I record myself working sometimes. This snapshot was taken right after my YC launch, around 3 a.m.

Exponential growth in everything

I am not going to tell my whole life story here, there was a lot happening during the year. I met a couple of the right people, and ended up in a couple of the right places at the right time.

The last 12 months were life changing for me. I remember sitting in an empty apartment in London a week before my first lecture. Just me, a mattress, and a router plugged into the wall.

That image is stuck in my head, maybe for the next couple of years. It was my first time living alone, and moving somewhere completely new with zero connections, friends, or support. Not saying this is anything out of the ordinary, but you always remember day zero.

Below, I will list the core principles I’ve been following for the past year.

Stay hungry

Congrats - you made it. You achieved something that moved you from x → x + 1.

And from up close, +1 feels massive. You feel progress. You feel good. Maybe you earned some peer respect. But if you step back and look at the full coordinate plane… what did it really change?

When x is huge, x + 1 is basically the same. The “big win” barely moves the needle once you zoom out.

That’s the balance you have to find: how much impact do you want each +1 to have in your life? What counts as a real shift, and what’s just noise that feels good in the moment?

One thing stays true though: you should always be moving forward. Not blindly sprinting into the abyss, but choosing your direction on purpose - and learning to love each step you take while you’re taking it.

Because all of this is a game, and you have to be in it for the love of the game.

Dumbest in the room

Suddenly, when you shift too far away from where you started, people in your close circle might change in your eyes. You may see them as unmotivated, maybe lazy - or maybe you just feel like you’ve outpaced them.

The problem is: if you feel like you’re the smartest in the room, you’re in the wrong room.

If you want to move faster than anyone, aim to surround yourself with people significantly smarter than you. The feeling you should get is like you’re talking to aliens who’ve reached the next level of intelligence or charisma - unimaginable to you. Of course, that’s a joke, but there’s some truth in it.

World is just a sandbox

I don’t remember where I heard this. Possibly on group office hours, but I memorized it really fucking well.

The world works the way you see it. If you think it’s big and you’re just a cog, that’s how it’s going to be.

But if there’s a chance, even a small chance, that you can see the world as something you can shape with your bare hands, you gain this unfathomable power.

“I can just do things.”

And it doesn’t matter what it is. You should always try. Always shoot your shot. Nobody else will do it for you.

Gratitude

The catalyst in my growth were the people

People who helped me learn, experiment, mentored me, and just gave me a hand when nobody else did.

This section is more for me than it is for you. Feel free to skip it

About half of the people listed above are also angel investors in Sparkles.dev. They came in at a very low valuation, and I gave up 0.5% to the people I want to keep close.

Not because I needed the money, but because I wanted to say thank you for giving me a hand when nobody else did.

Dreams

This is not even the beginning of my journey. I am at the origin of the exponentially growing curve that represents my life

I don’t know what is next. A lot of things will change in my life this year, but I think a couple of my dreams will stay the same.

That’s about it
thank you for reading this.

as a reward, attaching my last picture I took in Europe.

peace.

9th of August, 19:00

What should you really be doing in your 20s?

Travel the world? Stay home and save money? Go to university? Drop out? Start a startup? Focus on love and relationships? Stay single and independent? Quit your corporate job for freedom? Chase your passion? Forget passion - follow the money? Go into finance? Invest early? Spend your money on experiences? Build your network? Avoid people and focus inward? Take big risks while you’re young? Play it safe so you have a foundation? Work 100-hour weeks to get ahead? Avoid burnout at all costs? Live in one city to build roots? Move to a new city every year? Follow your dreams? Be realistic? Try everything once? Specialize early?

respectfully. shut up.

So many people want to give you your advice. Parents, friends, people you meet, everyone has their own opinion on YOUR life

Finishing a book called The Mom Test, and it has one of my favorite lines of all time

Funny how a book about customer interviews can expand into a broader life perspective. Opinions are self-indulgent noise with a high risk of false positives. If someone is giving you “advice,” they’re simply viewing things from their current perspective, trying to map it onto your situation.

They’re mapping it based on their own goals, fears, history, and constraints, not yours. Different times, different people, different goals.

Instantly, my mind jumps to a chapter in Psychology of Money (boring book, still haven’t finished). It explained why different people invest in different things. For example, my dad grew up in a stable real estate market and believes that putting money into bricks is an excellent way to achieve financial stability, but someone who lived through the 2008 crisis in the U.S. might disagree with him.

Point is - while it might be somewhat helpful to listen to what smart people did to maximize success when they were young - there is no guarantee this is your path.

Structure

So what should you do if you can’t listen to the advice people give you? I have no clue :(

But I will try to tell you a bit about myself

I don’t look at my life as a plan with X -> Y -> Z goals mapped to it. I see it as a structure. It doesn’t matter where I am, what I am doing with my life - I have a set of rules I follow to continue growing as a person.

