2025

Travel, transitions, and a few learnings I want to remember

12 min read

December 24, 2025

Without even planning for it, 2025 became the year I traveled the most in my life.

This year, in one way or another, life took me to 16 cities:

San Francisco, California (3 times)
Cancún, México
Mexico City, México
Medellín, Colombia
Cusco, Peru
Lima, Peru
London, United Kingdom
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Paris, France
Madrid, Spain
Milan, Italy
Verona, Italy
Cinque Terre, Italy
Venice, Italy
Rome, Italy
Florence, Italy

Along with this, this year came with big changes.

It started with me running my own company, Torrenegra Organization. I tried to push it as hard as possible to make it grow, until we decided to shut it down, even though it was profitable (post mortem).

I also completed one of my goals since 2018: going to Europe with my parents.

In 2018, thanks to them, I was able to visit Rome, Berlin, and Munich for six weeks. Since that trip, I really wanted my mom to experience what it feels like to travel to a different culture.

For some reason I had set the goal to do it when I turned 30. I turned 29 this year, and it happened earlier.

This is also my last year in my 20s, and I guess just like people say, once you hit certain ages or milestones, looking back is weird. Everything feels like it happened fast.

Anyway, these blog posts are mostly a photo of my thoughts for my future self. Writing is when you finally give yourself the time to look at your own thinking more seriously.

And yes, since I’m in the tech world, I’ll always have a bias to write about business and startups.

So here are the learnings, or re-learnings, I’d save from the last few years.

You don’t have time. Give your maximum, but also enjoy it.

This sounds contradictory.

Ever since I was 22, I’ve felt like I’m in a rush, like I’m running out of time. Many times I wondered if I was being too hard on myself, if I was putting too much pressure on myself for no reason.

Then I had a conversation with an Uber driver, also named Alan, on my way to the xAI hackathon. He’s 56, and he told me something I hadn’t heard said that clearly: the whole “you’re young, you have time” thing is, in his opinion, a lie.

Because for him, life happened extremely fast. So he genuinely believes you should try to take advantage of every day, because life will pass either way.

That’s exactly what I’ve felt like.

That said, I also think it’s necessary to have a few days in your year where you slow down, feel grateful for the journey, and reflect. But day to day, you should strive to give your best as often as possible, because compounding is real.

Be aggressive at truth telling.

Ever since I watched this Jeff Bezos clip, the truth-telling part stayed in my head. Because it’s true across almost everything.

We don’t aim for truth with ourselves, and we don’t aim for truth with others, because it’s uncomfortable.

But the more you can apply truth telling to your life, your business, and your relationships, the healthier they become.

Most of the time we avoid it because of the emotional consequences we think might happen.

This also connects to first-principles thinking, which got popular through Elon Musk. This video captures the spirit of it well.

Working with 101 companies at Torrenegra Organization, where a huge part of what we did was coaching, helped me understand the power of this even more.

When you force yourself to break things down to fundamentals, and not to analogies, you can push back on your own self-lies and limiting beliefs. You can also push back on other people’s stories, in a constructive way, because you can separate assumptions from facts.

To me, avoiding truth telling is easily in the top 3 reasons people fail across different areas of life.

Aim bigger.

This is one I’ve been improving over time, but even today, especially if we’re talking about the San Francisco startup ecosystem, I can improve it a lot: aiming bigger.

Something that really impressed me, and I learned it from one of the cofounders of the Thiel Fellowship, is how much of their “magic” was simply giving young people permission to build.

At critical moments in time, you can raise someone’s aspirations significantly, especially when they’re relatively young, simply by suggesting they do something better or more ambitious than what they currently have in mind.

Having a growth mindset is hard. And honestly, in business it can feel like bullshit to talk big when you have nothing yet (at least that’s how it feels for me sometimes).

But I’m still amazed by what happens once you delete imaginary boundaries.

It’s crazy to me that I’ve been able to work with people years ahead of me in experience and net worth. Crazy to me that I can have conversations with people I used to watch or read about on the internet, and today I’m a peer in the room.

Quoting Steve Jobs: "Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use."

Curiosity is a big advantage.

I studied Electrical Engineering. My first job was production support in IT. Then QA automation. Then software engineer. Then I started a company about content. Then I worked in a community supporting students and founders. Then I co-founded a company to support companies across different industries. Then I started an effort to sell human data to AI labs in San Francisco.

And then a bunch of other things, like going deep into financial markets, education, and more.

Like, what the fuck? How did I go from electrical engineering to all of this?

It’s just curiosity.

Something I hadn’t fully realized, but people have told me, is that one superpower is becoming a polymath.

Curiosity is a long-term moat. It’s how you avoid having an expiry date.

Learn programming.

Without even looking for it (San Francisco serendipity), I recently had an interview at xAI for a software engineer role. I got destroyed, lol.

