2025 Annual Letter
Broadly speaking, I tend to reflect on my year in three buckets: a) operating performance of MBI Deep Dives, b) performance of my personal portfolio, and c) my personal health as well as relationships with my friends and family.
For the second consecutive year, MBI Deep Dives has been in a really solid trajectory. Gross revenue and ARR were up +55% and +25% respectively in 2025. For context, Gross revenue and ARR increased by +33% and +70% respectively in 2024. While for first half of the year ARR growth threatened to be anemic, that quickly changed when I shifted from posting monthly to daily from July 2025. In hindsight, that was perhaps the most important change I have ever made since starting MBI Deep Dives in September 2020. Given that context, let me share three key learnings from this experience.
One of my interesting realizations is format doesn’t travel across platforms well. When I announced to shift to posting daily, I basically thought I would mostly continue what I was already doing for my WhatsApp group i.e. sharing excerpts from interesting pieces that I came across on that day. However, once I started posting the content on my website and not confine it within WhatsApp’s walled garden, I felt compelled to evolve the format a bit. The “Daily Dose” nowadays is mostly an eclectic mix of what I have been thinking within my coverage companies and weaving that with what I have been reading. This directly leads to my second key takeaway.
One of the striking realizations I had was if I imagined “Daily Doses” exactly what it has eventually become, I would be far more hesitant to launch it because I would be much more concerned thinking I would not be able to pull it off. Thankfully, I underestimated what it would take to do it on a daily basis, and once it was launched, I could iterate it a bit based on your feedback and listening to my own gut more closely. While many seem to wonder about burnout given such high frequency of output, I found it quite energizing to stay deeply intellectually engaged on a daily basis. This is, of course, perhaps not a good fit for everyone, but I suspect for certain type of individuals who tend to consume copious amount of content everyday and want to organize their own thoughts in a careful, focused way, publishing daily can be a terrific fit. While some readers may argue about the pitfalls of “too much content”, the reality is I have no qualms whatsoever that MBI Deep Dives today is more valuable for the readers than it has ever been since its inception which leads to my final key realization after moving to daily cadence.
While not the only focus, tech companies do receive a lion’s share of attention in my coverage. Although companies such as Brown & Brown and Sherwin Williams may not need quarterly or even annual updates, most tech companies operate in a much more dynamic environment. As a result, a Deep Dive on any particular point of time suffers the risk of obsolescence far faster than my coverage on some non-tech companies. This can be only addressed in a much higher frequency format. Moreover, Deep Dives and Daily Doses are incredibly complementary in nature. It’s lot easier for me to write Daily Doses on companies that I already did a Deep Dive before. For example, it would be lot harder for me to do some of my recent Veeva updates (see here, and here) if I didn’t already publish the Deep Dive a year ago.
Overall, the business is in a strong foundation today. I do feel the need to do some updates on companies that I did a few years back (e.g. Uber, Copart etc.). I am still thinking through whether to lower the number of new Deep Dives in 2026 to spend more time in updating some of the coverage I did few years ago. I haven’t made up my mind yet, but I will keep you posted when/if I do.
On personal health front, I did something that I am really proud of this year. Given MBI Deep Dives suffers from “key man” risk, I want to prioritize my health and want to give myself the best chance to operate this business as long as physically and mentally possible. Just a month before I launched Daily Doses, I started walking at least 10,000 steps everyday. I have maintained that consistency every month in the last seven months! Admittedly, I have been surprised how energized I feel just by walking everyday. I actually wonder if I didn’t take this habit almost out of a whim, I would have a lot harder time with the daily publishing cadence. Slacking or procrastinating is simply not an option in my “job” nowadays, and a general consistency and rhythm almost feels essential to execute my work everyday. I have lost ~20 pounds during the last seven months, and physically haven’t felt better in a long, long time. I didn’t start walking with any particular goal in mind. I just wanted to keep moving everyday and it has been personally transformative for me.
Yes, I have essentially become this meme 😂
On family front, I will keep it short since I already reflected on my experience of one year of parenting. We celebrated Nile’s first birthday over the holidays. If I pick two words to encapsulate my family life in the last twelve months, I will go for "unbridled joy"!
Let me look back at my portfolio’s performance now!