Another Year Around the Sun

On travel, recovery, and working with more ease and freedom

I don’t think I’ve ever made a New Year’s resolution in my life. I used to find the idea a little arbitrary: why should an accident of the calendar dictate when we begin again? Many cultures, including India, anyway celebrate the new year on entirely different days. Why not start the moment an intention arises? What is so special about January 01, I wondered. Over time, I’ve softened on this view. My colleague Katy Milkman has written about the value of “fresh start” rituals and the motivation they unlock. And more personally, as I grow older and time feels increasingly precious, it feels worthwhile to see the turn of the year as a natural pause. A moment to take inventory of where we spent our time, what stretched us, and what we learned.

Looking back, this past year felt full and yet marked by an ease that stands in contrast to the many years before that felt equally full but not as light.

Our family had ended 2024 with a last-minute trip to the Galápagos. My wife once again proved that even improbable plans can come together if you simply decide that they will.

This year was no different. We closed 2025 with another last-minute decision, this time to Australia. Snorkeling in the Great Barrier Reef and seeing koalas and kangaroos in the wild was a perfect way to mark the year-end for a lifelong wildlife lover. Earlier in the year, we had a spring visit to Santa Fe and a summer trip to France, where the highlight was an entire day cycling through the hilly villages of Provence culminating in an excellent French winery. There is something satisfying about exploring a new place on feet or one pedal stroke at a time.

Early in 2025, I also ran a 10K and then a half marathon. On paper, these are just races. In reality, they marked, at least for me, the closing of a long chapter that began with a misdiagnosed ankle fracture from a volleyball game, followed by surgery, and nearly a year of rehab. I wasn’t much of a runner before the injury and had never even run a 5K. Running these races was mostly about telling myself that this chapter was now complete and that I no longer needed to allocate mental energy to the injury or recovery.

After years of skipping live music post-Covid, we also returned to concerts. Coldplay in 2025. Taylor Swift the year before. These were my first concerts with my kids, an entirely different experience introducing them to the power of live music.

On Endings and New Beginnings

Professionally, the year carried a significant closing. We completed the sale of my previous startup, Jumpcut Media, an AI workflow platform used by creative executives at nearly 400 companies across Hollywood. I’ve written before about how difficult those years were, and about the internal battles that accompanied them. When the sale finally wrapped, I was convinced of one thing: this would be my last startup as a founder.

At the very least, I told myself, I would take a two-year break to slow down and be more present. Invest in health, mindfulness, and the parts of life that tend to get neglected in the fast lane.

And then, sometime in the summer of 2025, I started another company!

Not because I was restless. And not because I felt compelled to prove anything. I simply couldn’t see the wisdom in forcing distance to honor an old promise especially when the opportunity felt immediate, energizing, and aligned, and when I had found cofounders I genuinely looked forward to working with.

The new company is a research lab focused on building the future of AI-enabled commerce. At a high level, we’re working to make it easier for companies to market to and transact with AI, from research-backed approaches to improving visibility in AI search to preparing for a world of agentic commerce where AI agents shop on behalf of customers. I’ll write more about this soon.

For now, what matters most to me is something simpler. I’m satisfied that I can return to the kind of entrepreneurial work that once stressed me. That I can approach it with curiosity instead of fear. Ultimately, that is the growth we all seek.

Being aligned with my cofounders on our approach to entrepreneurship was very important to me. One of my cofounders, with whom I first began brainstorming this idea, comes from a deep tradition of Indian Vedanta practice. There’s a line from that tradition that emphasizes the ability to meet challenging work without agitation and acting fully while remaining inwardly free:

“Established in yoga, perform actions, abandoning attachment, remaining even-minded in success and failure. Evenness of mind is yoga.”
— from the Bhagavad Gita

That increasingly feels like the real goal: facing challenges without making the work your identity; staying engaged without becoming entangled. If I had to name one goal for the new year, it would be deepen this practice.

Looking Ahead

I hope you all had a good year. And for those of you who faced significant challenges in 2025, I wish you a gentler and better year ahead. I leave you with the Pali word anicca (pronounced anicha) —the concept that all things, from physical bodies to mental states, are impermanent, and that understanding this impermanence is the key to liberation.

My best wishes for a wonderful 2026 to all of you.