Phil’s blog

It’s 6am and food poisoning and a mosquito in my room are conspiring to keep me from sleep. Someone once told me to never eat raw vegetables in China, so I guess I should be especially wary of the huge 6 yuan (almost $1) salads from the small restaurant in the basement of the building where I work. But it’s such a good value! Anyway things have been quite busy lately, working ’til 10 or later most nights. We’re approaching a major milestone and I’m feeling good about it. I don’t go out as much lately (other than to eat), not due to work but because I just feel like staying in most of the time. When I have a chunk of time I’ll usually watch a movie, play GTA IV or Rock Band, or reply to non-work emails (which I’ve been horribly delinquent on). I haven’t been to the east side of Beijing for a couple of weeks now. Oh, and I’ve been getting facials at Beauty Farm every couple of weeks. I first tried it last month when my gf invited me to go with her and get a massage while she got her facial, but I opted for a facial too and it made my skin noticeably better so now I’m hooked. They also shape my eyebrows with a razor, very metro. No recent pics but I will probably take a bunch next weekend when I go to Shanghai, and post a couple if I’m not too lazy.

The 3 of you who occasionally look at this blog may have noticed that I’ve changed to a rather minimalist layout. I was inspired by tumblr and set out to find a way to give my blog a similar look, and this is what I came up with. I figured the old layout with all its functionality made me feel obligated to write more substantial posts, while the minimalist tumblr style encourages brevity, so the result would be that I’d do shorter but more frequent posts. We’ll see what happens.

The company is doing well and we took our first trip together which you can see photos of in my last post. Our funding situation is good and the development is speeding up. Our public launch isn’t too far away now.

I’ve been lifting at the gym regularly for the past month or so, about 3 times a week. I’m definitely stronger than I’ve ever been, but have neglected cardio. My natural state is to be rather skinny so when workouts are limited I always opt for lifting because I want to gain weight, not lose it. Ideally I’d alternate between cardio and lifting but it would cut too much into my limited social life.

Actually socially things are pretty good; I go out about 3 nights a week and spend at least one day doing something fun or relaxing on the weekend. Lately I’ve spent a fair amount of time at Houhai, a lake surrounded by bars and restaurants. It’s rather touristy but there are a few good places to eat/drink/chat, and it’s really nice to walk by the water at night.

My Mandarin these days is not so good. The money we paid a few months ago for classes finally ran out and I didn’t buy more because all we did was go through the book or talk freely, both of which I can do with friends for free and on my own time. Actually my character recognition is holding steady or even improving because I chat with people on IM in Chinese every day. Yesterday I even tried chatting with a few of my coworkers in a QQ chat room they set up, but they were typing way too quickly for me to translate so I only picked out the lines that had “phil” in them. My speaking and listening are definitely worse because people usually don’t understand me the first time and vice versa. The real value of this Chinese class is that it forced me to practice speaking regularly, just a discipline thing. I hate getting up early for class so I’ll try to come up with another way to practice…

I first landed in Beijing on June 19, 2007. It has been a good year. The most important thing for me was to do something I love, and though the course hasn’t always been smooth, I can honestly say that I love what I’m doing. I’m quite happy with the people I work with and the product we’re building, and I’m learning lessons that only a startup can teach. I’ve also learned a lot about myself and feel a little wiser than I was a year ago, with a bit better perspective. I think I’m getting closer to where I want to be. Thanks for a great year, Beijing.

I think there’s a time window after I write each blog post where the activation energy to write the next post is low enough that I’ll actually do it. If I don’t write anything before the window closes, I go into another phase where I won’t write again for a long time. I think it’s because too much has happened for me to want to write about, or I’m dreading explaining why I haven’t written anything for a while to the two or three people who read this blog (hi mom and dad), or both. Then there’s a tipping point at about three months where I finally work up the motivation to write something. This has happened twice before, and tonight it’s three months to the day since my last post. At least I’m predictable. So below are the major things that have happened since November that I’m willing to share with the general internet-viewing public. Actually, I think my flickr sets page is a much better chronicle of my life than this blog ever was.

