An origin story of Tencent and Chinese internet companies — Tencent is among the largest technology companies in the world. According to The Verge, it is the most valuable company of any sort in Asia. Tencent owns WeChat, the “everything app” with almost 1 billion users — many of which are active for more than 4 hours a day. …

Delighting customers through banking data feeds — Brex’s diverse customers use a variety of software tools to run and grow their businesses. About half of all our customers use some form of ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) application and expect Brex data to seamlessly integrate with their existing productivity tools. In late 2019, we identified two sizable opportunities: …

About the fraying wires between Americans and our energy future — One of the most recommended books by people I met in the renewable energy ecosystem, The Grid by Gretchen Bakke is a riveting dive into a fundamental piece of infrastructure that moves American society — the electrical grid. Bakke goes into the past, present and future of the grid and…

Field notes from learning Django — I’ve always wanted to experiment with Django after trying out Flask a few years ago. After some initial experimentation to build a search tool for solar farms (django backend, react frontend), I think Django is an optimal choice for building an API quickly from data models. It works great with…

Why work at a startup + some takeaways from Brex — A lot of my friends seem to be thinking about career moves lately or are considering new opportunities. I hope that sharing a bit of my rationale and learnings during almost 3 years at a breakout startup can be helpful to those considering similar paths. How it happened for me Before Brex, I started my…

It’s the hot new acronym on the street being popularized by giants like Coinbase and Fireblocks. A tool that could be used for building large-scale, privacy-preserving applications. Simply put, MPC allows a group to compute something without revealing each participant’s private inputs. MPC also enables “semi-custodial” wallets that serve as…

Once upon a time, the 12 ancient Greek gods resided on Mount Olympus and enjoyed a life of prosperity and wisdom. They relished in philosophy and poetry while eating grapes and playing harp music. Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Aphrodite, and friends even conjured up some theories…

In the blink of an eye, the first half of 2021 is now behind us. I’ve had the habit of personal quarterly reviews and goal-setting for a while, and this time it’s no different. Below are some of my work-related learnings and reflections from the past quarter as a Tech…

Comparing the state of programmable money to “mainstream” financial services — The concept of “programmable money” made possible by the blockchain has gained a substantial amount of traction this year, but this is just the beginning. With about $13B assets in decentralized finance, the space is evolving at an extremely rapid pace. However, it is still in a nascent phase with…