10/7

2024 New Year's Eve Letter

Dear family and friends,

I’m writing this letter from Cochin, Kerala in India, where I’m about to depart on the long journey back to Austin.  Cochin, or more commonly called Kochi today, is an appropriate place for me to close out the year as a Jew.  It’s home to the oldest synagogue in India, founded in 1568, and is a symbol for the deep ties between the Jewish community and Indian community for thousands of years.  India is now the largest country in the world with 1.46 billion people, surpassing China in 2023 as the most populous country on Earth.  And Indian Americans form the most financially successful minority group in the US, with many giants such as Satya Nadella (CEO of Microsoft) at the helm of some of the most important companies in tech that will set the pace for humanity’s ultimate invention of AI.  

What drew us to India?  Our first Indian wedding - in Mumbai.  It was a three-day event and did not disappoint!  There were over 1,000 people in attendance to see Sanjana and Ishaan wed and the preparations were absolutely extensive and beautiful.  Rachel and I will never forget it (Debra and Levi stayed home for an easier, no travel stress, end to 2024.)

Wow, what a year 2024 has been!  From the re-election of Trump to the breathtaking pace of AI to the historic military achievements of Israel over terrorists throughout the Middle East.  It’s been dizzying, to say the least.  To be clear, we didn’t campaign for Trump and thought Harris would be a competent choice but I get it at the same time.  From our economic and border challenges to Biden’s cognitive decline and the last-minute candidate switch, the people have now spoken.  Republicans will control the Senate, Congress, the White House, and even the Supreme Court (which hopefully will do their best to not politicize that last bastion of independence).  Debra and I remain committed to our independent political views, finding policies to like in both parties and looking for common ground.  And we’ve doubled-down on No Labels going into 2025, which will continue to work for that path with the Problem Solvers Caucus and more.  No Labels’ CEO, Nancy Jacobson, is a true force of nature and has become a friend over the years.

On the family front, our big highlight of the year was our summer trip to Japan. 

In the wake of Hamas’ gruesome slaughter, the banality of evil lurks in one simple word — “but”

In the wake of Hamas’ gruesome slaughter, the banality of evil lurks in one simple word — “but”

I’ve been writing a lot this year but have been neglecting my own blog here on Lucky7. Most of my writing has been at the data.world blog and on my Medium account. I’ve been primarily writing about AI as 2023 will no doubt go down as the year AI went mainstream, and for good reason (the productivity lift is now completely obvious). data.world couldn’t be better positioned for it either, and I can’t quite describe how exciting that has been as our CEO and Co-founder.

Today I turn my attention towards my post popular post of the year, which is on a sad subject. As a Jew, 10/7 was extremely disturbing to me. For humanitarians everywhere, it should have been as well. But then following 10/7 we saw something I haven’t seen in my lifetime. I wrote the following essay on it and published it initially on Medium on 11/7, the one-month anniversary of the horror of 10/7. And then on 11/9, the inverse of 9/11, I published a shorter form of it for the more time-constrained or younger reader. I’ve chosen to only include the full essay below.

But, first, let me say what was on my mind yesterday during Thanksgiving. There have been only leaders that have come forth since I published with extraordinarily clear moral convinction and no use of the word “but”. So, yesterday, I was thinking of the gratitude I have for Mayor Eric Adams of NYC, Congressman Ritchie Torres of the Bronx, and Einat Wilf, who used to serve in the Knesset in Israel and also as as a Foreign Policy Advisor to Vice Prime Minister Shimon Peres. Here are three speeches from them that you should really watch to feel that same gratitude that I have for them: