You’re receiving this monthly newsletter because you’ve been a valuable part of my life in some shape or form (or I’d like for you to be 🙂). See this video for context.
Let’s catch up sometime :)
This is a relatively shorter update for me this month. I haven’t had the headspace to do as much reflection as I wanted to. I hope that everyone had a great first month of Spring!
What I’ve been up to 🌱
When I think about March, all I think about is the Capgemini x Google GenAI Hackathon we’ve been running at Onova. We just wrapped up this major hackathon that resulted in 49 POCs and 1.1K employees engaged on Google’s latest Gemini models. I’m very proud of the team for putting in 12hr+ days, staying up till 2AM, and their hard work throughout the past few weeks.
The Onova team went to the cottage! This was a great cottage trip up north in Barrie. We spent some time getting to know each other more, spent a day at the Vetta Nordic Spa, and also competed in the world-class Onova Cottage Olympics. I’m constantly reminded of what a strong, healthy company culture looks like every single time we have these. Shoutout Victor, Ying, and Ron for putting the cottage trip together!
What I’ve been thinking/learning about 💭
This past weekend, I did an exercise that involved listing out who would be on my wedding guest list. I wanted to take a relationship audit across all of my existing relationships to better understand where I am spending my time, and which areas I’m lacking in. I have a lot of gratitude to my friends, and making sure that I’m not overlooking this aspect of my life, is something I’m prioritizing.
I was rereading Paul Graham’s Do Things That Don’t Scale recently. Over the course of the hackathon, the Onova team DM’ed around 100 individual teams over MS Teams. This was not scalable (and not that fun), but resulted in several positive comments on how responsive and “white-glove service” we were. It improved the participant experience significantly. Reflecting on this in other instances of life, what are the things that don’t scale, but have great upside? One example is this newsletter. It takes me 30-45min every month to write this, but it does help me stay in touch with nearly 300 people that I’ve met over the course of my professional career :)
Lmk if you are (or know someone who is) working on or thinking about the above!
What’s next for me ⚡️
I’m preparing for a (kinda big) new chapter in my life over the next month. I will share more in my next few updates 👀
Thanks for reading this month’s update. Would love to hear how I can help you this month (maybe I can make some intros, work through some thoughts with you, or otherwise). See you next month 👋
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