The Beginning Of The Journey

Welcome to my blog! My goal is to chronicle my journey from software engineer at a large Silicon Valley company to self-employed investor and software developer, including everything I learned along the way.

A few years ago I had brunch with a friend, a long-time Apple employee. He told me he had recently quit his job to take a sabbatical and pursue his interests. He described how he spent his days studying, exercising, planning trips and relaxing. As I listened, I was intrigued and a bit surprised, but I felt this idea didn’t apply to me.

After all I had a well-paid job at a big Silicon Valley company and I loved what I did there. I was working on a skunkworks project I really believed in: it was bleeding edge and offered plenty of challenges, learning opportunities and creative freedom. The managers were able to shield us engineers from most of corporate politics and gave us a lot of trust and room for research/experimentation. It was pretty close to hacker heaven, but all good things must come to an end, and even though we had hit all our milestones and had had considerable positive impact on the company, the project was eventually cancelled and the team disbanded. I had worked on this project passionately for 5 years and its sudden demise left me feeling sad and disoriented.

But life goes on and I ended up moving to a different domain in the same company. However, I never experienced again the powerful sense of mission and impact I did in the previous team. Over a couple of years, I realized that my career goals no longer aligned with those of my employer: I felt a need to pursue my own free-form research in fields I found fascinating, and that’s hard to do in a corporate environment. My (long) career in Silicon Valley had been mostly very positive and led me to push my boundaries, learn a lot, and develop long-lasting friendships with the smartest people I know. But the time was ripe for a change, and my friend’s sabbatical, which had seemed quite exotic a few years earlier, became a potent, new source of inspiration. This brings us to the recent past: a few months ago I bowed out and began my own sabbatical.

My plan was (still is) to delve into the following topics with full freedom to explore any creative ideas that came up in the process:

• Quantum Computing: the intuition-defying features of this deeper, more fundamental computation paradigm set my mind on fire. Concepts like entanglement and superposition have no equivalent in our everyday experience, and yet they are the key to unlocking powerful performance improvements that are unattainable with classical computers.
• Bitcoin: the invention of artificial, decentralized, digital scarcity is very profound and its potential impact on society could be large (and positive in my opinion). Plus I have always been interested in the technology Bitcoin was built on (cryptography and distributed systems).
• Investing: while I have always been an investor, mostly in passive index funds, my knowledge of economics wasn’t comprehensive. However, the study of Bitcoin made me want to dig deeper in this subject. In particular, I wanted to understand the following:
  1. how a non-inflatable monetary asset could redefine the notion of store of value,
  2. how developing nations would be affected by the emergence of neutral, unconfiscatable money,
  3. how the traditional financial system would be challenged by a digital competitor that is based on hard, mathematical rules, decentralization and low-fee, instant, global transfers (thanks to layer 2 solutions like the Lightning Network).

I will post on these topics in the coming months, including how the sabbatical is going and pointers to materials I have studied, software I wrote, ideas, etc. Thanks for reading!