"To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven."
(Ecclesiastes 3:1, KJV)
début
It was January, and I was now only 350 miles away from being back home in California. I had been on the road for three weeks now, and seen most of the United States at this point. The previous year had been intense, and I had taken no vacations — I even missed my family trip to Hawaii to celebrate my father's 55th. Each day of 2024 drove forward in a mechanical blur, and I drilled through it, resolving not to stop. I felt so numb I almost didn't care. My lips bent into a smile every now and then for the outside world, but inside I felt dead.
For almost the entire six thousand miles, I was with me and the road, and in that vast emptiness my thoughts eventually caught up. All year I had felt incredibly frustrated that my life wasn't moving forward. I had stopped growing at Matic, so what the hell was I still doing there? I was "stuck" working nights and weekends on two projects with the intensity of a second (and third) full-time job, neither of which had a clear endgame without letting my friends down. I had outgrown most of the friendships in my life, and had nonexistent social plans most weekends to show for it. I had gold stamped my fourth year in Mountain View, living the suburban mid-40s lifestyle for my entire early 20s.
To my credit — these were all things I designed for myself to make me the man I was at this point. When I graduated Berkeley in 2021, I had been humbled by the world with a string of failed companies and abysmal technical competence to show for my years of skipping class. I still had my moonshot ambitions to create an inflection point in the arc of humanity, but I knew I wasn't anywhere close. I figured I had to "get serious."
So two days after graduation, I drove to Mountain View and started my first day as an engineer at a company called Matic. After a few months, I started two more projects with my friends and ran them like startups. I declined social invitations most of the time. Christina drove over an hour to see me most weekends, and I often couldn't give her more than what was left of me after work. I worked 100-hour weeks for nearly four years straight, at the cost of everything else in my life, to become the kind of person who could build a great technology company one day. Which started with becoming great at technology, by becoming a great engineer.
While the goal of being a great engineer can never really be "finished", I believe I hit that goal early 2024. Then with no immediate next mountains to climb, I became aggressively jaded, bleeding through incessantly in my last year's reflection. And my entire life situation, one that I had crafted over four years with the utmost intention, when viewed through the lens of Shalin at 25, unveiled itself as something I now detested.
my year
This is the year I sacrificed my old self.
On January 12th, eight days after returning from my road trip, on a breezy afternoon on the dirt trails of Baylands Nature Preserve, I ended my 5+ year relationship with my partner Christina. The amber tules swayed in the lazy way they do in South Bay winter, and we walked for a while in silence before I said what we both already knew.
We met when I was 20, and we grew up together over the next half-decade. There are few in the world who got to know me the way Christina did. She wholeheartedly stood by me through every insecurity, every failure, every obsession, every triumph — the midnight work sessions she drove over an hour to sit beside me for, the journaling we did together over 200 nights, the five year anniversary where we painted hilarious portraits of each other. The thousands of tiny moments we spent together as I fought to find my way forward during the most formative years of my life. She watched me become someone, and loved me before I was anyone.
The truth I had kept circling was painfully simple: the life I felt called to craft was not the life Christina wanted to live. I loved her deeply, and naively tried for a long time to believe that this alone could stretch us to meet in the middle, to converge. Christina wanted a life rooted in presence — sharing a home, building something together, experiencing the small daily rhythms that make a partnership feel safe and whole. I wanted motion. Risk. Chasing something distant and undefined. I wanted to sprint towards the chaotic horizons, and she wanted to anchor. To stay together would have meant asking one of us to abandon something fundamental — and I cared for her too much to let that happen quietly, slowly, over years of resentment. So after five wonderful years together, we parted ways.
The months that followed were loud and busy and full. New furniture. Big parties. Projects ending. I took on loads of additional responsibility at work. I rewrote Matic's camera stack, led the second company-wide rebrand, and drove the core series B "general purpose robot" demo. I rebuilt my body, trained like an animal, and got into the best shape of my life. I filled every inch of my life, adding noise so I could outrun the silence.