New Office

Last October we got into an incubator at Tsinghua Science Park. An incubator is basically where a group of investors give you subsidized office space and access to resources either for a share of your company or the opportunity to invest. What it means for us is that we have a pretty nice office for very reasonable rent in a building full of startups in the heart of what’s called “the Silicon Valley of China.” Just down the street are Google, Microsoft, Sun, and a bunch of other tech companies. It’s a hot area because it’s close to the two top schools in China, Tsinghua and PKU. Many students stay on campus during the summer and if you’re just down the street they’ll be more likely to accept internships at your company and eventually take a full time job after graduating. Many students also do internships during the school year, either because they’ve finished and are just waiting to graduate (like one of our engineers), they’re almost done with their grad research and have plenty of time, or they’re machines and can get through 16 hours of study and work every day. Anyway the new office is totally sweet and beats working at the old apartment hands down. It feels more like a real company this way, and the division between work and home is good (as much as I enjoyed the old one-second commute from my bed to my desk). We have 10 nice desks, a few cheap tables currently used for extra computers and junk, a conference room with a white board and projector, and a private office for Clement because he’s always doing meetings and calls. It’s on the 11th floor so there’s a decent view out across Haidian, at least when the air is clear. There’s a cafeteria in the basement where you can get a lot of food a la carte style for cheap (I average about 11 RMB per meal which is $1.50 USD). At first it seemed decent but now I think we don’t have as much tolerance for it; it’s really salty and greasy and there isn’t much meat (though I seem to be the only one who complains about the latter). So we’ve been going out to eat a lot lately, most often to a restaurant across the street where you can feed a group of people for about 10-15 RMB per person and it tastes way better.

More photos of the new office

New Apartment

The new office is in Haidian district which is in the northwest of Beijing, while our old apartment was in Chaoyang which is on the east side. Beijing is a big city so that ends up being an hour and a half commute. Keen and I still had a month left on both our lease in Chaoyang and our memberships at the nearby gym, but the commute was too much so shortly after we started working at the new office we moved to an apartment near it. Living here is awesome. The apartment itself is nothing special; 2 bedrooms (actually mine seems to be an office but no matter), kitchen, living room, tiny refrigerator room, and split bathroom with the shower and toilet in one room and the sink and medicine cabinet outside. It has crappy wall-mounted radiators for heat. Oh yeah, it got really cold here. On the plus side the radiators are nice for drying laundry on because they never get that hot so there’s no fear of burning anything. Side node, after I do laundry I hang it on every corner, handle, door, or other feature in my room that will support a piece of clothing. It’s kind of funny to walk in and see 10 pairs of boxers on various pieces of furniture throughout my room. Anyway the great thing about living here is that it’s a 10 minute walk to work, 5 minutes to my gym and the supermarket, 2 minutes from our language school, 5 minutes to Wudaokou subway station, and 2-5 minutes from a large number of restaurants. There’s a McDonalds 2 minutes away that I’ve been to more times than I’m happy about. During the work week we have everything we need in a very small area so we get by just walking. Going out for fun is less convenient because fun is generally more central or on the east side of the city. We used to ride the subway more but have gotten lazy and now often just shell out for a taxi; about 60 RMB ($8 and change) is enough to go most places.

More photos of the new apartment

Learning Mandarin

After moving to Haidian, Keen and I finally started Mandarin lessons. We have class Monday-Friday from 8-9:30am. It’s just the two of us and our teacher whose name is Fei Lu. Her English is pretty good. She teaches from workbooks and adds some extra material, pretty standard. Actually the workbook exercises are lame. I think what helps me the most is just having improvised conversations with her. We recently started learning how to write characters and it’s starting to come back to me from my one Chinese class at UVA. Fei Lu is on vacation now visiting her hometown of Harbin, but we’ll start class again next week. I think I’ve passed a critical point where now if I have a dictionary I can express a lot of things. I can probably continue to learn just by speaking, reading, and writing Chinese (which I now do every day anyway), but I’ll at least continue with the class until we’ve gone through all the hours we’ve paid for.

