👋 Ow’Do!
This is the first newsletter I am doing! Pretty excited to start it and I hope you get some value out of it. Here is what we plan on hitting on every Sunday:
- Hype ZipSchool Moments
- Personal Growth
- Was Leaving Microsoft a Good Idea?
- Music Of The Week
My goal with this is to keep a close pulse on things that have been happening on a weekly basis. It helps me realize that I have done quite a bit in a weeks time and helps me reflect and grow through retrospect. On top of this, I hope to see you get motivated to finally start that one thing you have been wanting to always do (you should definitely share that with me as well 😁).
Finally, The past three weeks I have posted these updates in my Twitch Discord Server. If you are curious to know more about those, just let me know! More than happy to send the past three weeks 🤘. Alright let’s do this.
Hype ZipSchool Moments
This past week at ZipSchool has been really exciting. One of the bigger pieces of news is we have decided to setup our HQ in 🗽NYC! Yes, another move happening very soon. I’ve been moving essentially every year since freshman year of university. While I feel really lucky to even be able to do that, it’s pretty tiring 😅. So if you are in NYC let me know we should meet up at your favorite coffee shop 🎉!
Every single day I see our platform coming more and more together. From my view, we have been really good at building things that has direct impact to our users. We hit on a lot of really “low effort” / “high impact” scenarios. Essentially, I can change two lines of code and deliver 5x impact. Pretty awesome. We have employed a lot of areas where we gather direct feedback and improvements from our uses which I think is really filling in a lot of the gaps. As we start deciphering what people truly want we step closer and closer to our end goal of changing the entire system of online education!
I really feel like our team (Farza, David, and I) have found a really nice flow. While everyone has their “domain” I think we are pretty fluid when needing to wear different startup hats. While Farza and David have both had solid amounts of experience with startups, I am still absorbing a lot from them while at the same time, injecting my personal twist on things. I feel really good about the team and am really excited to see what growth we see in the coming week!
Also - we have been doing weekly team dinners where one evening we each pick a dish to make for everyone. It’s been pretty awesome and there has been week over week improvement in our food quality 🤤.
Personal Growth
I’m finishing up my last week here in San Diego. Honestly going to miss it here. I feel like I got into a pretty Grüvee routine (hopefully some of you chuckle at that 😋). The daily sunsets at the cliffs have been a really natural stopping point for me to reflect on the day and get motivated to finish things up if needed! Funny enough, I am actually here writing this!
Last week I talked about how I got into a pretty solid routine while working through a minor knee injure. Welp, my knee still feels pretty jacked up... It’s been frustrating because I can’t go a day without walking, but it’s also going to take longer for my knee to heal 😅. So goes life I suppose. I’ve continued my morning routine where I wake up, take a shower, get some coffee, and set my phone aside for a solid 30 minutes and read. It’s crazy, I tried to read in the past, but it would never really stuck. I think setting some time aside (and a good book of course) has really helped with that. I have started to realize more and more that habits are a really hard thing for me to build, but once I get into it I am pretty good at sticking to them.
I also talked about “questioning everything”. I think this past week I’ve tried really hard to keep that going. Not only in work life, but personal life. It seems like such a simple thing to do, but honestly it’s pretty damn hard. The past week I have started to try and pull myself out from “Alec’s view” and move to a “10,000ft view”. It’s helped me understand why people think the way they do. With this I feel like everything I do seems a lot more intent driven. I’m trying to do things that always feel purposeful and understand why I’m doing them.
Was leaving Microsoft a good idea?
So far we are 3/3 weeks for “Was leaving Microsoft a good idea?” Time to go 4/4! Looking back on talking to friends and family, I’ve only had good things to say. While I still think this could be some sort of “honeymoon phase” it seems crazy to me that I spent so much time at a place where I never felt like this sense of excitement and purpose. I think there are a lot of reasons behind this, but maybe those are thoughts for next week 🤓.
Before I left Microsoft, I setup calls with people that really impacted my time there. I had some of these calls this past week and it has made me realize, even more, that this was definitely the correct move. I’ve said this a lot, but Microsoft was an incredible experience and very valuable to me. I want to keep those connections and still grow them even though I don’t work there.
Music Of The Week
If you know me, music is a MASSIVE influence in my life and I think it can set the tone for your entire day! I wanted to share some music that was really impactful for me this week. They way I’m doing this is just thinking about what music really stuck out to me and why it did!
For this past week, the artist “Movements” sticks heavily in my mind. A friend of mine sent me this band about a year ago and I fell in love with them. They have an incredible way with words and taking you through a 3 minute story of their life with simple instruments. They recently released an album: “No Good Left To Give”. I listen to it at least once a day. It helps me be really introspective when I need it. I have noticed I listen to it in the morning and in the evening - starting and ending the day. It’s an extremely awesome and heartfelt album! I would have to say my top song off this record is “Seneca”. Let me know your thoughts always down to chat about it 🤘!
Wow a lot of words here, eh? If you made it here thanks! Hope you enjoyed some of my thoughts and I look forward to giving an update next week! Until next week friends.
Salute y Saludes.
- YaBoiAlec