Phil’s blog

In 3 weeks I’m moving to Beijing to start a company with 2 friends from UVA. Crazy? Just a little, but it’s an opportunity I couldn’t pass up. Reasons against: leaving a good job and a comfortable life, being away from Justine who had just moved in with me from across the country, and the risk inherent in startups. Reasons for: the chance to pour myself into something I believe in that’s incredibly challenging and find out once more what I’m capable of. I say once more because I’ve experienced this once before.

When I was a junior in high school, two of my best friends and I entered a contest called ThinkQuest in which teams of students create educational websites in competition for a scholarship. Our site is called The Artificial Intelligence Resource. It teaches AI by illustration through the LISP programming language. I wrote a LISP interpreter (a program that runs programs written in LISP) in Java so it could be embedded directly into our lesson pages, and created a content system where people could sign up for an account, log in, and submit LISP programs that other people could run, tinker with, and learn from through the site. My friends wrote all the content and created demo programs, some of which were pretty cool (e.g., graphical Frogger against a computer opponent). Anyway, what amazes me to this day is that we were in 11th grade, we had just learned LISP from an AI class at school, and I had only rudimentary knowledge of Java and almost no knowledge of Perl before we started. In retrospect, I wish I had known what a database was as it would have made account management much easier. But despite our lack of experience and knowledge, for 6 weeks that summer we poured our minds into it and built this thing. Long story short though, we only got an honorable mention because the interpreter didn’t work on the judges’ computers; they were using Netscape with Sun’s Java plugin, but I had only tested in IE which at the time used Microsoft’s own JVM. Tough lesson, but the experience was priceless.

Fast forward to 2007 and I have not been so passionate about anything since. I’ve worked on some interesting problems and have done ok, but the conditions were never quite right. But this opportunity makes me feel like I did that summer of my junior year. It has all the ingredients: an idea I believe in, a capable team that I have great chemistry with, an enormous and interesting challenge, a feeling of ownership, and tremendous experience to be gained whether or not the business is a success.

Career reasons aside, it was still a very difficult decision because it means I’ll be away from Justine. The timing is especially bad because I made the decision just as she was moving in with me from Virginia. She graduated last year and had been staying with her parents doing occasional temp work while deciding how to start her career - which depended on where she would be living. She finally decided to move here a couple of months ago - just before I decided to leave. Now she’s back in VA starting the career search over again. I feel pretty bad about it, but Justine has been understanding. It’ll be hard being across the planet from her, but the plan is for me to return in about a year to set up shop in the US if we’re successful (of course if the startup fizzles I could be back much sooner than that).

Friends in VA, I’ll be back in town June 14th and will fly to Beijing on the 18th - hope to see many of you.

It’s been 3 months since I’ve posted and much has changed. I’ll write about the changes soon, but first some highlights since my last post:

• Went to the 25th annual Santa Cruz clam chowder cook off
• Went on a seven mile hike at Crystal Springs reservoir. I know it isn’t far enough to be notable by hiking standards, but for a non-hiker like me it’s plenty.
• Went to the CMAT wushu competition at Berkeley. Justine competed in nanquan (southern fist) and rocked it per usual. This was the first time I didn’t compete, my excuse being that I’m too busy to train. It was nice to see my former teammates from UVA and Justine’s friends from her wushu school back in VA. The event went way overtime as expected, and we all went out for food and bubble tea afterwards as is tradition. The after party was ok, the highlight being when Syl taught me some dance moves which I probably looked ridiculous executing but had fun nonetheless.
  
  
• Had a picnic on the hills between Google and Shoreline. We feasted on banh mi, Thai iced tea, and beautiful views while struggling for warmth in a small blanket because it was a bit breezier than we had anticipated.
  
