2023 in Review and 2024 goals

First post - A reflection

Welcome to the first post of my email newsletter. I will be sending out weekly emails about tech, business, life, what I read and some other topics. Today we talk about my 2023 review, and plans for 2024.

Business

Financially, this has been one of the better years. My company (AcadBoost Technologies) diversified into business consulting and generative AI in 2022, which has paid off well. The EdTech business has done okay, despite a heavy decline in the EdTech industry in general.

This will be the ongoing theme for the coming years: Transitioning from an EdTech to a Tech company. I always saw AcadBoost dot come as a transitory business, and finally the levelling up to the next level is happening.

I have worked way less this year compared to 2022 as I setup many automations and softwares in place. This gave me a lot of free time to read and think more about my investments.

Investing

Investing has been amazing this year, my net worth increased the most from investing this year. I can see “compounding” happening in realtime.

I got lucky in a few stock pics and crypto which delivered insane gains (although I got burned in a few scam cryptos but that is part of the game).

I have changed my investing strategy to dividend investing in the last year, as that provides more cashflow (specially in the company portfolio).

I was told that dividend investing leads to lack luster growth, but funnily enough two of my best performing investments were dividend stocks.

I plan to invest more in dividend stocks in 2024, making the dividend stream itself a rather large income source. Most of these are PSU stocks, pretty safe with decent gains and solid dividends.

Reading

I read a lot this year, particularly in the second quarter of the year. Will make a separate detailed post on book reviews, but the books I liked the most were Deep Work, The Almanac of Naval Ravikant, Rework and The Intelligent Investor.

I didn’t read a lot in the earlier years, but I have restarted it as I have realised that there is an asymmetric return in reading - very little downside but the upside can be immense if you gain the right insight from the right book.

I plan to read a lot more in 2024, including some academic reading across discipline. More in another post about my reading.

Social Media

My YouTube channel has grown steadily to 338,000 subscribers (if you count all my channels it’s closer to 450,000). I have stopped posting anything except study related content as it helps with the sales of the EdTech business, but at some point I do plan to stop posting there. As my company grows out of its EdTech shell, the utility of the channel is reducing. I plan to quit making YouTube videos at some point, or maybe reduce the frequency to just stay relevant in that space.

I have recently started reposting on text based platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Ultimately, I want to grow a longer form blog/newsletter (the one you are reading!) This won’t have any monetary utility, more of an intellectual exercise/impact thing (I wanted to put the domain kalpitveerwal dot com to use).

I use my Instagram purely for personal posting, would like to keep at least one platform free from content maxxing.

I realised that I am not putting out anything for students who “graduate” from my JEE/study content. This text based audience & this newsletter will cater to that demand. These text based platforms have showed growth in my audience of late, and I will do more of it in the coming year.

Travel

I travelled in the first half of the year to Delhi, Ahmedabad and Mumbai. All three were for events (Josh Talks, guest speaker at DAIICT and IIT Bombay respectively). The events were enjoyable, met some college students and entrepreneur and had a fun time.

There were a few family trips as well to local places (road trips under 200 kms), which were fun and refreshing. 2022 and 2023 have been good for travel, although I don’t put too much emphasis on “travelling the world” - I prefer my trips for purpose rather than forcing them (which is why I didn’t accept any event invites in the latter part of the year, which was a bit more focused on work and reading).

Fitness

This year was great for fitness. I played a lot of football, and transitioned to cricket towards the end of the year. LOTS of cardio this year, some weight lifting and a good amount of fat loss. Never been in a better shape.

There are some more things I did this year - video games (favs were Witcher 3, RDR2, Skyrim, Max Payne), watched some cricket, some movies - but nothing worth emphasising too much.

Overall, this was a good and balanced year. Had some quality time by myself as well as with my family, achieved all the personal and professional goals I had set and then some.

Goals for 2024

Financial goals are pretty much the same - increasing income (I might start another tech business, probably not publicly/B2C), gaining a decent return on capital, and increasing my dividend income. 2024 will be big on the dividend income part as my corpus will have exits from crypto and some due rebalancing.

I would like to travel to 5 places next year, read 50 books, and do more weightlifting. I would love to grow my text-based social media and this newsletter. I have lost fat, next year will be about gaining more muscle. I will turn 25 in 2024, which is a big milestone for me. I have these 5 year goals for myself, and it is important to plan well for the next 5, while also enjoying the rest of my 20s.

Do let me know in the replies what your goals are and what your year has been like.

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See you next week!