A Report on the 2025 Fiscal Year

For My Shareholders

Dec 23, 2025

Dear shareholders,

I’m starting this letter on a plane to Calgary, where I’ll be spending the holidays. My first hour of flight has largely consisted of a boy in the seat behind me punching the screen of his in-flight TV, causing my head to bounce against the headrest around 150 BPM. I was hoping to stare out the window and feel ennui before embarking on this reflection, but as the report will outline, 2025 was the year of yielding to higher powers. Perhaps the rhythm with which the boy is shooting down spaceships, or doing virtual backflips, will filter through to these sentences.

As we close the books on another fiscal year, I remain deeply indebted to you, the hundreds of investors (readers) who continue holding and promoting stock in a chronically unprofitable venture. Having long abandoned traditional means of increasing shareholder value, and despite the continued absence of strategic windfalls (see Table 1), morale at welktober HQ, where innovation trumps valuation, remains high.

*Table 1: KPIs in key growth verticals, 2025*

The highlight of 2025, as you know, was the submission of our product team’s first patent in Q3, titled Ninety-Minute Walk with 222 ml Diet Coke Poured into Icy Thermos and Nothing in Pockets™. This innovation visited welktober HQ on a sultry early-summer night when we combined two known icons—a crisp Diet Coke, a long stroll—with a zesty third: keeping your wallet, phone, and keys (leave that front door unlocked, baby) at home and allowing the sights & sounds of the city to take you. As welktober’s combined product manager and target demographic, I was obliged to test this invention thirty-plus times through the summer to ensure product-market-fit, and can thus guarantee two favourable outcomes from regular use:

Seances, holy interventions, etc. While walking on a quiet, residential street after 10pm, a half-smoked lit cigarette sailed from the heavens in a streak of scarlet and smacked the sidewalk, fizzling out by my exposed pinky toe. I scanned the street for signs of human life, for a balcony to launch a cigarette from: nothing overhead; the street was deserted. I was charmed to learn that God prefers a cheeky cigarette over vapes and nicotine pouches; something tells me she would enjoy rounding out this vice with a Ninety-Minute Walk with 222 ml Diet Coke Poured into Icy Thermos and Nothing in Pockets™.
Breakthroughs in mind-body connection. Strolling past a baseball diamond on a rainy evening, I encountered a baby blue plastic bowling pin, perhaps a kids toy, sitting on the bleachers, and was met with a ferocious urge to smack the pin as hard as I could with my umbrella, a home run kind of swing that would send it flying into the fence which enclosed the diamond. It was standing there so plump and upright and available. But I didn’t do it. The act felt violent and invasive, especially with children nearby innocently kicking a ball in the grass. I tormented myself, for the rest of the walk, over abandoning that carnal impulse. The bowling pin later haunted my thoughts while I tried to read in bed. After much rumination, I stepped back into the night and returned to the baseball diamond to find the pin waiting, erect as ever. I wound up my umbrella and smacked it hard. The stiff metal made a satisfying thud against hollow plastic, and the pin twirled slow-mo through the humid night before hitting the fence and falling to the ground in an anti-climactic, but nonetheless worthwhile, conclusion.

I must confess to one extended instance of corporate wrongdoing in 2025. Halfway through Q1, welktober acquired its 69th investor (reader). On that particularly bleak February, as several feet of snow pounded Toronto, checking and re-checking that glorious number on Substack dot com was equivalent to swallowing a pill that made the dreary nights feel cozy and communal, as if all sixty-nine of you were present in my candle-lit room while I combed the folds of my brain for precious gems. It took no time at all to become addicted to the pills. For the rest of Q1 and Q2 I was self-medicating on the hamster wheel, hallucinating my newsletter to be not what it was—a csv list of email addresses to which I send sweet nothings—but a “channel” for “content” with a “schedule” and a “niche”. You, the reader, likely invested during this period, since it caused my subscriber count to multiply several times over.

Thankfully, the drug instigated a visit from a holy man, and subsequent ego death, one Friday morning in early Q3, on my commute to the Toronto Reference Library. My brain, still strung out from the previous night’s letter, was perturbed by the serenity of the streetcar. You’ll never find it more subdued, yet teeming with potential, than when heading east towards the financial district around 7am on a Friday. I searched the busy car for anyone who could hear the silence, but each commuter was still in bed, spiritually, with headphones in, or screens an inch from their eyeballs, and thousand-yard stares. Just as I made to whip out my device to join the ranks—and check my newsletter stats, no doubt—my eyes fell upon those of an older gentleman with nothing attached to his hands, ears, or eyes, who was watching me intently, who perhaps had been doing so for minutes, or months. We held each other’s gazes as we listened to the hum of awakening bodies. In that privately shared, publicly held moment, this man became welktober’s combined board of director and CEO. I have not checked my Substack dot com dashboard since his intervention. Subscriber growth has grinded to a peaceful halt, and was perhaps even net negative in Q4. I am thankful to have recognized, with the guidance of a wise man, how insidiously an algorithm can get its dumb, greedy fingers into an act I (naïvely) thought incorruptible.

In repentance for this brief loss of principles, I revisited welktober’s corporate manifesto in early Q4 2025, just as the weather cooled, printed the document, and included it as kindling in my inaugural fireplace of the winter season while spinning Who’s Zoomin’ Who? on vinyl, reading a printed-out essay a writer friend had courageously and vulnerably sent me, and deleting my Goodreads account, for good measure.

As enlightened shareholders, I’m sure you’ll agree that the fiscal year was an overwhelming success despite the few mentioned setbacks, and will, accordingly, send this report to your spiritually affluent peers to invest for 2026.

Sincerely,

Rishi