Then in March, I let go of another relationship, this time with my best friend Sam Gorman. I met Sam in 2017, in the multi-purpose room of a hotel near the Coca Cola headquarters near downtown Atlanta. Our friendship ignited over a healthy distaste for dogma when we attempted to host an afterparty for the other scholarship recipients that weekend. The party was promptly terminated, but our bond only inflamed as I went on to discover his background in activism, and his belief that technology served as a louder megaphone for forging change. It was a belief I shared with him.
In 2019, I brought my two best friends together to work with me on the project of a lifetime, called Iris. Even today, I reflect on it as being one the most wonderful periods of my life. For the past six years, Sam, Kanyes and I have built together nearly every day. We taught ourselves and each other how to design, engineer, and distribute beautiful products out into the world. We collectively sacrificed our nights and weekends, went through failed launches and quiet victories together. We each were dreaming the same dream of doing our life's work.
But over time, and with painful clarity, I began to see that while we wanted the same impact, we often disagreed on how that impact should be pursued. We often made compromises that dimmed out each of our flames until we were left with something extinguished. This had happened in Iris, and again in our most recent project Spacebar. I spent a lot of quiet time over the years explaining away the differences as situational or temporary — but over years of working closely together, they stopped being about any single decision and started being about worldview.
Sam wasn't just a coworker or friend to me, he was a brother. He was one of the crazy ones, the misfits, the square peg in the round hole. Who was crazy enough to believe he could change the world, and each day, earnestly tried to. He was someone I got to live life in parallel with, a rare gift from the universe. So when we finally sat across each other one evening at the local Taquería in Potrero — feeling nothing like the thousands of times we'd sat across each other before — and the words that we should part ways were finally said out loud, I realized it would likely end our friendship. It hurt deeply in a way I wasn't prepared for.
All three of us were planning to quit our jobs in the coming months to start a company, and by the end of April, all of us finally did. In Silicon Valley, it's so well-known it's almost canon at this point that startups have a 90% risk of failure, and substantially higher risk of failure when the startup is founded by a solo founder. After that conversation, Sam went on to found a company by himself.
After leaving Matic, I immediately flew to India to spend May living with my grandparents. They spend a lot of their time in the US these days, so it was one of the first times in a while where both sides were in India at the same time, and I was old enough to finally appreciate spending time with them. I split the month between both sets of grandparents, and the days took on a rhythm I hadn't experienced since I was a kid: unhurried meals, long conversations about everything and nothing, the kind of family time that doesn't have an agenda. There was a calm gravity to the way my grandparents spent their time. Unhurried, present, as if they had all the time in the world. It's ironic, but after a month spent exclusively with people in their 70s & 80s, I realized it was those with the least time left who knew best how not to waste it.
I will carry those few weeks with me for life, because in late August, I was back in India to cremate my dada.
Kanyes and I went through a washing-machine of ideas from June through August, then finally landed on the product we wanted to build our company around. We then took 3 months off to go travel — we figured we may not get the chance again for at least five years.
I chose to spend one of those months with my parents. I had not spent more than a weekend at home since graduating college five years ago. I spent the other one in East Village Manhattan, walking the same streets I walked with Sam in January 2024, my first time traveling with a friend. But this time alone.
I got a hair transplant in May this year — after watching my hair fall out over the same years I was grinding myself down — it felt like one small thing I could choose to take back.
In November I left my life behind in Mountain View, and all the memories with it — four Superbowl parties, countless walks to Red Rock and brunches at Crepevine, hours at the library where I read papers and wrote software. And moved to San Francisco, the epicenter of the AI tsunami.
my values
Every year, I go through my values with you, where I get to be honest with you about how well I lived by my principles. The ones I wrote last year were: 1. question everything important, 2. move at breakneck speed, 3. enjoy the present moment, 4. keep an open door.
Today, I don't resonate as much with them. The floor under my feet shifted so many times this year that what I needed to measure myself by changed with it. Looking back, there were two things I think I did well and one thing I failed at:
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I found real courage this year. The kind of courage where your hands are shaking and your vision goes blurry and the world starts spinning a bit, but you do it anyway. I permanently changed my relationship with three people who I loved. I walked away from the company that shaped my identity as an engineer. Each of these decisions were made months before I acted on them, and the months that followed were their own kind of hell. I don't regret any of them. But I want to be honest that courage didn't feel like triumph in the moment, it felt like grief.
