Living in cities has removed me enough from the fundamental processes of life that when Kate planted some seeds and the first buds emerged, I was in awe of it. Let me tell you, watching a little bean of a baby turn into a real person is infinitely more miraculous.
One body, many babies
Theo started the year unable to move or speak or do anything useful other than poop (his pants). At the end of the year, he could walk and climb and laugh and joke and ask for things and attempt trickery to get his way (and still poop his pants). This learning happened in fits and surprises, repeatedly. He'd often wake up a different baby than the night before. One year, one body, many babies.
A baby's brain is made for learning, but even at their best, it's hard work. He'd go on little missions, trying something simple a dozen or a hundred times, failing over and over, crying because his desire exceeded his ability, until it would click.
Learning big things is supposed to be hard. It takes pain and repetition. After a point in life, it isn't strictly required of us, and while a part of me wonders if I still have the capacity for it, another part knows that especially now, it's necessary and destined.
The guitar gently sings
I decided at 40 that this would be the decade of the guitar. I'd tried twice before, first as a kid (bad teacher, quit immediately), then at 25 (directionless, it fizzled). I took drum lessons in the Venmo years and was fired by my teacher for not practicing enough. I picked up some music theory on the piano and tucked it away, unused.
I know that I need two things for a habit to stick: the desire and a spark. A dream and a kick. The carrot and the stick. The desire for guitar was always there, the spark was Theo. In the early days of fatherhood I wrote: "whatever it is I want him to learn - I need to live it first." I want him to be surrounded by music. For it to be commonplace to sing and play together. To have some magic in his fingertips. So I've got to get it into my body and into our home.
I borrowed a guitar and got started, but it helps if your tools pull you in with their gravity, so I tried four others and found a Yamaha from the 70s that sounds deep and clear and makes me want to pick it up twice a day. I can happily play the same four chords all day, and sit with the sound of each note in a melody, playing deliberately, smoothly, with intention. And slowly, then suddenly, the pieces do fall into place.
Let yourself dream
Money is a tool that is meant to be used. Spending well is a skill. Some possess the skill, many don't. I…am learning.
Case in point #1: In any year up till this one, I wouldn't have bought an electric guitar. I would have waited years to "earn it". But the sooner you try a thing, the longer you get to do it. So now I know that the acoustic and electric guitars are totally different beasts that allow different techniques and serve different moments, and I like them both!
Case in point #2: Savings can serve a much better purpose than being a scoreboard. I've resisted living beyond my means for long enough that I can afford to spend a little time and money to pause and reflect and explore some alternate futures, so at the end of the year I pushed myself out of a very nice nest I had built…
Into the unknown…
If you're a fan of change, this might be the most exciting time for it in our lives. It's reasonable to be pessimistic about it, but I just am not. I like change, I like participating in it, and once in a while I like to push myself headfirst into it.
Over the past five years I've been holding a vision and hiring a team and urging them to do more, better, faster, while mixing a serious measure of levity into the everyday. And things are very good at Maven. It's a fantastic place to keep up with the rapidly changing tech world, serious livelihoods are being made on it (someone made $4 million on Maven last year), and the team gets better all the time. My work here is done.
"I'm more of a beginnings guy", I told the team, "and I like to leave things while they're still good, before I've overstayed my welcome". So at the end of the year, I told my co-founder, who I admire and have learned a lot from, that it was time to move on. A short roller coaster of emotions later, it was done.
What happens next is wide open. It's easier now than ever to make things with code, and it turns out that code can do more than we thought, and I'd like to see what's possible now that wasn't possible before, what's beyond the frontier of what I know today.
…with helping hands
Two things I made and wrote about in 2025, both with heavy participation from AI, were disturb and the data explorer.
Disturb is the successor to an art project from years ago, and the journey of making it was filled with whims and surprises and emergent phenomena. I wrote about it in pulling threads and finding infinity, the first post on this new Substack that I started in the final hours of 2025.
The Data Explorer is something that every company and team will soon have: the ability to ask a question about their business in natural language, and get back a runnable query that produces an answer (as a table or chart) that combines all the data sources at the company. I "vibe coded" this in a day and it's now a consistently useful part of our toolkit, even for our data experts. I wrote about it here.
Mom, Mode
The coolest thing I saw being built in 2025 was as far away from AI and code as the four lymph nodes Kate had removed as a teenager to treat her melanoma. Ever since, she's had to wear compression socks, and most compression socks are sticky, synthetic, and ugly. Swollen even more from pregnancy, she decided to make the compression socks she's always wanted, and ten factories, a hundred TikToks, and a thousand pairs of DHL'd socks later, she launched Mode Compression.
Her journey of discovery and creation was incredible to witness. She leaned into things that came naturally (mood boarding, design details, photo shoots), and learned the things that didn't (budgeting, negotiation, posting her face and voice on social media). She's in dialogue with her market, she's learning from the responses, she's telling and selling, and it's working.
Mind you she did this all as her second job. She amazed me just as much in her role as a mom. Our living room is a mini Montessori school. It shapeshifts as Theo shapeshifts. She thinks about a hundred things and finds a way to give him the best food and great play and the purest love. We love mama.
Growing famiglias
As Theo transformed, so did our social lives, but it was not a year of retreat. Instead, it was a year of brunches and dinners at home, of more quality time with friends and family than in years, of arriving as a family and barely holding him as he was passed from friend to friend, of taking turns watching him so one of us could go out, of showing up despite Theo and because of him because babies went from not being around to being everywhere.
