2022 in Review

Previously: 2020 2020 2018 2016

I realised that I hadn’t written one last year publicly. I think I have written some privately but I can’t find the document. I’m going to try to keep up this “year in review” thing publicly where I can.

Firstly it goes without saying that this year has been a tough year for a lot of people in tech. The layoffs situation and the funding situation is rather bleak. However, one thing I realised when reflecting on the year was that there were a lot of

Key Learnings/Achievements

I finally sold Probabilistic Programming Primer, I listed it on Microacquire and the process was quite painless when it all went through. It was a nice end to a journey to build a small business, have it profitable and finally sell the business to another party. It was also quite a release because the overhead of running a side business with the day job was quite overwhelming for me.

One thing I realised was it’s important to personally and professionally take more photos – when I was reviewing photos of the year I realised there were months without photos in my google photos collection or on instagram. Make sure to invest the effort.

I’ve been swimming regularly about 3 times a week normally – I’ve found this very therapeutic and it’s become the exercise I enjoy the most. I’d like to keep this up and just keep the goal of consistency.

Aflorithmic

The macroeconomic environment has been tough, and navigating that has been a huge challenge as a leader. Something I’ve found rather helpful has been the excellent slack from Rands. The reality is that pretty much every technology company is looking or have executed cost savings, and the new interest rate environment we’re in has caused companies to emphasise profitability and free cashflow more – as opposed to just top line growth. Listening to how other companies navigate such issues has been helpful, if only the fact that these things are hard.

Personally I’ve been very proud of the team and the resilience they’ve showed, we shipped more machine learning based features than ever before, and while we had to iterate through some team setups we got to a setup I’m happy with for future growth and reliability. We also shipped a big refactor of our API – which will be released next year (email me peadar[at]aflorithmic[dot]ai if you want to be on the beta list)

Parrot Week: We had our first in person event in late 2022. This was a lot of fun, with a variety of remote, and the two offices in Barcelona/London it’s very important to get people together in one room to talk about strategy/ best practices or just understand each others personalities. It’s one of those things that advisors and friends mentioned a lot to me personally – and to my cofounders – I wish we did it earlier, and we’ll be sure to do it next year.

Careers are long: Some of my team have moved on to other adventures in recent years. One nice thing has been that some of those relationships are still quite strong. I recommend that you keep the weak ties and don’t take it so personally when someone decides to move on.

Customers: We continued to grow revenue and usage solidly this year. I’ve been very impressed at the variety of use cases our audio infrastructure can enable – from marketing, to synthetic avatars to gaming. And I expect we’ll see more use cases in the future. One lesson to learn again and again is that you can’t under invest in great customer support, and pulling the threads of some bugs from customers has led to some great new features.

Management I’ve been working a lot more with advisors and colleagues on people management. And the Rands slack is good on this too. Setting goals and being accountable to them is good, there’s a challenge of setting goals that aren’t too overly specific though as often I find the market demands change over the course of 3 months. Performance reviews and those sorts of processes – while they can be hard to get into motion in a fast growing startup do definitely help. A great blog post on this is here

Hiring One of my highlights hiring wise has been Hugo our BizOps and Strategy manager. The energy, good humour and ability to help us as a leadership team scale projects and processes has been hugely helpful. He’s also helped us focused on learning from our employees (which leaders are lost without). I was a bit skeptical of this role before hand but I recommend it to other startup founders. You realistically need to bootstrap that function.

Goals for the decade

(I’ve been heavily influenced by Will Larson)

• Write 4 blog posts a year – Quality not quantity
• Do more learning experiments each year – One of mine recently was Probabilistic Programming Primer and of course Aflorithmic. One thing I’m struggling with is how to do more programming.
• 10+ folks who I’ve managed or meaningfully supported move into VPE or CTO roles at 50+ person or $100M+ valuation companies. – I like this one slightly adjusted from Will.
• Build up a reputation for Aflorithmic as an innovative technology company where people can do their best work – This one is a big vague and it probably correlates with valuation to some extent. However, something I think we’ve invested a lot in – is getting a good culture and encouraging creativity. It’s very easy to “screw up the culture” so I’d like to continue to invest in this.
• Do something substantial and new every year that provides new perspective or deeper practice – I took this from Will directly, but for me it’s found a company and get us to our next milestones – it was probabilistic programming primer, and it was Open Source work a few years back. Perhaps in a few years it’ll be join a board or take part in angel investing. I’ll leave it vague for the moment because I like the general idea.

Other stuff

• We went to Morocco a fascinating country
• My brother got married which was a huge milestone for my family
• I didn’t do too much public speaking or talks – except this one which was kinda fun I’d not like to do too much of this each year but if I do one or two podcasts/ talks a year I think that scratches that itch for me. More than that would be a distraction