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.

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.

http://www.ecitysky.com/blog/

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.

Clement, Keen, and I were in Singapore last week for the State of Play V conference. There was nothing groundbreaking in the talks but we got to meet some key people from the virtual worlds industry, notably Richard Bartle, co-creator of the first MUD.

We stayed in Geylang which we didn’t realize was a famous red light district until the cab driver told us. Clement’s girlfriend XinXin apparently didn’t know either because she booked the hotel for us. I’m actually glad we stayed there because it contrasts so much with the clean, modern, luxurious image that Singapore strives for. The conference was held in the Marina Mandarin Hotel which is in the midst of shopping malls and huge office buildings. That would have been our impression of Singapore had we not stayed in Geylang, which mostly consists of small shops and restaurants and cheap hotels. When we first pulled up to our hotel, we were shocked to see ladies of the night lined up on the sidewalk all the way down the street. I had never seen anything like it. Later in the trip we walked along this street to observe. Almost all of the pedestrian traffic was men, and usually the women would stand or sit off to the side with a pimp not far away. Usually it would be the pimp who tried to solicit customers, asking something like “Need a girl?” when you pass by. Sometimes the more aggressive women would try to grab you, and one even stopped Keen and stood in front of him asking “Hey superman, want to go with me?” There were also pornography merchants and people running dice tables. Our walk down the back streets was pretty interesting, but the best part about Geylang was the cheap, delicious food. Actually all the food we had in Singapore was excellent. Highlights included Indian roti with various fillings, Thai beef noodle soup, and of course chili and black pepper crab, which are specialties in Singapore. Other highlights of the trip included walking around Sentosa Island, clubbing at the Ministry of Sound, and shopping in and around Suntec City.

Here are all of my photos from Singapore.

Yikes. It has been almost a month since I posted, so to the three of you reading this I apologize. Quick status update: I’m happy, I’m healthy, I’m working a lot, work is going well, we eat out a lot but it’s cheap and usually good, I cook about twice a week, I go to the gym about twice a week, I spend most of my free time on Skype chatting with Justine (having a laptop with built-in camera rocks), and I haven’t been practicing wushu or Mandarin but want to start soon.

Despite not knowing the language I never feel alone because I have some great friends and coworkers. I’m sharing an apartment with my friend and cofounder Keen, who I’ve known since undergrad at UVA. Like me, he left his job at a large tech company to join our friend Clement on this startup. Also like me, he has an angry girlfriend in the states whom he chats with through Skype every day. And both her parents and Justine’s parents are from Hong Kong - we’re like the same person. Back at UVA we had an awesome time working on a project for our CS 340 class in which we wrote software to control a trashcan-like robot. Here’s an old photo of our team (guess who has bleached hair).

Clement and I were in the same class at UVA. He was always coming up with these business ideas and I had fun working with him on a couple of them. He’s one of the most determined and hard working people I know, and I have no doubt that he’ll succeed eventually at everything he does. That’s him on the right next to Keen in a taxi, doing some kind of gangster salute.

XinXin is Clement’s girlfriend. She’s really nice and is always driving us around and arranging nice dinners and shows for us. She’s also tall - almost as tall as Clement - and always wears heels so she’s even taller. She works and Microsoft and is doing a dual MBA program (yes that means two MBA’s) on the side, so she’s always carrying textbooks around to study whenever she gets a chance.

Wei, our art director, comes to work with us every weekday (he’s in the center). When we first met him he spoke barely any English but he studies on his own and has been improving quickly. He’s a really fun, happy guy and his work is fantastic. Prash works part time for us from Shanghai and visits Beijing for a weekend every month (he’s on the right). He’s super laid back and casual. Before we went to an investor meeting he asked Clement if he should wear his nice shirt. Clement asked if he had a collared shirt and he was like no, but he has a nice t-shirt that doesn’t have naked women or skulls on it. Johnson also works part time and comes in every Saturday, but I don’t have a picture of him yet. He’s really into his work, which is 3D engines.

Update - Justine after reading this: “‘angry probably doesn’t even begin to cut it”

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.

It’s recruiting season at Google and this year the Associate Product Manager candidates get to go on a scavenger hunt in SF. There were 5 teams, each led by 2 current APMs and with 3 or 4 APM candidates. Rather than find artifacts, we had to complete tasks and capture photographic evidence of them. They ranged from easy (mimic the pose of any statue you see) to extremely difficult (get handcuffed by a real police officer). We actually asked a couple of cops about the latter and were told that no cop would ever agree to anything even resembling this because someone could easily edit the photo, post it on the internet, and get them in trouble. Anyway, we did some interesting things, took some great photos, and had a lot of fun. People were surprisingly cooperative, perhaps because the Frankenstein mask (which we used in nearly every photo) was so amusing.

Notable items from the past two weeks:

• I’m going to graduate. About a week and a half ago I got feedback on my revised thesis, made some final changes last weekend, and am finally done! It’s waiting to be bound at Alderman Library. Definitely a weight off my shoulders, but now I have to publish a paper which may be more involved. There was a lot more I wanted to do with my thesis but was in a rush to finish, so this will be my chance to follow through since there’s no longer a deadline.
• I found a place to live. It’s on Bay St. southeast of downtown Mountain View. I’m quite pleased; two bedrooms / 1 bath, $1100/mo including utilities, off-street parking for two cars plus motorcycle, plenty of street parking for guests, great landlord, and it’s only a 4-plex so less potential for neighbors with noisy children and dogs, both of which I have to deal with at my current residence. The master bedroom is pretty large but the other one is only 10×11.5′ - a bit cramped but it’ll do. I’m not sure about the roommate yet; a friend from work wants to check it out, there’s a chance that Justine will move out here, and failing those two, I can always resort to craigslist. I’ll move in during the second week of September and see what happens.
• I went to SES (Search Engine Strategies conference) in San Jose last Tuesday and Wednesday. It’s a conference held several times a year in various locations for anyone whose business involves search engines. Most of the attendees were from companies that specialize in making your sites rank well in search results or optimizing your internet advertising campaigns. As you can imagine, these industries are largely dependent on Google, so I felt like something of a VIP since name tag had my employer printed on it. People were very interested in what I had to say, and it was a good exercise to talk to them and answer questions without giving away secrets.
• Tuesday night was the Google Dance. It’s an annual event during SES where attendees (and of course Googlers) are invited to a big party at the Googleplex. It allows us to hang out with people whose livelihood depends on Google and in some cases have an adversarial relationship with us (webspammers). Delicious food was a given, but there was also live music, video karaoke, photo booths, a dunk tank, radio controlled robots, and product demos. Good times.