Alma, Uma, Roman, Max, Carolina, Ryo, Snow, and Calliope were born in 2025. Luna, Saringa, and Ollie turned into little toddlers. I held more babies this year than in decades, and this may be true for a lot of our friends. Being around them, feeling the weight of our roles and the visceral knowledge that we will shape their lives is a new level of adulthood that I find myself quite ready for.
There's no call before it ends
I felt the presence of people, and I learned about absence. People in my life have passed before: uncles and aunts and grandparents and old friends. But nobody until this year that I was about to text. Nobody with whom I had an open channel. This loss hit harder. The suddenness and finality won't be announced. Do what you can when you can do it.
Rules to live by
Late in the year, my friend Julian shared a doc of his rules to live by, and I followed up by starting and sharing my own. These things are best accumulated over time, but here are a few things that I wrote down on day 12:
Three related to taking action, clearly the advice I give myself the most:
If there's something you eventually want to do, can you do it now?
Action creates momentum. It's often easier to do more than less.
If the best time to do something was in the past, the second best time is now.
And two on classical virtues:
You can't think your way out of a courage deficit ("life shrinks or expands according to one's courage").
You can only help others from a place of strength (like Julian's "always put your oxygen mask on first")
Over the year I was also reminded that I believe in the comedy of life (even when tragic), following my gut (especially when it repeats), sustained effort (learning is supposed to be hard), conviction over consensus (especially while designing), positive sum systems (we can create our way out of problems), and knowing oneself (including the bad parts).
What would 18 year old me want?
Faced with a wide open space of possibilities in 2026, with the thought of rent and insurance and nanny bills, the choice of easy, known paths, and wild, unknown ones, I've been wondering what would make young Shreyans proud.
He would have just written a college essay about his belief in bottoms up capitalism and the ability of individuals to create change. He would have been in love the Unix philosophy and 3D worlds and sci-fi futures in space. He would have just finished reading every Isaac Asimov book he could find at the library. He would have wanted to be a maker at some frontier with hints of an artist.
25 years later, some of these ideas have clearly stuck, and I'm coming back around to the others. They provide no answers but they do point in a direction. Let's see what 2026 reveals down that path.
Love,
Shreyans
Brooklyn, January 11, 2026
Other moments, memories, and notes
My first time voting
I became a citizen the week after the last presidential election so my first time voting was in the NYC mayoral election, about which I had a lot of thoughts. The process was strange (no ID checks: odd), the dreams were big (reality: not found, resentment: in heaps), and to be honest voting felt pointless (but I guess margins are often slim), but I did it anyway and I'll do it again!
Four notes on tennis:
- I started serving and volleying (separately), meaningfully improved on both, and played my first full sets.
- Like a pilot flipping switches to prepare a plane for takeoff, tennis requires many systems to be turned on - knees bent, body low, wrist loose, eyes on the ball, split step when the opponent hits, mind off - and it takes some time within each session to turn each one on. Maybe a mental checklist will help.
- Two of my regular partners were out with injuries so I started playing with strangers via the Fort Greene Telegram group and loved the variety. Much more of this in the future.
- I didn't participate in a tournament like I had hoped. 2026!
Would the sequel be as good as the original? Looking back, I love the portraits and the connections that came out of them just as much, but my energy dipped midway and it was a struggle to get through it. I want to do it again in 2026 but it needs a renewed purpose and a planned outlet.
Films watched
Kent has passed and Kortina is taking a break but we watched a lot of movies together earlier this year, and I really liked these:
- Closely Watched Trains (1966): funny and beautiful and parts of it felt like a Wes Anderson film, but from Czechoslovakia in the 60s.
- The Rules of the Game (1939): movies like this remind me that the past was so much like today. This movie is modern in its style and content and spawned the "upstairs/downstairs" genre, like Gosford Park (2001), which we watched before this. That one is very funny.
- La Haine (1995): my favorite scene of the year was this bathroom scene, profound and hilarious and so surprising.
- Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb (2022): More than Caro, I liked meeting Gottlieb, someone so good at reading that he made a life out of it.
- Master and Commander (2003): two hours of camaraderie, competence, and a lots of details about ships and battles at sea in 1800.
- A History of Violence (2005): Layered and intense with some very satisfying scenes (of violent justice).
- Duck, You Sucker! (1971): Epic and hilarious, an overlooked Sergio Leone film.
Friend's creations that I loved:
- Ebreo: sometimes someone finds a project that's so perfect for them it's a little astounding. Julian (not the one above or below) is a perfect blend of salesman, bargain hunter, truth teller, loving gen-z father, hustler, taste maker, and it's no surprise that the store he started on a sidewalk in 2024 is busting at the seams and is already a fashion institution in the fashion capital. I got half my new clothes from Ebreo and I love everything about it.
- Zo: Ben and Rob's company took a hard right turn and ended up on a path that feels obvious and exciting and built on their past while pulling us (and them) into the future. Of course computers will have AI built into them and of course we'll use them to make really powerful personal software and of course they're the ones making it.
- Julian Lindsey: my first memory of Julian from 2011 is of him making an app to download tracks off of Beatport and he has lived a impressively committed double life of playing music and leading teams ever since. I shouldn't be surprised that over the year he went from beginner producer to making ripping, layered tracks in hours. I need to hear them on a massive soundsystem.
- Paolina: I've had em all over the world and luckily Gabe's obsessiveness has led to the best falafel sandwich I've ever had popping up in Williamsburg. It's a weekly pilgrimage.
- Granola: Chris is a genius in his ability to understand what people are really trying to do, and then to deliver something that solves the root problem and gets out of the way. Granola is clearly, resoundingly that as a product and seems to be just as great a company judging by all the other cool stuff the team is doing. I was lucky to see him work up close at Socratic, and we're all lucky to see it from a distance with Granola.
