Tech, Travel & Tales

Blessing in disguise

Wed, 22 May 2013 12:55:00 -0700

When I was 16 years old I knew I wanted to work in technology. What I didn’t know was what I wanted to do in technology as a career.

When I went to the University of Washington, the hot company to join back then in 2002 was Microsoft. I was fortunate enough to get into a co-op program with them for six months as a Product Manager in 2005 and boy was I excited! One month into my job at Microsoft, I knew I hated it. I hated the politics as well as the red tape. When the decision came to accept a full-time offer or find another job, I decided the latter. That’s when my second ideal company came up in 2006 - Deloitte Consulting.

The green dot promised me the wonders of travel and the most exciting projects to work on. Not only did they ship me off for the entire year (which was to LA from Seattle), I got to work on boring government projects that moved incredibly slow. I knew I needed to leave and do something much more exciting and impactful and at that time I was fixated on a company called Zillow. Zillow was one of the hottest companies in Seattle and I really enjoyed the real estate market and that’s when I applied.

I would have hoped to say I got the job and all my dreams came true but this was far from it. I didn’t get the job as Product Manager and I was torn. I thought I answered all the questions correctly but I guess that wasn’t the case. After that day, I was pretty devastated and down about it.

A week later Facebook was announcing the Facebook Platform and while Zuck was giving his keynote and I remember I was instantly sold within the first ten minutes of his talk. I knew i wanted to work there since I saw the potential of his vision as well as the product. After his keynote, I put together my resume for a position at Facebook and submitted it online at 12:30pm that day. Three hours later I remember getting an email back from a recruiter and two weeks later getting an offer from Facebook. And the rest is history.

As I reflect back I must admit that not getting that job at Zillow was probably the best thing to happen to me in my career. If I got that job, I wouldn’t have applied to Facebook, moved down to San Francisco, and spent the next 5 years of my life at one of the best companies in the world. It’s crazy to think that my entire career was based on that one event that I marked as a failure.

Come and get your Libraries!

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 11:56:08 -0700

To all of you developers out there who gave us a ton of feedback around our APIs, thank you so much. We’re happy to say we just released a couple of helper libraries to our developer community. This should bootstrap you onto the LearnSprout APIs much faster. The libraries can be found here:

http://developers.learnsprout.com/libraries

If you have any questions, feel free to email us at support [at] learnsprout.com.

Also, special props to one of our developer members who built our Ruby Library, Kabuko.

Cheers,
Frank

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Applying to an Accelerator Program - Imagine K12

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 02:56:00 -0800

In parallel of building and validating our hypothesis with our prototype, we also applied to a few accelerator programs. If you don’t know what accelerator programs do, check here and here for more info but basically they help your startup get off the ground. Fast. When applying to a few of the accelerator programs, you’ll have to expect 3 things: The application, the interview, and the suspense.

The application:

The Imagine K12 application is very similar to YC (maybe that’s due to all the influence YC had on Imagine K12) which was pretty awesome for us since the application we used for YC we could use for Imagine K12. The application itself is actually a really good way to really make you focus on the main core aspects of your business and thing you’re building. It helps boil your ideas and business strategy into a couple of sentences. If you’re thinking of applying to accelerator programs, you should start early on your application. Even better, if you have an idea, build it and validate the hell out of it. If you can show you have adoption (and revenue!!) on the application, the more you stand out.

Once we had a rough draft of our application, we sent it off to a lot of friends for review. This helps a lot since you need to be very concise with what you’re getting act. If your friends don’t understand what the hell you’re building, how can the partners. After a bunch of revisions and numerous comments, we had an application we felt solid with. We sent the YC application a couple of weeks early. For Imagine K12, we sent it in the day of (whoops) since we didn’t actually know of Imagine K12 until Startup School.

On November 18, we got the email from Imagine K12 that we got accepted into the next round — the interview.

The Interview:

The interview was scheduled for December 1st. We talked to a few of our friends who got interviews by YC or got into YC, and they helped us understand what the interviews are like. Chaotic. You actually can’t prep for the interview after chatting with our friends. The one way you can be confident into going into the interview is being logical with how you’re going to build your business and whether people want to buy what you have.