My schedule has stabilized these past few weeks and I’m pretty happy with it. My Monday-Saturday routine goes something like this:

• 7:50 - Wake up
• 8:00 - Go to the gym
  • 15 minutes of qigong
  • 15 minutes of stretching
  • v-situps, wushu style
  • 40 minutes of either lifting or swimming, alternating each day
• 9:30 - Return to the apartment, eat a bowl of oatmeal, and start work
• 12:30 - Lunch. We used to order delivery from a nearby restaurant but this week we started hiring a cook to come to our apartment to prepare meals. It’s a bit more expensive than ordering from the restaurant but it’s also less salty and greasy and there’s more variety of ingredients, so for me it’s totally worthwhile. After lunch it’s back to work.
• 7-8ish - Dinner. We usually eat at a nearby restaurant, sometimes order, and sometimes I cook. I’d like to just eat leftovers from lunch if possible but I’m not sure if we can ask the cook to prepare that much food.
• 10ish - Mandarin lesson. Keen and I have an agreement to do a 30 minute Pimsleur lesson every night, but so far we’ve only had about a 50% success rate. With each missed night we throw 10 RMB into a pot. Maybe we need to raise the stakes.
• 11ish - Chat with Justine, do personal email, catch up on news and blogs.
• 12-1ish - Sleep.

On Sundays we try to get out but sometimes work straight through if there’s a close deadline or if someone is visiting for work. So there’s a lot of work going on but I really don’t mind it, in fact I look forward to starting work every day. This is why I’m here!

I arrived in Beijing almost 3 weeks ago on June 19th, so this update is long overdue! For context, I moved out here to work on a startup with my friend Clement from UVA. For the first week, my friend and soon to be coworker Keen (also from UVA) was also visiting, so we spent most of the time taking care of things like apartment, insurance, cell phone, and generally scoping out the area with Clement and his girlfriend XinXin as our hosts. Keen only spent a week here but will move here for real around the middle of July. For my second week, we started working at an office we shared with Clement’s friend Felix’s company, and my evenings were spent settling into my new apartment and visiting the internet cafe. My third week has been more routine; we moved our office into my apartment to avoid the hour long commute, have been working out roughly every other day at a gym that’s about a 2 minute walk door to door, and go out for dinner a few times a week. I spend most of the evenings chatting with Justine and catching up on emails and blogs and everything I neglected while I didn’t have consistent internet access. There’s a lot to cover about my experience here thus far, so I’ll just put down my general and miscellaneous thoughts here and write about major things in other posts for easier reading.

The first thing I noticed walking out of the airport was the amount of smog. Some days it’s better than others, but even on the best days, visibility is worse than in any place I’ve ever been. I heard that the government will try to reduce pollution in time for the “green” olympics, but that’ll be pretty tough because apparently a lot of it blows in from outside the city.

The second thing I noticed riding to Clement’s place from the airport was that drivers are very aggressive by US standards, especially taxi drivers. The rule seems to be that if 1) there’s space in front of you wide enough for your car and 2) any cars about to fully or partially occupy that space have enough time to stop or slow down, go for it. It seems really dangerous but I’m told there are relatively few traffic deaths here, at least in the city, because you can never drive that fast since there are so many cars. Even the bicyclists are bold; nobody wears a helmet and people don’t hesitate to ride alongside cars and across intersections when they don’t have the signal to go.

There’s construction everywhere, mostly offices and apartment buildings. This means a lot of migrant workers are in the city, sleeping in ramshackle huts and even under bridges. I felt bad for them initially but a friend told me that people jump at the opportunity to do these construction jobs because they get paid far more than in the villages they come from. When they return home where the cost of living is even lower, they can live pretty well. They may not have amenities like internet and flush toilets, but I can see how a simple life could be pretty good too.

