My 2024 Annual Review

Building life after exit: what's worth doing?

Most people think there are two phases of entrepreneurship: before the exit and after. I’ve added a third: the "afterlife" – that crucial period when you've processed the exit enough to see clearly again.

Three years post-exit, I've learned something counterintuitive: the most dangerous question isn't "what's next?" but "what's worth doing?" The first keeps you busy; the second keeps you honest (and happy).

What Went Well

The Return to Legacy

In late April, I did something that would have seemed unthinkable in the past. I joined my father's 20-year-old engineering firm, m2e, as Chief Financial Officer. Not exactly where you’d expect to find a film school graduate, and certainly not where I thought I’d find myself post-exit. Everything I know about business and finance comes from running my own companies and an obsession with learning, not from formal education.

This wasn’t our first attempt at working together. When I moved back to Miami years ago, we briefly tried it, but quickly agreed that to preserve our relationship, we should build our businesses separately. However, as I began exploring coaching and mentorship as part of my afterlife, the opportunity to impact a family business seemed like a reasonable half step towards my long-term goals.

Family businesses are fascinating. They often hold decades of value locked behind outdated systems—not just the computer kind, but the human kind as well.

We re-implemented EOS, tightened financial and operational reporting, embraced new technologies, and began holding one another accountable for performance. The results reconfirmed that sometimes the most innovative thing you can do isn't to build something new, but to unlock what's already there. By September, we weren't just seeing better numbers; we were witnessing what happens when you give the right people, in the right sets, better tools and systems to execute with. Revenue rebounded significantly, but more importantly, we discovered that family businesses don't need to choose between legacy and innovation. They need (and likely crave) both.

Conventional wisdom says never to mix family and business, but maybe that's backward. Family businesses may have an advantage that tech startups would kill for: deep trust and shared purpose that money can't buy.

The Global Lab

We split our summer between Serbia and Italy, watching our kids discover gelato, various kinds of pasta, and connect with my Serbian relatives. At my cousin’s wedding in Serbia, seeing our kids embrace their heritage and extended family made every challenging moment of international travel worth it (and confirmed that flying overseas with a 2-year-old is, in fact, much like trying to restrain an anxious, caffeinated ferret).

Stefan (bro #1) defended his PhD in Neuroscience this year (and graduated), and landed a gig at an AI startup. Maks (bro #2) and Cyndi got married, with Kaia as the flower girl, and my mom’s nonprofit, Building Talent Foundation, continued to soar. All in all – a big win for family this year.

Traveling has always been a foundational element of my relationship with my wife, Sara. Early in our relationship, travel was a good test of how we behaved when spending lots of time together, alone. It was the easiest test because we love each other’s company, and exploring new places is a mutual love language. This jumps to another level when we get to do it with our kids.

Watching Kaia and Luka navigate Italian piazzas and Serbian family traditions revealed something surprising: children don't distinguish between ordinary and extraordinary moments – they just experience them. While we adults were measuring the success of our trips in photos and milestones, they were simply living.

Health and Habits

The fitness routine I established post-Preemo has become a cornerstone of my week. Three sessions with my trainer, Sunday basketball games, and now pickleball (which I love so much we built a court in the backyard) keep me moving. I've maintained my two-drinking-days-per-week rule with about 90% consistency, tracking it all year.

Habit tracking has been a powerful unlock. It’s one thing to change a single habit, it’s another to actually track certain behaviors you want to achieve and see your performance over time. One unlock I found was positive trend goals, like “Sober & focused 5 days a week” vs “Alcohol only twice per week.” It’s the same thing, but the habit focus is on the positive habit-forming activity of being sober and focused.

The health and longevity trend seems like it has bitten everyone I know. Everyone’s reading Peter Attia’s book, listening to Huberman and Andy Galpin, cold plunging, and debating whether or not to take Ozempic. While I’m guilty of listening to every health-related podcast, I’ve tried to find some balance between this and enjoying the things I love: a fancy meal with no rules, a rest day with my kids, and budgeting time to think about big ideas.

What Could Have Gone Better

The Parenting Pivot

My daughter's first soccer game was (yet another) tough lesson in parenting for me.

We arrived early. Kaia was decked out in her pink gear, and the “Princess Heroes” were hitting the field. Kaia froze, curled up with my wife, and refused to play with her team. My startup-founder instincts kicked in – push through, execute, you can do it. I didn’t realize I was solving the wrong problem.

Kaia didn’t need to be pushed. She needed support, encouragement, and patience. Kids don’t need product-market fit; they need patient-parent fit. Learning to parent based on who Kaia is rather than who I expect her to be has been this year's most humbling pivot.

I later apologized for getting ramped up with her and committed to allowing her time at the next game to warm up. As expected, within a couple of minutes of the start of her second game, she was on the field, smiling and chasing the ball.

Sara and I share parenting videos on Instagram with one another. However, she does the best job in emulating them, and showing me both in real life and in real time, how to be a sturdy, calm parent, even when faced with the overwhelming feeling to explode. The kids and I are lucky to have her on our team.

Food Is Delicious

My love/hate relationship with the phase “food is fuel” is a constant struggle, probably one I’ll never actually reconcile. I love to eat, to experiment in the kitchen, to try all kinds of things, and to try every new restaurant that opens in Miami. Our investment into Ariete Hospitality, along with lots of international travel, lends itself to all kind of eating, not just the healthy kind. And of course, wine.

‘24 was the beginning of a recalibration as I’m starting to be more affected by the food I eat. My energy levels, my mood, my behavior - all are dramatically influenced by my last meal. This got progressively worse over the holidays, to the point where I ballooned back to my starting weight from 2 years ago. Disappointed doesn’t even scratch the surface.

Here’s to starting the new year with a focus on food as fuel, but also as enjoyment. In moderation, as with all things.

Looking Forward: 2025 Hypotheses

Rather than traditional resolutions, I'm treating 2025 as a series of experiments:

1. Testing if my experiences can scale (podcast launch, minimum 10 episodes)

2. Health = focused and progress. (95% compliance on habit tracking, add one habit)

3. Geographic arbitrage (5 major trips)

4. Breaking hardwired habits (nail-biting, drinking limits)

The Meta View

So, what’s worth doing?

Three years post-exit has taught me something about success that's hard to see when you're in growth mode: the most valuable things you'll build won't have cap tables. They'll have birthday cakes, graduations, and flower girl dresses.

The metrics that matter now are different. Instead of ARR and customer satisfaction scores, I'm measuring moments of presence, instances of impact, and depths of connection. These don't show up on a balance sheet, but they compound in ways that money never will.

Here's the question I'm sitting with now: What if the best way to find what's next isn't to search for it, but to build it slowly, intentionally, one unsexy decision at a time?

Let’s Grow.

IM

PS - Something that’s given me great joy in 2024 and beyond is my weekend tradition of searching for South Florida’s best croissant with my kids. It’s one of our solo moments when mom gets a break, and I get unfiltered quality time with my favorite two rugrats.

Here are our top 4:

1. Casa Bake - epic flakey, artisanal croissants. Little chocolate works of art. Line starts around 7am, get there early AM, they sell out every weekend.

2. Madruga Bakery - South Miami local spot, excellent coffee and the staff is super nice to the kids. Kids love the monkey bread.

3. Flour & Weirdoughs - when you trek to the Key, stop by this place for cinnamon buns and cacio pepe bread.

4. Delices de France - Still our family favorite, in Palmetto Bay. Feels like Paris street corner bakery croissants. The real deal.