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I finally stopped performing my ambition and started acting on it. For four years, I talked about starting a company. I planned for it, optimized my life around it, and told everyone it was coming. This year I actually did it. I finally bridged that gap for myself — the distance between talking about it and doing it is the distance between the person I was and the person I've chosen to become.
- I was not able to hold myself together through the chaos. I didn't train consistently, eat healthy consistently, sleep consistently, work consistently. The habits I spent years trying to build crumbled every time any turbulence hit. I know this about myself in a way I didn't see before — I'm someone who can make enormous decisions with extreme clarity, but lose the thread on the daily discipline that's supposed to sustain me through them. This pattern runs through every reflection I've written. I've been talking about fixing my sleep since 2022. It's high time I stopped writing about fixing it and fix it.
For this year, I want to hold myself to the basics:
- Integrity: Do the right thing even when no one is watching. I've found that the more I do this, the more courage I have. The more courage I have, the higher my self-esteem. 3/5 this year. I made hard decisions I'm proud of, but there were quieter moments where I took the easy road.
- Consistency: Maintain the fundamentals even when the rest of life is chaotic. 2/5 this year. This one keeps showing up in reflections because I keep failing at it.
- Honesty: Strive to be more of an open book. I've found that those closest to me aren't judging me, and vulnerability makes my relationships deeper. 3/5 this year. I was more honest in my biggest decisions than ever before, but I still kept myself isolate and my bedroom door mostly closed.
- Faith: I've found that in my worst times, I do at my core believe that there is someone watching over me, whether it's true or not. It's helped me make the right decisions in the hardest moments. Not sure how to rate this one.
fin
Last year, sitting in my Prius on a random cul-de-sac in Mountain View, watching the homes glow under the full moon's light, I made a promise to myself that this year would finally be remarkable.
Was it? I think remarkable was the wrong word. Remarkable implies something bright, something I can point to with pride. This year wasn't bright really in any way, but it was necessary. It was the year I had to tear down the scaffolding I spent four years erecting, unsure of what I was building next but fully certain that what I had built so far was no longer right.
I lost my partner, my best friend, my grandfather, my job, my city. It wasn't a rejection of what they meant to me, but each one sealed off a wonderful future that could've been but will never exist now.
There is a season for everything. A time to build something new, and then a time to clear that away to make way for something new again. I spent 2021 through 2024 building my life methodically and obsessively. And I spent all of 2025 uprooting it. I knew it was going to be incredibly painful, and it fucking was.
Life these days has become strangely quiet. Most Saturday nights I'm just home. My phone doesn't really buzz. I walk around a new city where I don't know anyone, and no one knows me. The person I was — the one with a packed calendar, four-minute commute, girlfriend, and projects he'd work on with his friends after a stressful day at a job that gave his life meaning — that person is gone, and the person replacing him is mostly still an outline.
It's not painful anymore, but boring in a way that just feels strange and unfamiliar. It's like moving into a house with no furniture, and hearing your footsteps echo off the empty walls just loud enough that it feels uncanny.
But I'm writing this from my new apartment in San Francisco, in a city that hums with the energy of people trying to bend the future. Kanyes and I are building the company we've been dreaming about for six years. I'm 26, and for the first time since college, I feel like my life is pointed in the direction I actually want to go and not the direction I engineered because I thought I had to earn the right to want something.
I don't know what season comes next. But I know that whatever I build now, I'm building it as the person I chose to become, not the person I was afraid to stop being. Perhaps that's worth more than remarkable.
To everyone reading this — I offer my sincerest thank you for believing in me, for sitting with me in the hardest year of my life, for not flinching when I made decisions that didn't make sense from the outside. To Christina, for five years that shaped me in ways I'll spend a lifetime understanding. To Sam, for the dreams we shared, even if we had to chase them separately. To my dada, for the conversations I didn't know would end.
I'll keep fighting. I'll keep building. And next year, I'm excited to tell you how it went.
— Shalin