2020 in review
I rang in 2020 in a club called Bang Bang in Singapore (85°F) and now I'm writing this year-in-review post from Ithaca, NY (26°F). 2020 was quite the eventful year. I traveled in Asia for 6 weeks before COVID hit, rescinded my full-time offer to Facebook, joined Ramp, worked on new projects, connected with Internet friends on Twitter (+1,283 followers), and got into investing.
Early 2020
I graduated early from Cornell in December 2019 and decided to travel during the winter despite my friends asking me to wait until May. Thankfully, I hate my friends 😂 I visited South Korea (my motherland), Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, and Japan. See highlights on my Instagram.
Joining Ramp
After my trip, I continued to work remotely from Cornell for NTWRK. I found out about Ramp when they launched publicly in late-February announcing their $25M funding. And after connecting with the team, I decided to join Ramp for 3 months until my FB start date.
I started at Ramp on March 16, the day the company went fully remote. In my first week, I met with design agencies for our upcoming rebrand, and I designed and shipped improvements to our payments UX.
With every sprint, I got hungrier to learn as much as possible within my 3 months. People at Ramp were thoughtful, kind, and supportive. As my start date for FB got closer, I didn't want to leave this rocket-ship that I had joined. After arguments with my immigrant parents, and chats with friends, mentors, and investors, I decided to stay for longer.
It's Time to Build
2020 was the time to build. With the quarantine, I was tired of watching Netflix and playing Fortnite and wanted to build. This a16z post sparked that fire. My friends and I built Hub, an internal social network integrated with Slack and won prizes from Unusual Ventures and Village Global.
I also doubled down on interns.design, a site that I built in December 2018 to help students find paid design jobs and resources. In 2020, I built features like job filtering and expired listings, opened my calendar for daily 1-on-1s, and published 3 career resources. interns.design grew tremendously in 2020 🚀
And lastly, I redesigned my plain html/css site with next.js and added new case studies and writing.
Personal Improvements
I also picked up new hobbies in 2020:
- Invested money in stocks
- Learned to actually cook meals (less takeout)
- Read more articles and books
- Published career resources
2021 Focus
In 2021, I want to:
- Write more of my thoughts down and share with the community. My goal is to publish at least 12 pieces by the end of the year.
- Build tools to save time or save money for people. Build once and sell it 10,000x.
- Mentor more students and connect them to job opportunities. I started to do this in 2020 and want to do more in 2021.
That's it! Connect with me on Twitter to stay in the loop and I'm pumped for 2021. Let's do this 💪