People like to sit around outside and chat or play card games and the like - in parks, on sidewalks and bridges, in front of stores, and especially in front of residences in the poor areas. Clement suspects it’s because their homes are so small, the outside is like their living room. It’s neat that these people probably see each other every day and are perhaps like extended families.

The quality of things ranging from mass produced goods to buildings is generally lower here than in the US. We’ve all heard about the toxic toothpaste and pet food, and probably numerous other cases like excessive levels of cancer-causing preservatives. The drive to produce things cheaply leads to cutting corners, substituting cheaper materials, and a lack of quality control. I saw this first hand in Clement’s building, where some of the wall surfaces are stripped away to reveal large cracks in the concrete. In one place there’s a hole about the size of a large loaf of bread that looks like it was filled in with some kind of Styrofoam spray.

People pay for almost everything in cash because there’s no credit system here, and no checks either. I felt like a gangster or something when I went to the bank to withdraw money to pay 6 months’ rent; I left with 50,000 RMB - more currency than I’ve ever handled in my life. Clement said he once saw a guy use two giant sackfuls of cash to pay off his condo, which a group of property management staff then spent hours counting.

Unlike in Japan, very few people speak English here. I get by through a combination of scattered Chinese words, gestures, drawings, pre-written addresses for taxi drivers, and when all else fails, a call to Clement so he can translate for me.

Possibly my favorite thing about China is that the food is incredibly cheap, both at restaurants and in grocery stores. I’ll write more about this later, but to give you an idea, I now consider $5 US to be pricey for a meal :]

That’s all I have the energy to write for now, but I hope to soon post about friends, living arrangements, food, shows, and maybe even work. Hope everyone is well back home!

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.

While I was at work on Valentine’s Day, Justine spent the whole day decorating my room with flowers, streamers, balloons, chocolates, candles, doilies, and shiny heart confetti. I had no idea, so when I came home and opened the door to my room, I was totally floored. Almost every surface of my room was decorated in some way. It looks way more lively now and I’m still enjoying it. She also hid 12 easter eggs with candy and coupons in them, the latter being for massages and such. Wow. Thank you, Teeny! More photos.

It’s time for another massive update; I haven’t posted for the past month because I was having too much fun with Justine :] She flew back to VA on Friday so I’ve had time to upload all the photos and recount the notable things:

• Took multiple trips to Maru Ichi. I think udon is edging out ramen as my favorite noodle again. We also tried Ramen House Ryowa but didn’t like it as much.
• Went to a public safety job fair and talked to reps from the FBI, Palo Alto police, private investigators, and a security guard contractor. From talking to the PIs, it seems their #1 type of case is worker’s comp fraud, possibly followed by cheating spouses. Justine wasn’t too excited about that, nor was she thrilled with the rent-a-guard company. The FBI dude told us pretty much what we already knew, but the Palo Alto PD rep was interesting. It sounds like a sweet job; $70k starting salary, mad benefits, and very little danger given the crime rate in Palo Alto. It sounded like a reasonable first step for Justine but the next academy semester doesn’t start until summer.
• Made the best homemade sushi ever. We used tuna, salmon, shiitake mushrooms, cucumber, avocado, and flying fish roe.
  
  
• Watched every episode of The Office. Justine had shown me one before and I wasn’t super impressed but we watched a few more from her season 2 DVDs and I was hooked. Downloaded and watched seasons 1 and 3 up to the current episode. Thank you Bittorrent.
• Received a visit from Miss Kitty, the neighborhood cat.
  