Over the course of a couple of weeks, we tried practiced a few times interviewing each other on what we thought the Imagine K12 team would ask us but after a few hours of doing that we realized that we can’t really prepare for the interview that way. Actually, the best way to prep for the interview is to try to run your business now. Understand your competitive landscape, how are you going to make money, why your team is the right team to solve this problem, are you sure people would use your product .. would they pay for it? These are the questions they’ll ask and the only way to know these answers is to try to build your product and get it in front of people for feedback. And that’s exactly what we did or try to understand as fast as possible.

When December 2nd came, we arrive at the AOL building on Page Mill. We got there about 20 minutes before hand and met with a few of the teams that were part of the last Imagine K12 cohorts. We chatted with them for a while and then I brought the team outside to clear our minds and focus on the task at hand. After 5 minutes enjoying the sun, we entered the AOL building again and they called us in.

The interview was concluded extremely quick. 10 minutes. Done, fin, all pau. Each team has 10 minutes with the 4 partners and it’s a fast pace conversation. No chit chat, but straight the point. We got into the room and I basically started the conversation off with who we are and what we’re building. After that, it was question after question. It’s like a group interview if you’ve been to one. The partners are just blazing through questions and you and your team’s job is to answer them as confident and logical as possible without stepping or overpowering each other. No tangents or side points (don’t waste time). Basically, in, out, done.

After the interview, you thank them and walk out. Now comes the suspense part.

The Suspense:

After the interview, you have to wait until the end of the day to find out your results. In our shoes, we had to wait until the next day to figure out if we’ve been accepted. Imagine that. Your startup, your team, your ambitions are lingering on a phone call (or an email i hear if you don’t get accepted). The suspense gets to people I hear. People can’t concentrate, eat, or even sleep because they wait anxiously for the answer.

We thought we’ll find out the day of our interview around 7 or 8pm. When that time came and gone, I was frantically checking my email to see if we got rejected but nothing.

The next day, we basically continued our path as if nothing happened. We continued to build our product and idea since it was no use just waiting around. Then it happened. Around 3pm I got a call from a strange number so I stepped out of the room. It was Tim, one of the partners of Imagine K12, and we just got accepted into the program. After the call, I came back to the main space where Anthony and Joe were (my co-founders) and I told them the good news. Let’s just say a few drinks (and a game of settlers) were in order.

Hopefully that helps on what’s it like to apply to an accelerator program.

2.5 Months in ... Recap Time

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 01:48:00 -0800

After leaving Facebook back in late September, things have been busy, to say the least. In this post, i’m only going to focus on the startup life portion since that seems to be consuming a lot of my time and a lot more in the near future. So with that, let’s recap:

Brainstorming on ideas and finally deciding on doing an education startup
Applying / getting interviewed with accelerator programs (YC, Imagine K12, and AngelPad)
Meeting the startup community, especially the edu tech
Meeting with the education community (teachers, schools, admins, etc).
And designing, building, validating (rinse and repeat) in between

Brainstorming / Deciding on an idea

When we were brain storming on ideas our our main philopshy was to write everything down. It doesn’t matter on whether the idea was necessarily “stupid” .. just write it down. You never know whether that idea is dumb or not until you start evaluating it. Also, it may help spawn new ideas off of it.

Once we had a bunch of ideas down, we notice a pattern. All of our ideas were revolving around a couple main themes so we decided to pursue those ideas more in depth. With that, we came up with our first idea — syllabus hub. We had a clear idea on what we wanted to achieve and figured that this was a good starting point in working as a team as well as just executing an idea and pushing it out the door to validate. NOTE: syllabus hub is only the tip of what we want to build and we later realized that (more below).

Designing / Building / Validating

Once we had a goal / vision on what we wanted to build, we went right in. We talked about the architecture design and what languages to use. We also started iterating on the design (UI/UX) of it as well. Over the course of 3 weeks we built syllabus hub. Boy was there a lot of learnings there: everything from what languages / frameworks to use, to understanding SEO and analytics (you must measure everything on what hypothesis you want to test on), to infrastructure stuff (Amazon EC2, etc).

Once we had a rough idea, we shipped it to folks who are in our test market (teachers, students, TAs, school counselors, etc) for feedback. The info we got was extremely valuable; actually without that feedback, we wouldn’t have realized the idea we truly wanted to pursue and that was all due to understanding what our customers really want from them using our application. Actually, I think without this feedback, I don’t think we would have gotten into the accelerator program (or be where we are today). If you’re building a startup, I really do believe in the lean startup movement: Build, Validate, and measure whether what you built is true to your hypothesis.

More info to come.

Adobe Illustrator CS 5 - Learnings

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 17:51:00 -0800

Since we got into Imagine K12 an education startup accelerator just like YC but for education (more info on that in the next blog), we’ve been designing our backend schema and getting the front end to work (sort of). It’s been fun designing it from the ground up but since we don’t have a designer (graphic or UI), i’ve been trying to learn more design. With that, I’ve been using Illustrator much more to do high fidelity mockups and now just creating basic images (aka art).

I’ve been reading a lot of tutorials and design blogs recently and did my first trial. Here’s my first mock of mario .. not bad i must admit but i think his chin is a little .. crazy.

Props to this site for a lot of good tutorials.

Startup School - 2011

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 00:17:45 -0700

Startup school was pretty awesome. Tons of folks who have a passion for startups, especially a lot of people who want to start one or who already have.

The basic premise of startup school is a bunch of talks from various startup founders or angel or VC people. Great info — some of which to me seemed a bit contradicting but still interesting advice none-the-less. I’ll post the advice that we wrote down later on but it boils down to these main points:

What problem are you solving? (Note, a HARD problem doesn’t always mean a valuable thing that people want)
It’s all about your team and how you can execute. Having co-founders will help tremendously as being a CEO or a C level is pretty lonely and having co-founders there to talk to is immensely valuable.
If you can, bootstrap before you get funded.
Distill idea into strategy.
Being an Entrepreneur is 24x7.

Here is the list of speakers that spoke this year.

2011 Speakers

Marc Andreessen
Partner, Andreessen Horowitz; Founder, Ning, Opsware, Netscape

Stephen Cohen
Founder, Palantir

Ron Conway
Partner, SV Angel

Jim Goetz
Partner, Sequoia; Founder, VitalSigns

Paul Graham
Partner, Y Combinator; Founder, Viaweb

Drew Houston
Founder, Dropbox

Max Levchin
Founder, Slide, Paypal

James Lindenbaum
Founder, Heroku

Matt Mullenweg
Founder, Automattic

Mark Pincus
Founder, Zynga, Tribe, SupportSoft, Freeloader

Mark Zuckerberg
Founder, Facebook

Iphone 4S or Galaxy Nexus

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 17:06:05 -0700

Iphone 4S or Galaxy Nexus:

Torn between these two phones: Iphone 4S and Siri or a Galaxy Nexus. Hmm the choices! It’s hard to commit to an Android phone since I’ve been on the iPhone since the day of the original iphone came out. I had every iPhone except for the iPhone 3g I believe. Is it time to move over to Android?

Almost 360 degree view at the top of koko head

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 16:52:28 -0700

Almost 360 degree view at the top of koko head

One of the best meals I had in Korea. So delish

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 23:14:03 -0700

One of the best meals I had in Korea. So delish

Loving the weather in Seattle today. Met with Yong (Prof at UW)...

Sat, 08 Oct 2011 15:59:23 -0700

Loving the weather in Seattle today. Met with Yong (Prof at UW) at Ivars.

5 Tips when traveling abroad (especially greater than a month):

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 03:35:00 -0700

So after being out and about for the last month, visiting at least 4 different countries, and lived in various living conditions, here are some tips that I found very useful:

1. Get a Charles Schwab Checking Account (and amazing ATM Card):

This is probably the most important (and frequent) card I use. Want no ATM charges/fees when withdrawing cash from any ATM machine in the world? This is your card. Oh and it has no account fees on it, whatsoever. Go ahead, create one now. I can wait :) https://www.schwab.com/public/schwab/banking_lending/checking_account/:

