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.