with Carlo
- 2024 Year of Gratitude - Mental health focus, moved to Utrecht, bought a house
- 2025 Year of Sukriti - Focused on our relationship, worked hard to build and exit FirstQuadrant
The Year of Gratitude became my anchor during the last few years. The practice of actively being thankful for what I had helped me stay grounded when other things were falling apart. At the end of 2024, my spouse and I faced a tough time in our relationship. So in 2025, I made a commitment: this year would be about her.
We started couples therapy. We learned how to communicate in a way that actually worked (I’m still learning!). We fought through some hard conversations and came out on the other side with better tools to understand and appreciate each other. It was one of the hardest periods I’ve been through, but we emerged stronger than ever. I’m not going to share the details here - some things are ours alone. But I wanted to acknowledge that while the professional narrative of 2025 involves shutting down a company and searching for what’s next, it really was all about strengthening the important partnerships in my life.
Reflecting on 2025
I’m writing a five-part retrospective about the Pabio + FirstQuadrant journey, so I’ll keep this section brief. In October, Carlo and I had our final founder call: We stared at the numbers - runway, churn, burn rate, OpenAI bills - there was no conversation needed, the math made it obvious. It was time to shut down the company. This was different from Pabio. With Pabio, we pivoted, turning furniture into AI and building a new product. This time, we were hard stopping. After five years of building, fighting, and iterating, we were choosing to walk away.
I ran an extremely fast acquisition process and ended up selling our assets to an AI decacorn. It wasn’t life-changing money, but it was enough to have a clean ending and some time to figure out what’s next. It was surprisingly relieving. For the first time in the better part of a decade, I had a clean slate. No customers to support, no fires to put out, no KPIs to track. But it was also painful. This wasn’t a pivot with a silver lining, this was the end.
I had six months to try new things, explore new ideas, and decide what I want to do with my life. November was a blur of asset transfer logistics, decompressing, reading, thinking, and spending time together. I thought I’d enjoy the break after five years of 80-hour weeks.
By December, the restless feeling caught up with me. I can’t do nothing all day, so I started exploring: chatting with other startups, spending a few hours every other day with Carlo thinking about new ideas, attending AI events, having lunch with founders. My days became a mix of reading, gym, cooking, ideation, and trying to figure out who I am when I’m not “cofounder of X”.
And that last part - the identity question - is more disorienting than I expected. For a decade, I’ve had a simple answer to “what do you do?” Now I don’t. And some days that freedom feels exciting, others it feels… like there’s something missing?
What’s next?
I’m actively exploring two paths: joining another company or starting something new with Carlo. After being the sole technical decision-maker for years, I’m excited about the prospect of working with other really smart engineers and product builders. I very much don’t want to be the smartest person in the room, I want to learn from people who know more than me.
But I’m also still hungry. Two companies shut down in five years means I have unfinished business. I want to prove I can build something that works financially, not just technically. The next idea needs to resonate deeply - not just be a good market opportunity, but something I genuinely care about and want to learn from.
2025 by the numbers
Work & productivity
2025 was a very productive year for me, but it was also a very different kind of productivity. The software engineering job changed completely in the Year of Agents, and my work elevated to managing AI programming tools like Cursor and Claude Code.
- GitHub: 5,000+ contributions (top languages: TypeScript, Markdown, JSON)
- WakaTime: 730 hours 48 minutes coded (2 hrs 33 mins/day average)
- Cursor: Top 5% users with 46,000 tabs tabbed
- ChatGPT: Top 3% in messages sent, first 0.1% of users
I also had some side quests this year:
- Built Continuous Claude, a CLI that runs Claude Code in an iterative loop that hit 1k+ stars on GitHub and topped Hacker News
- Gave $1,000 to an LLM to autonomously trade stocks for four months which made $380 (over 100% CAGR), open sourced Priced In
- Organized an unofficial remote batch for YC founders to recreate that intense batch experience, with 90 companies participating in weekly section calls and a final Demo Day
- Spoke about how to build your own coding agents at RenderATL in Atlanta
- Chatted with dozens of founders about building sales tools and navigating exits in the last few months
Here’s my year painted in pixels by ChatGPT - “Still Life with Laptop and Eurail Pass”:
Seems about right.
Everything else
I didn’t read as much as previous years, but my favorite was Everything Is Tuberculosis by John Green. I greatly enjoyed it and highly recommend it; I didn’t expect modern beauty standards to have this greatly arisen from consumption.
Travel was a lot: Started with Delhi and Bangalore, then Atlanta, SF twice, Italy twice (Alghero - best trip ever, followed by Milan, Florence, Pisa, Rome, Naples, Pompeii in trains). 16 flights, 11 airports, 52,000 km. Also, my brother visited us, which was awesome.
My Spotify Wrapped revealed what anyone who knows me could have guessed: Top artists were Gracie Abrams, Olivia Rodrigo, Sabrina Carpenter, Taylor Swift, Maisie Peters. No concerts this year though.
Continued listening to podcasts and audiobooks, along with somewhat consistent therapy and gym sessions.
If I could go back to January 2025 with the knowledge I have now, I would make one change: pivot harder to the Brain. Instead of maintaining email and CRM features and trying to be an all-in-one platform, I would have focused exclusively on the AI reasoning engine - the actual innovation we’d built.
More than tactical, I’ve learned that the next idea I work on can’t just be a good market opportunity or a smart play, it needs to resonate with me emotionally. I need to deeply care about it, want to learn new things from it, and feel it align with who I am as a person.
Discovery in 2026
After exiting FirstQuadrant, I find myself at a crossroads that’s both scary and liberating, albeit foggy. For the first time in a decade, I have a clean slate: I’m not pivoting, no longer racing against a runway, not trying to make something work; I can actually choose what’s next based on what resonates most.
I mostly dealt with 2025 by staying busy - working 80-hour weeks, doing things on weekends, traveling. But unlike 2023 when we pivoted from Pabio to FirstQuadrant, this time I want to slow down. The fear isn’t picking wrong; the fear is picking too quickly. So in 2026, I want to embrace uncertainty in my Year of Discovery:
I want to explore ideas. Carlo and I are spending a few hours every other day thinking about new concepts, talking to users, and validating problems. But this time, I’m not rushing to build. I need to find something I deeply care about, something that resonates strongly with me as a person, something worth committing the next five years to. And at the same time, I’m working with some great founders on problems I’m excited about such as context search in AI applications, adding value wherever I can.
Secondly, I want to learn from people smarter than me. After a decade as a solo technical founder in a small team, I’m interested in other startups. I want to work with other really smart engineers, and I’m genuinely curious about what I’ll learn when I’m not one of the two people making every call. What scares me more than failing as a founder is failing as an employee, discovering I can’t handle not being in control, which is why this will be most fun.
Finally, I want to discover who I am without a company. For ten years, I’ve had a simple answer to “what do you do?” and now I don’t. That identity shift is stranger than I expected, and I need to sit with that discomfort. I want to explore interests beyond startups, read broadly without everything tying back to building a company, and do the internal work of understanding what actually matters to me.
I really don’t know what lies in 2026. But that’s the point - the Year of Discovery is about being comfortable not knowing, exploring without forcing outcomes, and trusting that the right path will emerge if I give it space.