2. Google Voice / Facebook Messenger App / Skype:

With these 3 services, I almost never have to text or call anyone from my phone. I thought I would use my friend’s international phone, but as of 4 weeks in, I didn’t have to use it once. Google Voice is super sweet when you have to make calls or text to anyone within the US (and to check my personal voicemail). Facebook Messenger for all my text replacements since there is a lot of free wifi around, and Skype for good ole video calling with my international friends who don’t use google talk. All of this adds to be … Free :)

3. A Credit Card with No International Transaction Fees:

Not having to worry about international transaction fees is blissful. With this type of credit card and #1 above, you now can travel the world worry free of foreign transaction fees. I currently use this card (my annual fee is lower since I was grandfathered in) and it’s amazing: https://creditcards.citi.com/credit-cards/citi-thankyou-premier-card/ The Capital One card is also awesome I hear.

4. Get a laptop that has a power charger regulator (or an iPad2)

That way you can plug that bad boy anywhere and it’ll be ok and still have the internets wherever you may go. I currently roll with the macbook air and it’s been great.

5. Bring an extra passport photo with you

Or have this picture in your gmail — just in case. You may never know when you need this again (getting another landing visa, etc). I had to use one when I landed in Vietnam. That saved me a lot of hassle.

Two extra tips that I thought of .. both optional :)

6. Translation apps on your phone

This only applies if you’re bringing a smart phone with you on your trip. Very handy when you’re off in some foreign land and don’t have anyone to help you communicate. This was particularly useful in Vietnam and rural parts of Taiwan.

7. 2 factor authentication (on Gmail and Facebook):

I normally suggest this for everyone since phishing sites are so good nowadays (and we’re just so prone to give away our passwords), that having this makes life so much more secure. Knowing that your security settings are the highest possible on your 2 favorite services is rewarding, especially is true when you’re logging onto those sites from a shady computer in your hostel or internet cafe.
Google: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/advanced-sign-in-security-for-your.html
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150172618258920
Note 1: only do this is if you have your phone on you as both these services will text you a code so you can log into your accounts.
Note 2: for google, make sure you input your codes and set everything up on your laptop and phone before you leave. Otherwise, it’s serious a PITA.

Good luck and have fun!

Vung Tau Orphanage kids. Wanting to go back soon to play with...

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 21:25:17 -0700

Vung Tau Orphanage kids. Wanting to go back soon to play with them!

Children's House District 8 - Visit # 1

Sat, 01 Oct 2011 08:06:24 -0700

We visited an orphanage that we served the last time I came to visit Vietnam, just to connect and see how things are. I’m happy to report that it seems things are better than before — they remodeled a bit but the living conditions are still not ideal.

Photo: Kids eating dinner

The children’s home is all boys, 22 of them to be exact, and they are self-funded as well. There are usually 3 people who help but one of the staff has a medical condition and she can’t serve much and the other one is out on a fundraising trip in Europe now (where they get the most of their funds). That leaves only 1 staff onsite, Loi, which we blogged about here: LINK. Because of this, we decided to provide them more rice to help ease their needs on that topic. We decided to hit up a nearby rice distributor and ordered 300 kg of rice and at first the taxi driver was hesitant to put it in the car. After some negotiations, success!

Photo: That’s 30 bags of rice right there.

Once we got to the orphanage, we summed help and boy were the kids happy!

Photo: Kids and Minh coming to help carry the rice

Photo: Thung carrying rice

After, we went inside to play with the kids. They showed us a lot of their toys and pets and wow, i love how they utilize their time with so little things. While we were playing with them, we also toured around the place for a bit.

Photo: Kids playing with their toys and pets (grasshoppers)

Photo: They sleep on the floor

We had a great time with them. I really liked them and I hope to be back there. One of things I’m thinking of is a sleeping over at the Orphanage with them and really live their daily lives and activities. That should be interesting.

Photo of Orphanage Sign

The sea of mopeds. Imagine trying to cross this street with no...

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 05:05:11 -0700

The sea of mopeds. Imagine trying to cross this street with no crosswalks or traffic lights.

A photo collage of all the kids moving on from the orphanage....

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 10:30:01 -0700

A photo collage of all the kids moving on from the orphanage. Beautiful in its own way. More story about this orphanage here: http://tumblr.com/xu24wql8ud