About me: 2023

One of the most underrated parts of writing a blog is that you can viscerally witness your own progression in thinking with enough time and consistency. Writing is an investment into latent or ‘waiting energy,’ where many years of incremental effort can build up to meaningful results.

For better or for worse, my thoughts have been launched into the internet ether for years. It has created serendipitous ripples both personally and professionally. It has taught me curation, revision, devotion. Then, patience. That cycle repeats itself infinitely.

The last time I wrote a personal update on this blog was in 2020.

Since then, professionally, I:

• Built a covid connectivity tool over 1 year, spent countless hours developing the product and selling to cohort-communities, interviewed at YC 2x
• Worked in management consulting for 2+ years, on a mixture of growth/marketing/sales strategy: which includes grocery, ecommerce platforms, and fitness hardware and software (with some dream clients of mine)
• Flew out from SF for 7–10 weeks straight last year. Meaning: each week in a different city and back to SF every weekend (Boston, Chicago, Atlanta, Utah) which was exhilarating and an extremely unique experience
• Met incredible mentors who vouched for me, pushed for my success, and made my journey feel personal and supported
• Worked under 10+ managers in different capacities over a year or two, which sharpened my understanding of management, leadership and variation in communciation style above all. FYI I like Scaling People a lot and respect the frameworks Stripe operated with when building a high-growth team — it is theoretically simple but extremely difficult to operationalize ‘best practices’
• Started Junior Managing people, which has been incredibly fruitful and empowering
• Attended, participated, and felt inspired by wider professional-community events (McK InSF, accelerator for underrepresented founders, McK x Stanford corporate programming)

Personally:

• Devoted all my free time to my personal blog, which is now tracking ~7K subscribers/20K social media and has led to an incredible amount of serendipity, energy, and openness
• Met new friends through expanding my surface area for social interaction (new classes, events, online tooling and intentional outreach) and felt immensely humbled and inspired by the energy and techno-optimism in San Francisco
• Anchored my mindset on continuous learning in what I call ‘multiple intelligences’: you can learn something from everyone’s different strengths if you approach the world with humility and curiosity

A writing culture in an organisation teaches people how to think, clarify, simplify. A writing habit or operational modality for an individual opens up an aperture through which you see the world with more acuity and beauty.

For me, writing is a force that propels and augments my thinking process. So: I’m restarting this particular blog to continue the stream of consciousness/ideating on investing, entrepreneurship and reading that began this journey all those years ago with fresh perspective, more experience, and a renewed enthusiasm. I hope you will join me on this journey.

Nicole Seah