2023 development goals, how'd I do?
Daniel Shi
South Quad LLC | Investments, Growth strategy | Fintech Operator, ex-Remitly | ex-VC
At the start of 2023, I wrote down my development plan. How did I do?
These were my goals:
Goal 1: Become a more technical business operator
I way overachieved.
I became very technical. I was able to take the foundation of Python and data science that I learned from coding boot camp, and continue to build on that. Even over the course of this past holiday week, when there was a lot of downtime, I was able to squeeze in a lot of learning of new programming techniques.
I was able to take that and put it to work at Remitly . What started off as an exploration of different AI tools for the marketing team, turned into hand building apps leveraging LLMs.
ChatGPT played a big role in that. It’s remarkably useful as a teacher for learning how to code. If you know a little bit of Python, you can get going even faster.
Goal 2: Become a more tangibly useful angel investor
I under achieved.
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On the one hand, I do think that I was able to consistently check in and advise founders that I supported as an angel investor. But, when I take stock of the type of ways that I was an advisor, it continues to run the gamut.
The most consistent thing that I was able to help with was in fundraising introductions, but those were pretty episodic and ad hoc.
If I were to be honest, what I would have hoped was that I could help startups recruit.
Now that I’ve developed some experience as a product manager, maybe there's some useful repeatable frameworks there.
So what?
While I'm disappointed I did not make more progress on Goal 2, it doesn't really matter. I blew Goal 1 so far out of the water (beyond my wildest expectations) that I am deeply satisfied with my personal development in 2023.
On becoming more technical, this is really wonderful. My freshest thinking is that I will carry this forward into 2024 unchanged. It is worth continuing to hone this edge. 2023 has shown me that there is discontinuous leverage that can come from understanding how to hand build products.
On the angel investor side, I’m not sure. I may refactor this goal or abandon it for some other category. Or I may go all in on being more technical. More to come.
Summing it all up, I am extremely pleased with my personal development. Even though I under achieved in the second goal, I absolutely swamped the first goal. I swamped it to a degree that I never could have imagined, thanks to AI.