Looking back on 2024 and ahead to 2025

It’s been a couple of busy months and I haven’t written a monthly recap since August 2024. I started writing this post in Sacramento in 40 degree weather and finished it on the beach in the Dominican Republic over the last week of December (see the attached pic).

2024 was a great year. It was the year I went to weddings for 5 of my best friends all over the US, traveled around Peru, went to Guatemala, crossed the 1 year mark living with my girlfriend, and spent quality time with my family in summer, on Halloween, and over the Christmas holidays. I also (kinda) learned how to surf, and reluctantly came to grips with a bunch of grey hairs I found on my head.

Here’s a quick recap of what I’ve been up to, 2024 in a nutshell, and what I’m looking forward to in 2025, the year I turn 30.

What I’ve been up to:

I launched VertSchool, which is a business built off of work I did 10+ years ago when I published a scientific paper after 3 years of research on how to help young athletes safely do plyometric jump training. Me and a friend of mine launched VertSchool to be the jump program we wish we had access to 10 years ago. We launched in December and have our first VertSchool students working out with us.. There’s a bunch more about why we built VertSchool and what our product is on the website.

Stuff I wrote in 2024:

I published a bunch of founder advice in 2024 on our Magma blog. Magma has made over 120 investments to date, and I try to write a simple founder guide on the topics that multiple founders ask me for help on. Here are the 11 articles I published in 2024:

3 part series on Due Diligence:

1. You need a great team, not just great traction, to raise a $10M+ round in Latin America

2. How VC funds evaluate and identify strong startup leaders and teams

3. Practice Makes Perfect: How to prep your team before a VC due diligence process

Other founder guides:

1. People debt and HR debt: what they are and when should you pay them off?

2. Precruiting: Simple steps to help source the right candidates for your startup

3. How to write great a job description that makes top talent want to work with you

4. Reference check team members before hiring, every single time

5. What is a Senior Autonomous Leader and why they should be your first senior hire

6. Try working with people before you hire them…and pay them for it!

7. How to get better at interviewing so that build a team to help you win

Best stuff I’ve read in the last couple of months:

Books:

1. The Bear | Andrew Krivak

2. Digital Minimalism | Cal Newport

Articles:

1. Real-time payments in 1,000 words | Matt Brown

2. Cross-border payments in ~1,000 words | Matt Brown

3. Mullet Capitalists | The Generalist

Other:

1. The State of ESOPs in LATAM, 2024

Looking forward into 2025:

I’m starting this year doing a digital declutter, an idea I’m taking from Digital Minimalism. For me, that means deleting Twitter from my phone, only using Instagram for 1 hour a week, setting rules for when I let myself listen to podcasts, and not using my phone in bed.

I’ve also been using The Way to meditate daily for the last few months. I’ve tried a bunch of different meditation apps over the years and none have really stuck except The Way. We’ll see if I stick with it.

I have a couple of non work related goals for 2025:

VertSchool: The idea behind VertSchool is for the program to be personalized, data driven, and really automated. While I won’t be spending that much of my time on it, we hope to substantially grow our users this year.

Dunking: I turn 30 in November. My goal is to dunk before I hit 30. I’ll be eating my own dog food, and following my own personalized Vertschool jumping program.

Portuguese: I wrote back in August 2023 that I was starting to learn Portuguese. Since then, I’ve had a weekly 1 hour tutoring session with a Brazilian tutor in Mexico City. My time investment in practicing Portuguese outside of my 4 hours of tutoring a week is sporadic. Some months I spend a bunch of my own time practicing Portuguese, but the last 4 months or so I’ve spent barely any extra time on it. I’m at a B2 level, which was my first goal when I started learning over a year ago. I can talk about most things and understand most things people say to me. I still make errors, and don’t speak as fluidly as I’d like, but I can communicate. My goal for this year is to take a step up and become more fluid and natural when speaking.

I’m not sure if I’ll continue to write monthly recaps, but my goal is to keep writing about stuff that interests me and keep this page relatively updated.

Another Kings loss over Xmas…

Las Terrenas, Dominican Republic for the New Year