• Work hard

• Rest

• Read

• Exercise

• Meet cool people

• Try new things

Dead simple, right? Let me explain them one by one

Work hard

In any line of work - whether it's a corporate job, a startup, or school/university studies - always put in effort. I live by the principle that it doesn’t matter what you are doing; if you are spending time on it, spend it wisely. There is never an excuse to procrastinate if you have allocated time for work.

There might be an exception for people who are trying to just "get by" in university while focusing on something else on the side (that’s what I am trying to do). However, the whole point of "getting by" in university is to save time for other things and work hard on those. It also doesn’t mean the limited amount of time you've allocated for university can be spent unproductively.

Rest

This includes everything - sleep, holidays, exercise recovery, and more. Balancing rest and work seems hard, but it is not. Getting your mind off work can be difficult, and here is what I do to make it easier:

Separate work and personal lives using spaces (home/office).

Use different apps and, if you have the luxury, laptops in your work/personal time.

This creates boundaries in your mind and doesn’t allow it to switch to the opposite mode in an unnatural environment.

I'm not saying you must set a clear boundary between work and life. That works for some people, but it doesn’t for others (e.g. in startup culture). It’s more like a soft boundary, where things in the middle can blend slightly. However, if you go deeper into one side, you won't notice anything from the opposite side.

Recover from exercises, and sleep well. Good sleep patterns are always underestimated, when they have proven to increase lifespan and lower mortality rates

Exercise

You can’t believe how much sport and basic exercises improve your life. To start with, you will live about 10% longer if you exercise regularly. This alone already should be enough to get you started. I am not even talking about general health benefits, like not being gassed after going up the stairs, moving faster and lighter, and looking better.

Read

This. Books are one of, if not the best, ways to learn new things. When you are listening or watching you don’t memorize information, whereas the book actually makes you think and follow the author’s thought. 30 minutes a day. One book a month. Doesn’t need to be a lot. Just do it consistently

Also, you get ultimate bragging rights :)

Meet cool people

“Your network is your net worth” - one of the stupidest but most real phrases out there. Humans are social beings, and we adapt to our closest circle. If you meet new smart people, you can watch them grow and grow with them.

Try new things

This one is quite obvious. I know I will stagnate if I won’t try new things in life - this is what life is all about.

New food, new places, new projects, new programming languages, new friends. Trying never hurts.

These 6 points are just the basic way how I approach life. They are not a plan, but principles I live by. Here are some thoughts on planning:

Plan A. Scrap the plan. Plan B...

Certainty kills fun. I hate overplanning. Sometimes when I try to plan every 5 minutes in my calendar it works out really well time-wise, but it is boring as hell. Same with life. If I know exactly what is going to happen then what’s the point?

Just live your life, and you'll see your path unfold naturally.

Final thoughts

Everything is temporary. Most of us will die in around 60-70 years.

Listen to yourself. Do the thing you wanted to do. Don’t overthink

Money is important, but is also temporary, memories are forever

age is a number, stay young :)

unrelated pic of my bike cause I think it is cool

this is a sketchpad rather than a polished essay. Just my thoughts that I got from everyday encounters.

what I define as thoughts is a tensor product of the people I met and the situations I got myself into. Might be total bs in math theory, but you get the point.

Some highlights of my SF trip:

• Got stuck in a Trump protest

• Andrej Karpathy and Michael Truel talks

• Drunk Waymo ride

• Friend raised preseed

• Midnight trip to an ✨authentic✨ taco place

(stick around, there are photos at the end)

This trip was mostly free (shoutout YC) trial into the SF culture. Honestly - I liked it. For now I told myself I will move there at some point, but you never know where life could lead you.

Here are my main personal takeaways from the trip

Serendipity

Steep hill.

We were all tired and going from the AWS afterparty. I found a random taco place nearby. Software engineers aren’t exactly built for cardio, so every step came with some half‑serious complaints.

When we got up, this is what we saw

I whispered, “Great view,” and someone replied between gasps, “Steep hill, huh?”

When we were enjoying the view, we struck up a conversation with 4 other kids our age, and it turned out they were MIT and here for their internships.

We were apparently headed to the same taco place, and we got some great food together. This situation is my personal proof that tech world is smaller than you think.

One of the main drive factors in success is luck, and in SF randomness is on another level. The “pay it forward” culture shows - people are not scared to interact with strangers. We have sparked conversations in the bakery queue (HR lady was really friendly), on the bus, even on the street with some crackhead - not the best experience but it was funny.