  
• Practiced wushu at O-Mei. We went about twice a week and were starting to get back into the groove, but didn’t renew our membership this month because of my change in plans which I’ll write about in the next post. We once trained at Eagle Park (near downtown Mountain View) which was actually really nice until the sprinklers got us.
• Finally installed flush-mount turn signals on my motorcycle. I was all proud of myself but then all of them (even the rear ones which I didn’t replace) stopped working at some point during my first ride. Need to take care of that soon.
• Set up an easter egg hunt for Justine. I only had 12 easter eggs but I also hid tons of stray candy all over the apartment. Amazingly, Justine found every piece (that I’m aware of) except one which was pretty far under the bed.
• Golden Gate Park, specifically, the Japanese Tea Garden, the AIDS Memorial Grove, and the Conservatory of Flowers.
  
  
  
  
• Went to the Gel Conference in NYC. Not your typical industry conference, but rather a series of workshops and speakers covering various topics, the unifying theme being the creation of good experiences (Gel stands for Good Experience Live). I attended two workshops, one about juggling and the other about building MIDI instruments out of junk. Both were pretty interesting and I can now juggle 3 beanbags for a about 5 seconds before losing control. The speakers were also pretty good, and among the more interesting were Danny Meyer, owner of several popular NY restaurants, and Andrew, creator of songstowearpantsto.com. Also got to hang out with some old buddies from middle school, high school, and college - bonus!
  
  
• Spent a weekend in the Seattle area to work out business plans - more on this in the next post.
• Hanging out with my dad in San Francisco.
  
  
• Watched the entire Man vs. Wild and Planet Earth series.
• Watched Spiderman 3, Stranger Than Fiction (surprisingly good!), The Terminal, As Good as It Gets, Cave of the Yellow Dog, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Alien, and Inside Man.
• Cooked a lot and tried some new dishes including mango chicken salad (kind of made this one up), red bean soup (a simple dessert), congee (incredibly delicious yet so simple), and a soup with sausage and veggies that I added way too much cayenne pepper to but was still good.
• Got Justine to play video games with me! Actually got her hooked on Lego Star Wars 2 (which we played through in co-op mode) and The Sims 2 (which occupied many of our evenings). We also played Lego Star Wars 1 and X-Men Alliance, but these weren’t as fun.
• Went to a bunch of restaurants:
  • Palace Bar-B-Que Buffet - Korean BBQ place in Sunnyvale, good but we couldn’t eat enough to make it worth the money
  • Gochi - Japanese fusion tapas, crispy rice pot was incredible
  • Long Life Noodle Company - noodle place in Palo Alto, not that good
  • So Dong Gong Tofu House - Korean place in Santa Clara and Palo Alto (we went to both), outstanding bibimbop but I actually prefer Totoro’s tofu stew
  • Cafe Yulong - Chinese place off Castro, great calamari
  • Queen’s House - Chinese place on Castro, not bad but not super memorable
  • Katz Deli - deli in NYC specializing in giant meat sandwiches. The meat to bread ratio was ridiculous and I wasn’t able to finish. Very tasty though, and the pickles were great.
  • Shake Shack - burger joint at Madison Square Park in NYC, best I’ve ever had
  • Vung Tau - solid Vietnamese place in San Jose
  • Miette Patisserie - French bakery in SF serving up heart-stopping treats
  • Katana-Ya - ramen place in SF, pretty good but not better than Maru Ichi
  • 99 Chicken - Korean fried chicken? Delicious! And the owners are so friendly and cute.
  • I Love Sushi - sushi place in Bellevue, very tasty and nicely presented
  • El Calderon - El Salvadoran place in Mountain View, delicious and seems authentic
  • Afghani House - in Sunnyvale, the lamb was outstanding
  • Gooyi Gooyi - Korean BBQ place in Santa Clara. Was quite good, and at one point a girl and a person dressed as a giant soju bottle came in and started advertising the product to the Korean patrons. The soju bottle was dancing around the whole time - it was pretty awesome.
  • Breaktime Desserts - Asian dessert place in Cupertino, very large and interesting selection, and very tasty
  • Okane Sushi - in San Bruno, nothing to write home about