It’s been almost four years since I programmed seriously every day. If you benchmark me against someone who does it daily as a profession, I’ll lose today.

But I don’t really care, because I already know that if I put the hours in, I will become very good again, just like I did before.

And this matters because I originally moved away from coding because I thought I was too stupid for it.

Until I had no option but to learn it, and learn a lot, because it was literally my job from 2020 to 2022.

I still have the important concepts in my head, even if I’ve forgotten syntax and small details. I can still communicate with other engineers, and I can still build.

In the AI era, I think this becomes more and more important. For me, it has been a huge advantage.

I would encourage anyone to suffer a bit and learn programming, without relying on LLMs as a crutch.

Get used to eating shit.

I’ve literally been told, personally and professionally, that it’s unreal how much discipline I have. For training daily, learning new things, and in general.

A long time ago I internalized something simple: you can achieve almost anything, as long as you’re willing to accept the trade-off.

And the trade-off is usually discomfort.

No, I don’t like the discomfort of a restrictive diet to reach 9% body fat.
No, I don’t like the discomfort of running at 6 a.m. in San Francisco in December.
No, I don’t like the discomfort of doing a live presentation in front of 100 people.
No, I don’t like the discomfort of feeling social anxiety again, walking into an event where I know nobody.
No, I don’t like the discomfort of doing an interview at xAI when I know I’m unprepared.

But if I really want to be good at something, or at least have a shot, I have to do it, or at minimum try it.

A couple weeks ago there was a talk at South Park Commons with Microsoft’s CTO, Kevin Scott. He shared a story that nailed this idea for me:

“I had a boss who I don’t think would mind me saying this: Jeff Weiner, the former CEO of LinkedIn. He’s a dear friend, and I learned a ton from him. I had a one-on-one with him once, and he looks at this grumpy as hell engineer working for him and goes, ‘Dude, you’re always unhappy. I’m going to help you reset your hedonic equilibrium.’

And I was like, ‘What the hell are you even talking about, man? I don’t want my hedonic equilibrium set. I don’t even want to be happy. That’s not the first-order thing.’ I want to do meaningful work. Meaningful work is hard. And I’m not going to be happy while I’m doing it, but I will be content. And honestly, that’s all I need to hope for in my life: to be content while doing meaningful things.

It’s all going to be hard, right? So learn to accept, enjoy, and appreciate the hardness. It’s a privilege that we get to solve hard problems.”

Yeah. Exactly.

We can all increase our pain tolerance.

Your network is your net worth.

Yes, one of those cringy sayings. But reflecting back, it’s crazy how normal it feels to me now to host events in any city, or enter a new ecosystem, just because of the people I’ve met.

I take that for granted today, but it’s not normal.

Since 2022, I’ve been building communities in one way or another. It felt like “work” to reach out to people, connect them, and keep relationships alive, but I didn’t fully appreciate how powerful that becomes over time.

Recently I hosted my first event in San Francisco. It was stressful because we organized it in under a week. It didn’t feel spectacular to me while doing it, but seeing the goodwill it generated, and how some people reached out afterward, made it obvious that this is a real superpower.

I also have mixed feelings here: I’m still shy reaching out to people at events, but as a host I feel very comfortable. I’ve been told I’m a good host, so I guess I’m doing something right.

The message is simple: invest in relationships because they truly matter. And pay it forward. Generate goodwill. It comes back in ways you can’t predict.

Use social media in your favor.

It’s funny. I deleted Instagram for a month and didn’t miss it. And even though I have a LinkedIn addiction that I hate, I somehow ended up being very good at it (and people who know me professionally have told me that repeatedly).

The reason I hate it is because it can feel cringy and fake, like a circus. But I’ve seen firsthand the advantages of being public, and it still amazes me.

I started posting on LinkedIn in 2022. Today I have 11k followers, a Top Voice badge, and most of the sales I’ve done ($300K+ USD) happened through that channel. Same with sponsorships for events and random opportunities that opened just because I was visible.

I completely agree with this saying: if you’re good at something and nobody knows, you have to look for opportunities. If many people know, opportunities find you.

Serendipity is real, and you can manufacture a lot of it.

Traveling is almost never an expense. It’s an investment.

Yes, social media creates mimetic desire. But I also think travel is one of the few things that isn’t overhyped, at least to a certain extent.

Looking back, most of my best adventures happened while traveling. Even things that weren’t fun in the moment, like going to Vancouver in 2019 to do random jobs, became valuable later.

The discomfort of being in a new place, with worse conditions, out of your comfort zone, forces you to level up.

And I’ve learned over and over again: almost everywhere you go, there are cool people to meet, especially if you’re in the startup ecosystem.

So yeah. For me, travel is rarely “just travel”. It’s usually fuel.

That’s the snapshot. Not commandments. Just what felt true looking back at 2025.

Resources

The following are resources I consumed for the first time or revisited and found excellent.

If you have any recommendations, I would love to hear them.