Randomness is a huge factor that you can never account for. I have accidentally met a YC founder whose place I took for my current internship at Iterate. Very interesting guy building in infrastructure. If you are reading this - yes I did reread the PG essays.

You could mesure this so called serendipity with a coefficient - let’s call it s

Imagine a city is a bag with marbles, and a golden marble is this cool situation/person you are looking for. Chance of pulling a golden marble out of a bag is a lot higher if there are more of these marbles in the bag.

Sounds simple, but many people forget it

YC Starup school

I always forget that this was the main reason I went to SF. The talks were generic, and it was more about personal takeaways rather than what speakers actually said. I have met a lot of interesting people on the event, and I hope I will meet them again.

It was cool seeing Sam Altman in person, but he essentailly said “Build startups and don’t copy OpenAI (you won’t be competititve)”

The two talks I liked the most were by Andrej Karpathy and Michael Truel

Andrej mostly talked about the new paradigm he called “software 3.0”, which essentially is English written code. He monstly emphasized that we have entered an era where we are working in a validation loop with LLMs and need to now adapt to the new ways of development. Documentation for LLMs, more detailed prompts, and the “autonomy slider” are all things we need to consider in the development. What we currently need to work on is the GUI for LLMs. Currently, the main interraction with AI hasn’t changed much since the 90s - we are still using the same command line in a fancy UI wrapper.

Michael’s talk was inspiring, rather than informing. I caught young Zuckerberg vibes from him. He wasn’t bragging or humble, he was simply talking about what he has built and why he did it. His story shows the usual pattern - success never happens from first try.

Doing a startup

Obviously everyone is telling you to do a startup. Right now. Drop everything and start running around VCs raising your preseed.

At 5 AM, I often catch myself wondering, “Why aren’t you building something?” The honest answer is that I’m still learning. My internship at Iterate is sharpening my dev skills, and the books I read won’t be wasted - they’re laying the groundwork for whatever I choose to build later

- “But building is the best way to learn”

Yes and no. Jumping the gun with starting a startup might be a suitable option for some people, but not for me. I made a choice to learn when I can, and will execute when I choose to. There should be a balance between practice and studies.

People say that there is no playbook for startups, but I think there is one. It has four words on the front page - “Build. Iterate. Show. Build”. It also gives you paper—you can write in it, tear it off and make origami, or even burn it. Your call.

One principle I follow with life is taking everything one step at a time. Getting overwhelmed is never helpful - humans are not built for multitasking. I talked to over 20 founders over the past month - from YC/preseed to series B. All of them are different, but there is one thing they all agree on

”If you are not thinking about your startup all the time it won’t work out”

This paragraph is just a collection of thoughts I have on startups. I think raising money is the easiest part, and the hardest part is staying sane while everything around you feels like it’s on fire. It’s keeping your team aligned when no one’s slept, making calls under uncertainty, and still showing up every day to move the needle. The real challenge isn’t launching—it’s enduring.

“There are few sources of energy so powerful as a procrastinating college student.”

- Paul Graham

August 2025 would be a good month.

Elitism

This one is interesting. Not sure if some people from London have noticed, but I am clearly seeing an elitism culture around SF. If you are not running a moderately successful startup / work at big tech / quant, people lose interest in you quickly.

But the hype is real. Getting into YC or closing a pre‑seed round now seems to carry more prestige than landing a FAANG job ever did. Too many people chase that prestige rather than a genuine desire to solve problems—or even to make money. My hot take: if you have to pick a superficial motivator, chasing money is healthier than chasing clout.

I started all of my intros by simply saying that I am a student, and when I saw that a person still gave a shit about me, I told them more about my other experiences and work. If namedropping changes someone’s view on you - you are not talking to the right person. People who are interested in your personality as much as a professional life are the real ones. What I noticed a lot is that people put value on others based on how impressive their CV sounds. As much as I understand this, I value my own view of the person much more than wherever he/she is working or what startup they are doing. You can tell how smart and interesting a person is by the way they speak.

<sounds silly>

I guess I haven’t noticed this in London because the bar is generally lower. There are not as many “cracked” people, hence it is a bit more inclusive and more “beginner friendly”. In SF you are competing with YC founders, kids from Stanford and other smarties, whereas in London it is mostly Imperial people and bigtech SWEs.

</sounds silly>

I don’t like the term “cracked”, but I feel like it fits the description the best

Would I live there?

I don’t like the windy weather. I don’t like that there is a lot of homeless people (walking through tenderloin was an experience). I don’t like paying $9 for a coffee. I don’t want to get shot :(

but there is a good side..

the insanely smart people, the waves (I surf), the concentration of talent, the startup bubble - they all far outweight everything else

I will be back, sooner or later.

Here are the promised photos if you didn’t forget:

Subscribe now