  
• Made multiple trips to Totoro. Two favorite dishes: soon dubu (tofu stew) and bi bim bop (grilled beef and veggies over rice).
• Had dinner at Xanh in downtown Mountain View with my friend Kathy and her husband Peter. Delicious, great decor and food presentation, but expensive. We shared an Asian pear salad, crab and quail egg soup, garlic noodles, cubed beef tenderloin, and shrimp puffs.
• Laid my motorcycle down going too fast into an easy turn, leaning and braking and causing it to slide out. Luckily damage was minimal both to the bike and myself. The left turn signal broke, the handle bar end got scraped, and I got a little scrape on my knee. Pretty amazing because the bike left a couple of long gashes in the asphalt. I was able to pick it back up pretty easily and rode it home. Haven’t not taken it out since; need to get it checked out at the local shop. I’m actually kind of relieved to have gone through my first bike accident. I guess it’s like getting hit for the first time; you think it’ll be awful but it ends up not being so bad. Actually I’ve never been in a real fight outside of sparring. Hope that day never comes.
• Went to Tahoe! More about this in my next post.
• Had a nice dinner with Justine’s aunt Amy, cousin Douglas, and his wife Mimi at Lotus Garden in Milbrae. Doug was excited about the prospect of Justine moving to the Bay Area. On the way to Doug and Mimi’s place we almost had an accident; one car stopped suddenly and completely in the middle of the 101 and the car behind it swerved first left to avoid it, then back right, presumably to avoid more cars. It ended up passing right in front of us, perpendicular to the lane, and off the road. I had started braking immediately upon hearing tires squeal and seeing the stopped car, and luckily we just missed the tail end of the swerving car as we passed. Scary.
• Played laser tag for the first time at Laser Quest in Mountain View. Justine had played before and gave me some tips, but I still got destroyed by a bunch of high school kids. It was kind of embarrassing but I had a good time. Justine is really good and got 4th place out of about 15 people both times we played. I think my problem is that my accuracy is horrible, so in a shootout on equal terms with no cover, the other person will usually win. Guess I need to practice..
• Made a chocolate cake and only succeeded in eating half of it while Justine was here. It was delicious though and we had fun baking and making a huge mess.
  
  
• Got Lego Star Wars II for the 360. I’m not a huge Star Wars fan but this game is cute, clever, and funny, and best of all, Justine loves it and is always up for playing. She even played it while I was at work!
• Made our own soon dubu and bi bim bop. They turned out pretty well, especially the tofu!
  
  
• Was surprised by Justine on Valentine’s Day More about this in a later post.

It has been a great weekend. My friend Clement, whom I haven’t seen in over a year, came to visit. We went to UVA and worked on a couple of projects together, and he recruited me to intern at Microsoft in 2005. He’s now working at the MS office in Beijing, but has been in Redmond for the past couple of months, so it was a good time for him to make a trip down to Cali.

Highlights from the weekend:

• Dinner at Hyderabad House in Palo Alto with Clement’s friend Robbie whom I met while he was interning at Google this past summer
• Lunch at Brothers Korean Restaurant in SF with Clement’s friend Helen, who stayed and hung out with us the rest of the weekend. The food was amazing; they used wood charcoal in the table grill and brought more little side dishes than I’ve ever seen at a Korean meal. They also gave us a free dish of chap chae, perhaps because we ordered so much.
• Walking around Fisherman’s Wharf, checking out Ripley’s Believe it or Not, and getting clam chowder in a sourdough bowl.
  
• Seeing Blood Diamond at the Metreon. Great movie, and very cool that it is doing some social good in educating the public about conflict diamonds.
• Lunch at King of Krung Siam in Mountain View with Clement’s friend Shan and his girlfriend. We ordered several dishes but the only standouts were the seafood salad and the calamari.
• Hanging out and shopping at Santana Row. We went to the lounge at Sino which has nice decor but the lychee sangria isn’t so good.
  
• Dinner at Maruichi, my favorite noodle place outside of Japan. I learned that they have ramen in a spicy miso broth that isn’t on the menu. It was delicious!
  
• A great discussion with Clement, Robbie, and Helen about a startup idea Clement is trying to recruit me on. It brought back memories of the old days at UVA when Clement and I worked on a couple of ideas together. Fun times!
• Geocaching with friends from Google. We attempted and found: Google Falls, Octal Fair, Element #2, and Lone Pine Overlook. 4/4 is pretty amazing, but we did have seven people. Great times were had.