Greetings from Mykonos, Greece!
Since our last newsletter, we wrapped up our time in Turkey and began our honeymoon. Owen finally caught Covid and the poor timing meant we had to delay our honeymoon to quarantine. Owen recovered, we spent a few days in Marsa Alam, and then Santorini for our friends Lulu and Greg’s beautiful wedding (a pause from celebrating our love to celebrate theirs).
We’re now continuing our honeymoon in the Greek islands.
We often get asked what makes for a honeymoon if we’re already traveling all the time. Back in 2019, we fell in love with Marsa Alam when we stopped by for a short snorkeling excursion on our way from Egypt to Israel. The last section of our Egypt newsletter explains why.
That time, we booked a trip to Dolphin House, a national park where pods of dolphins live. No one else signed up so it got canceled due to the minimum head count. We vowed we’d come back to see Dolphin House and hopefully all the other marine animals we missed. Since Marsa Alam is quite the trek to get to and the internet is nonexistent, it’d be hard to work remotely from so we chose it for our honeymoon.
This time, instead of staying in a tent along the beach, we stayed at a fancy all-inclusive resort called Jaz Maraya. We got in two days of diving and one of snorkeling after our delay and made the trip to Dolphin House happen. Alas, we didn’t spot any dolphins... but we did swim with a sea cow and the coral was as massive and colorful as we remembered!
Jaz Maraya’s rooms were quite nice and the AYCE buffets were great, but if we were to go back, we may stay at one of its sister properties like Jaz Solaya. They share the same dive center and the price tag is a bit cheaper. The hotel and dive center had German as its second language and it turns out there’s a direct flight from Frankfurt to Marsa Alam. Much easier to go through next time!
Our Changing Planet
On our snorkeling day, in one of the reefs, we found ourselves surrounded by plastic waste. Everyone with us helped clean what we could and ended up with about one garbage bag’s worth. Part of why we’ve been diving whenever we get the chance is because we’re not sure how many more years we’ll have to see what we can now. This was a stark reminder of that reality. The coral in Egypt isn’t yet bleached, but that’s not the case in much of the rest of the world. Our waters are warming, marine life is going extinct, and trash is piling up.
We have not been treating our planet well and the more we see, the worse the situation seems. Owen’s been taking a course on climate change and learned from it that the problem is more urgent than we expected, but also that it’s not too late! If we continue “business as usual” as we’ve mostly been doing, we only have 8 more years before we’re locked into 1.5C of warming, which the world has collectively decided is where we need to stop.
But really there isn’t a safe threshold. The more warming we have, the higher probability of “unprecedented” heat waves and other extreme weather we’ll have. On top of that, people and animals will be forced to migrate — it’s estimated that 1 billion people will be displaced for every 1C of warming. Animal migration leads to diseases being carried to unexpected places, which leads to more pandemics. Human migration leads to refugee crises on a scale we haven’t yet seen. Our society is only possible when there’s a foundation of stability and climate can quickly erode that.
If you’re interested in learning more, we’ve been reading Ministry of the Future — a sci-fi novel recommended by Gates and Obama that paints a potential climate future — on our honeymoon (super romantic) and think that’s a casual starting point to understand where things could be headed. We highly recommend you at least read or listen to the first chapter where through the eyes of a clinic volunteer in India, the author takes readers to experience a deadly heat wave + power outage that kills millions in 2029.
Given most of our audience is friends in tech, another good read is Bret Victor’s “What can a technologist do about climate change?”. If you want to dive in deeper, Owen highly recommends the course he’s taking (he has a promo code if you want a discount, the next cohort’s in October). The material gives you a solid overview of the problem and all its nuances as well as many of the areas for solutions. Owen’s also happy to chat more if you want other resources or to brainstorm on how we can get more involved together!
What first opened our eyes to how we could be doing our part was visiting Ivy’s ex-boss on Big Island in 2019 and seeing the climate startup he’s working on (Terraformation section of our Hawaii newsletter). He and his current CEO both had successful careers in tech but were worried about the future for their kids. They vowed to commit the rest of their careers to fight climate change, despite having no prior experience. This was a huge inspiration to us and has been in the back of our minds in thinking about the future of our own careers.
Picking up where we left off in our Colombia Newsletter…
Let’s continue with catching up on the missed months of newsletters now! After 5 weeks in Colombia, Ivy flew back to Ottawa to do our wedding tasting and Owen flew to Austin, Texas for his bachelor party.
Manly fun times were had. Here’s one newsletter-appropriate photo to share.
We then regrouped in San Francisco, still one of our favorite places in the world because of the people and the coast.
Exciting things had been brewing for Ivy. In an online writing course, Ivy wrote about “How to make online courses fun for kids” for a writing assignment. This caught the eye of a group of professionals also in the Future of Education space, particularly one of the largest investors of Lambda School, Synthesis, Quizlet, and many other Edtech startups.
In their first coffee chat, Ivy had no idea who this man, with a limited LinkedIn profile, was. He offered to help in any way he could, including paying for all of BETA Camp’s ad spend to experiment and see if BETA Camp can scale. Ivy spent the chat asking in 10 different ways exactly what he wanted back, skeptical that it really was no strings attached. After the call, Ivy decided to Google him and found him on Forbes’ richest list and with his own Wikipedia page. We were very shook.
Yifan and Ivy had been considering the future of BETA Camp for a while and had spoken to multiple potential companies for acquisition. This marketing help eventually led to an offer of acquisition where Ivy was to come on board to work on whatever she wanted in the education space, whether that’s growing BETA Camp or consulting for their other portfolio companies. We took the deal. Verbal agreement to cash payout in bank took just 10 days.
Now, Ivy is building Prequel, launching new programs that help expose kids to the skills and careers of the future.
Yifan and Ivy celebrated the acquisition with a spa day at Ritz Carlton and a picnic with guest instructors who helped out at BETA Camp in San Francisco.
Other than that, we lived our best West Coast lives. We went on a white water kayaking trip with friends
And Owen hosted dinner parties with his friend Jon in his epic kitchen. The one Owen was most proud of was a tasting menu they did with the theme “dishes in our 20s made healthy for our 30s”. They took memorable foods from their past and made them fancy while adding twists so that the meal clocked in at 1000 calories and 60g of protein in total. To make the tasting menu happen, Owen and Jon spent 2 days building out spreadsheets (nutrition calculations, Gantt charts, shopping lists) and 2 days doing taste tests.
We still love the life that we have whenever we return back to the Bay and sometimes wonder what it would have been like if we just stayed.
Recently we’ve been having some periods of sadness where we miss our friends. We’ve had a lot of folks join us throughout our travels which we’re very grateful for, but we realized there was still something amiss. Despite getting to see our friends occasionally in different parts of the world, we had no idea what has been going on in their lives day to day or the problems they’d been facing. We weren’t part of anyone’s life discovery process, we just got the Spark Notes summary after discoveries were made. We wish we had a community and people we saw every week again.
It may finally be time to stop nomading.
Our current plan is to move to Portugal for 1-2 years. We won’t build a permanent home there, but think it’d be a good transitionary phase. We’ll be slowing our travels, occasionally making trips throughout Europe and back to North America to see our friends, and looking into where and how to settle after that.
One more newsletter and we’ll be caught up! Next time we’ll share about post-SF, our wedding, and Turkey.
Onwards,
Ivy and Owen