Morgan Chen

back in the Embarcadero Tower lobby. same fountain, still working way too hard. it has this very specific 'someone approved this in a committee' energy. coffee's bad too lol

Send the follow-up decks to the three firms tonight. Addresses are in the email I just forwarded you.

keep thinking about that Pinwheel EU thing from August 2022. their counsel emailed about a data-subject ask from one user and we just... had no answer. fully froze for half a day, then spent like three weeks reconstructing what we'd kept vs not kept. not even dramatic in the moment, just bad. sitting here remembering how quiet the office got when we realized nobody could say what the right response was.

day 4 done. one more tomorrow. feel pretty ok actually. not energized exactly, just... steady. jamie's home before me for once so i'm walking into leftovers and kibo losing his mind at the door

last one of week 1. 2 investor meetings then debrief w Devon. need to keep the deck exactly where it is unless something is actually broken -- no more 11th-hour edits. leaning coffee + no lunch thing again, just get through it.

third miss this week. legs feel weirdly buzzy just from sitting, which is bleak lol. took kibo out for like 6 min and he was ready to make it a whole thing. drizzle, cold hands, back inside

wrapped the debrief. fine. not our best room and they were a little hard to read, but nothing broke. sent the follow-up already -- deck, metrics snapshot, and the one customer note they asked for.

week 1 done. home now with a glass of wine and i am not opening Slack again tonight. Jamie's still at UCSF, Kibo's parked by the kitchen like that's his job. that's enough

still at the office w Devon. 11:30 and we're doing the seed slide for the sixth time bc he wants the burn bar moved up and i keep cutting half the market text. pretty sharp around the edges now. not a blowup, just that bad tired where every word sounds wrong. data room tabs open everywhere, deck in figma, both of us talking over the same sentence

Long week. on the couch with Kibo half across my legs and I don't really plan to move for a while. Jamie's at UCSF till later. TV on mute, phone face down, brain pretty much off.

panhandle w kibo and we actually did the full sunday version for once. sun's out, grass still kind of damp, every other dog off leash and pretending not to be. he is now fully passed out on the floor like he had a job

been staring at the retention slide for like an hour and i don't fully buy it. mixpanel says one thing, the csv devon pulled says another once you cut out the sandbox/workshop accounts, and the shape gets prettier a little too fast. maybe it's just the cohort window. idk. monday in front of the lead partner with a number i don't trust is... not great. jamie's at the hospital, kibo's asleep under the table, and i'm still moving labels around on one slide

reviewing the deck and found i wrote "at scale" in two different slides. my own copy. incredible. texting you bc i feel like i owe the counter money now lol

partner meeting at 11. doing one more pass now, mostly retention slide -- need the month 3 to month 6 shape to read fast and not get lost in the cohort labels. deck otherwise stays put. debrief w Devon right after if anything gets weird in the room.

same lobby again. one of the partners is camped down here too doing the pre-meeting lap thing, so now it's me pretending to care about the citrus water and him asking if i was in Tahoe this weekend. very shiny in here. weirdly warm.

meeting was good i think. room felt fine. but the Feb 13 lead-investor partner meeting is still stuck in my head bc the partner had two pointed questions on retention and i kind of hand-waved one, half-answered the other. not catastrophic, just bad in the specific way where you know they found the soft spot. i keep messing with that slide like the label order is the issue. it's not. the problem is we show top-line logo retention cleanly enough, but the usage cohort gets muddy after month 4 once teams collapse into annual and seat expansion hides the drop. i need a real answer on what we believe is product improvement vs segmentation artifact vs instrumenting this badly in Stripe + app events. leaning pull raw cohort cuts tonight and stop trying to pretty it up -- if i can't say it plainly in the room, deck polish is useless.

kibo's getting absolutely scammed this week. four days of basically hallway-level dog care. he kept bringing me the leash while i was still on a call. gonna make it up to him this weekend if he still agrees to speak to me lol

long day. partner meeting finally behind me. stood in the shower way too long doing retention math in my head and getting nowhere. jamie's already eating, kibo glued to the kitchen like he pays rent

Tuesday. internal day finally. retention pass first thing bc i still don't like where the week-4 number landed, then Priya 1:1 before lunch. trying to keep the rest of the calendar clean enough to actually think. also need to text Jamie back about dinner before that turns into 9:30 cereal again.

Need the real month-12 cut from Devon, not the blended one. Ask for cohort-by-cohort and what happens if we strip out the 2021 self-serve wave + any expansions hiding churn -- logo and ARR both. I can answer a bad number. I can't answer a slide where gross looks fine because the denominator got weird. Want one clean table before I touch that retention slide again.

Clear Thursday after 1. Keep only stuff that would actually light the building on fire if moved.

jamie's home tonight so the apartment finally feels normal again. kibo fully glued to her on the couch. i think we're just gonna put on something dumb and let the espresso machine make its weird clicking noises in the kitchen

Wednesday. nothing till noon so i'm protecting it. writing deck copy first while my brain still works, then the narrative doc that's been half-open for 3 days. trying really hard not to let random inbound eat the whole morning.

lead firm's been quiet since monday. no follow-up, no random diligence pings, nothing. trying not to make that mean anything and mostly failing. devon still has the data room clean on our side; there's just not much to answer if they're not asking.

still on that retention slide. need Devon to send the real month-12 cut, not the blended one. cohort by cohort, and strip out the expansions/seat adds so we're not pretending gross looks like net. if the round lands this is still gonna come back -- someone will ask why logo looks fine up top and the floor drops when you actually follow accounts through.

he pushed again on the retention wording. wanted "stabilized" instead of just saying it flattened after the onboarding fixes. i left it. not gonna sand that down for a deck line. little frosty after that, whatever. he's in the data room now and i'm redoing the seed slide again bc apparently the burn bar placement matters more than my blood pressure

Calendar's weirdly open. just team sync and one internal, otherwise waiting on the lead to call back today. trying not to fill the gaps with random stuff -- wanna be near my phone and not spin out before they say yes/no.

Just got the lead firm's formal pass email. 12:45pm on Feb 16. So yeah. B-round pitch fell through. Trying not to do anything dumb for the next hour. Devon's on it but this is bad. Need a minute.

played it normal all day. meeting cleared, smiled at people, did the hallway thing. leaving now and i feel pretty much nothing. gonna get home before my brain starts doing laps. hope Jamie's back before i fully turn into furniture.

keep thinking about Zulu Logistics tonight. august 2021, we told them we were done and gave them like a week to get off us. then the breach suit. spring settlement, all that discovery garbage, emails pulled into PDFs like anybody was saying anything smart in those threads. idk. that one left a mark. jamie's making eggs and kibo keeps pacing at the stove

not a great day. that's about all i've got. on the couch now, Kibo fully wedged against me like he pays rent. Jamie asked once and let it go, which... yeah. tv's on but i couldn't tell you what's on.

up but not really. walking Kibo weirdly slow. coffee's been sitting here for like 20 min and i still haven't opened my laptop. Jamie already out the door. long day.

saw you cleared the afternoon. on Feb 17, morning after the pass... yeah. thank you for that. i needed it. think this is gonna be the post-bad-news recovery pattern btw -- just stop letting me stack meetings on top of bad news days

ended up doing takeout. didn't cook. don't really want to talk tonight tbh. on the couch with kibo glued to my leg, jamie's being nice about it. long day.

keep thinking about the Reece thing from late '21. we brought him in as ops director and then like two months later found out he'd been quietly pushed out of the last job under terms nobody had surfaced to us. whole exit got weird fast. ate maybe three weeks of board time for absolutely no reason. idk. Kibo is passed out by the heater and i'm still annoyed

we said we weren't doing valentine's and jamie came home with flowers anyway. very rude honestly. kibo's been doing laps between the couch and kitchen like something important is happening. quiet in here for once.

took kibo on the long loop and just kept going. like three hours. he was doing that little check-back every so often to make sure i was still coming, then fully got his swagger back by the hill. deserved tbh. i owe that dog like a week of normal life

not back to 100. but moving. been trying to picture the next two weeks as actual days instead of this vague blob. a couple cleanup convos i can't keep dodging, internal stuff with devon, then getting the team back onto normal work without making it weird. idk. weird month. jamie's making something that smells aggressively like garlic and kibo has been following me room to room all afternoon

texted Devon bc last week got weird. just said hey, that was a lot. we're good. he wrote back "yeah, we are" and that was kind of it. feels better. still here a bit longer doing cleanup.

two more investor follow-ups today. 10 and 2. gonna do the notes pass once then leave the deck alone -- every time i touch it more it gets worse. pretty flat honestly. maybe one of them surprises me.