fall 2025

joining Google Deepmind, running a marathon, and being my own manager

I joined Google Deepmind recently. We launched Google Antigravity, a new AI tool for building software. I haven’t written a personal update in a while so I want to share how I’ve been thinking about things and how things have been.

life

I left Windsurf as a part of the acquisition in July. Due to my visa status, I waited a month to transfer my visa. I made the most out of life then: I went Windsurfing in Hawaii, celebrated Jason and Annie’s wedding, and soaked in the benefits of calling SF home (friends! outside lands! parks!).

A few months ago, I wrote about wanting to challenge myself this fall. It’s meaningful to challenge yourself at least once a year. It challenges complacency and it’s meaningful to experience a training arc and a reward, whether it be success or learnings from failure. Part of me also loves anime training arcs.

My goal was to do my best at work and run a marathon. I was familiar with the individual demands so the idea of both simultaneously was a fun challenge. But the whole is definitely greater than the sum of its parts.

The start of challenges are always the worst. It reminds me of jumping in an ice tub—the immediate reaction is to jump out. The opportunity cost is clear: you could be sitting in warmth and comfort instead so why feel cold in water? Time is never given, only replaced. As a result. I committed to replacing most of my free time for these goals.

I found a great routine. On most days, I wake up at 7:15, I run in the morning till 8:30, leave exactly at 8:52 to make the shuttle to work, work till 6:30, dinner, shuttle home and work till 10:00. I’ll then sneak in an episode or two of inspiring anime before knocking out at 11:00. Weekends grant some breathing room until the long run.

At work, I’m lucky to wear many hats. I manage and lead a team of engineers, I lead design for the product, and I also get to do IC work. My role was inherited from my time at Windsurf where I would fill in the gaps needed to make the product feel great. I couldn’t be more proud of the team of the launch and also feel proud of my effort.

challenges

Confidence in my mind doesn’t come from the outcomes. It comes from being able to stick with the commitment. While I’m still young and my mind is still being shaped, I’d love to maximize any opportunity to increase my mind’s confidence in tackling challenges. This felt like the right challenge for the year.

I feel this way about any past events that gave me a boost in confidence. One meaningful event was when I won my first award at a band summer camp in 10th grade. I had diligently practiced a piece at a speed slow enough to drive most people crazy and performed it. It impressed my peers and I was proud of myself. I became more confident.

Since then, opportunities ebb and flow and hit or miss. The problem was that many of them were flawed by design. They relied on chance—they were not reflective of expected potential. What if the variance could be reduced? In people’s professional careers, people often talk about being set up for success. Its benefit is the momentum created from confidence derived from these opportunities. These methods typically allow people to reach their expected potential.

The problem is that as an adult, there isn’t anyone out there to set us up for success in life. We have managers at work but they’re busy and we’re busy. But what if we could always be set up for success? What does that mean in terms of personal meaning, growth, and fulfillment?

We’re obviously all responsible for ourselves. Each of our biggest priorities should be to set ourselves up for success based on our goals and definitions of success. I’ve failed many past challenges at this because I didn’t set myself up for success. Examples of failures were pursuing too many things at once, wanting the outcome more than the process (e.g. dunking lol), and more. Ambition is great, but it needs to be aligned with a person’s capability and interest.

As I embrace unc status, I’ve been thinking about opportunity cost at a different scale. A compounding future is increasingly my focus, not just today or this year. The key here isn’t “future”. It’s “compounding”.

Most things are transient in the grand scheme of things. Comfort, fitness, feelings, etc. But there are things in life that compound more than others: memories, relationships, health, confidence, perspective, knowledge, habits, etc. The latter has significantly way more meaning. So when I’m left to decide between the former or the latter, I’ll default to the latter. The former is frequently a gateway to the latter, but it is dangerous to optimize for.

looking back

My personal challenge this fall was born out of wanting to build more confidence in my ability to take on bigger challenges. This has felt in reach: I’ve ran a marathon and I did the same work rodeo with Windsurf’s launch a year ago. I felt well set up for success.

I still have a bit left. But I got through the hardest humps: peak week for marathon training and launching Google Antigravity. There are many little things I’d do differently. There are a couple that come to mind:

• Marathon prep: I tried out a 225lb bench press in one month challenge before my marathon block. This was fun, but this delayed my training block and was not a good decision. I also was not successful at the challenge but was close (~215lb).

• Portion control: Because food at Google is self-serve and free, I didn’t have a good pulse on portion control. As a result, even though I was burning more calories during training, my weight didn’t change as much.

• Onboarding: I wish I spent a bit more time learning tooling at Google before I got deep into working on Antigravity. Once things got busy, it was more inconvenient to ramp up on tooling.

• Ambiguous problems: I spent more time on designs than I should have for ambiguous problems. I noticed those areas had the largest gaps between the concepts and the result. This was because the nature of the ambiguity means that it’s harder to land on a perfect solution, meaning my designs were an inefficient estimation. What would have been better is to build an initial prototype and then iterate off of internal feedback.

Overall, I feel great about it. There’s plenty of things that went well and I think the outcomes speak for themselves. It was a great challenge and I’m excited to get to the finish line.

looking forward

San Francisco has seasons, but it’s not the same as the east coast. Seasons here are blurred by similar temperatures throughout the year. Time goes by fast in this climate, making it feel blurry. But time shouldn’t feel blurry. Time instead is most special when it’s intentional and shaped in seasons, both natural or self-constructed (training arcs!). It’s nice to know that at a specific point in time, change is expected because it gives us something to look forward to.

I have vague ideas about what’s next. I’ve been eager to have more free time for old and new things. For example, learning tennis, weightlifting inspired by Physical Asia, cooking new recipes, reading on the shuttle bus, traveling, and more. So many things that I think would be great.

Until then, I’ll give it my best shot at finishing this marathon. Gemini thinks my fitness is looking good but my knees think otherwise. If my long list of “if this goes according to plan” all works out, I’ll end with a result I’m happy with.

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looking backwards

Okay, I finished the marathon. I wrote the previous bit before it but decided to only publish once I finished running it. I ran a 3:18 marathon at CIM in Sacramento! I didn’t hit my goal but I did hit a 12 minute PR which I’m proud of! Most importantly, I did my best and felt proud of what I gave that day.

My quick race post-mortem was that my cardio was ahead of the fitness in my legs due to lack of training. 8 weeks of training wasn’t enough and I should have started preparing earlier. I went conservative in the first half but after the half-marathon point, I admitted that I was more ambitious than capable. I held on for the second half and got an energy boost at mile 19 and 22 from seeing family and friends.

I remember trying to give a final kick but couldn’t find anything left in my legs. That felt good because I wanted this marathon to be harder than last year and last year, I definitely had a kick.

It felt good to finish my goal. It was challenging and fun. It was a lot of doing things I don’t feel like doing. But it also reminds me that past the “I don’t feel like it”, there’s the “I feel good”.

what’s next

I feel a sense of incompletion from this season. I did great but I see many areas of improvement. I was especially inspired by my friends James and Lili who crushed their goals with months of dedicated work towards CIM and hope to ride that inspiration for the coming new year. I have an exciting holiday break in Japan (learning snowboarding!) and Taiwan (NYE!) but once that’s done, the only natural thing to do is to get back into it. Can’t wait to see what’s in store for next year!

CIM 2025!

Google Antigravity Launch!

P.S. Sorry for being behind on updates! Just another example of having to replace my time.