2above.com

Since last week, I have done a few things differently from norm (or my intuition) to keep my mind occupied, focused and clean. A clean mind is a clear mind with more focus. Early entrepreneurs tend to have lot of ideas going on at the same time, I did following and found they are incredibly helpful for me to be upbeat and focus.

1. Focus

I already said I am working on a personal recommendation system. It sounds easy but it is a profound field that challenges many scholars. By using both Google, Aardvark, Linkedin etc., I have discovered many folks who have similar interests, I am also able to have deeper understanding about the field, and how mathematics can be applied

2. Talk (to smart people)

Usually, Entrepreneurs are loners, in some sense. They keep heads down and hide themselves in the cave to crank out great things they believe in. Is that enough? Since last week, I have started to chat with smart people more. It was not anything serious. But the results were astounding. The wisdom from combined brain power is exponential to ones own.

3. Organize

Starting from my home page at igoogle.com, which was a big mass of blog feeds from variety of blogs I subscribe. It kept growing and getting messier everyday, to the point that I don’t really know what I am looking at. So starting last week, I have re-organized igoogle feed reader into three columns with thought leaders’ blog focusing on entrepreneurship, technology trend, and niche fields. After a few glance, I immediately have a healthy dose of entrepreneurial insights, technology news, and new development in the niches field. I find it sets me in a great mood with more confidence and happier attitude. I recommend everyone do this exercise

4. No rush

Entrepreneurs have sense of urgency, they are the people trying to get stuff out of door and “make it”. I used to be always like that but it has not really worked. As Simon Sinek, the author of Start with Why said to me “I firmly believe that struggle is the single greatest source of innovation. And entrepreneurs are the ones who innovate from struggle. Entrepreneurs solve problems then share the solution.” and struggle is the reason entrepreneurs do what we do, it’s not for money, it’s for the “why” or the “cause” that are personal to ourselves. And when one does things to the right cause, one can not rush it. As I pointed out, the biggest struggle these years for me is to find the right people to do the right things, and this struggle is leading me to what I am working on.

5. Team

Wisdom is an exponential function of number of intelligent, experienced individuals. Instead of working alone, searching and inspiring people to work with you, even it’s a struggle to find the right people. If you have not found the right people, read what other successful entrepreneurs are doing. Andrew warner’s mixergy, and Paul Graham’s website, in particular the incubator Y-combinator that he started, are great places to get inspired, stay focused, maybe even stay connected with potentially like-minded people.

6. Read

Entrepreneurs tend to think they are smart enough to do things on their own, they don’t have to go to classes, they don’t have to read books. They are the ones who write the history, isn’t it!

The short answer is “No”. Last week, I broke my reading norm which tends to be fictions, bought two books from Amazon (not kindle version, I still love the feeling of flipping the real pages next to the fireplace in a cloudy day), one is Simon Sinek’s “start with why”,  the other is Paul Graham’s “hackers and painters”.

I think above things are what I did slightly differently from what I usually do on weekly/daily basis. And I feel good about it. So, I encourage you do a few things slightly differently, get some new flavor injected into your life, I think you might like it.

I am at a stage to start a new journey toward entrepreneurial success. I figure it’s a good time to look back at the past: a history of my own may have better lessons in it for me. Following is a quick glance about how unsuccessful, in-authentic, I had become, and my quest to to where I want to be.

1999 – 2006: from top of the class to a dying industry

School is over-rated but I am always grateful to my school: Stanford, where I regained confidence. Nevertheless, I graduated from EESOR program in 2001 without having any clue what I wanted to do with this degree and my life. The dot com era just went busted; there were hardly any jobs left. One day, my friend who was in the linguistic Phd program referred me to a company called Google which was looking for search quality raters to improve their search technology, I signed up and immediately started working on contract base till early 2002. I did not hate it but certainly did not love the job of reading bizarre search queries and results.  I honestly could not figure out why my boss, who was also my neighbor AND a Phd in biochemistry, would want to work as QA manager for Google, which was still fairly unknown among average people back in 2001. I sensed the opportunity rising to stay in Google as full time employee in its quality assurance group, but I left for a later becoming the stupidest journey I ever embarked on in my life: working for the dying US technology manufacturing industry till early 2006: 4 years of my youth! I blamed this on myself and the horrible H1 visa policy toward foreign students like me: should that manufacturer turn down my H1 visa application, I would have stayed at Google and become at least “quadruplet millionaire”.

4 years went by just like that. It was boring as hell! I could not take the manufacturing industry anymore. All I wanted was to get out, but getting out was (still is) difficult when you were tied up with a company because of H1 visa!! You cannot move around freely. It was suffocating.

Colorful 2006: Become a first time entrepreneur

Long story short, there was this big day in 2006 that I jumped ship.  Life is too short, I had become far behind in my career comparing to people of my age to start all over. I wanted to make it up, quick. What would be better than doing startup?

With no job, no money, I started a website in Mar. 2006: It’s kind of shameful for me to admit but it was about online dating: I called it 2above.com, with a hint that 2 is better than 1 (Lame! I know, LOL, but Isn’t that true in life, that 2 is better than 1?). The other inspiration was from site like 37signals, it felt like it was a trend to have a number in your domain name. And 2above also means to be above average, to be the best that I can be.

Well, 2above’s “pay-per-email-to-your-potential-date” model did not work out, although I am still damn proud of the launch party I managed to pull off at mina111 on Mar. 12, 2006, a day when snow fell on bay bridge. It was so cold, but still people lined up to see what this fashion party brought by a startup called 2above was all about.  200+ people including all of my two dozen friends in bay area attended the party filled with talented designers, beautiful models, and I did it with ONLY $400, $900 paid to Mina111 gallery, $500 ticket income. All of the models and wonderful people in our party were volunteers. They were awesome!  (Thank you again, if you are one of them and happen to read this)

Nevertheless, it did not work out.  Months later, I changed that into a group dating site called groupmingle.com (current groupmingle.com has no affiliation with me whatsoever): not only the site itself got some decent traffic within a few weeks after I worked day and night posting information all over the Internet. I also used it to start a great professional mingle group on meetup.com, thanks to the organizer who took over from me, it has become one of the popular professional singles meetup groups in bay area, and it still is today.

Bootstrapping my own website startup was difficult, I did not have expertise, certainly did not have much money thanks to the previous job, still I managed and worked with a dear technologist friend/advisor of mine on the side to set up another venture focusing on video social network just in case groupmingle does not work out. We managed to get a $30k+$20k total $50k angel investment waiting for us to sign the term paper, in exchange of 60%+ equity. Yes, laugh all you can, but that was the only offer that we got for a video streaming project. It was like a term sheet to bankruptcy from day one. We turned it down without hesitation.

I continued to hang on to groupmingle project all the way till the end of 2006, completely bootstrapping without any other side job or sponsor. During that year, I perfected my windsurfing skills whenever I felt stressful, hopeless.

2007: smell of startup money and cruelty

Finally, that day came: the day that all entrepreneurs are scared of – running out of money. Luckily, I was able to convince a search engine advertising startup who was just acquired for $60 million by a much bigger company (allow me to remove the name of it), to take me as who I am and I became their search platform’s product manager. The job got routine-like pretty quickly, although looking for a way out, I did learn a lot about search engine marketing which turned out to be very useful and rewarding experiences.

Another classic day of entrepreneurs came into our shiny office in a beautiful day of San Francisco bay area, rather suddenly, 9 months into the job. The parent company that acquired us sent its CEO and a whole management crew from NYC, fired almost everyone on our team which they just acquired, founders included. The only ones left were a Caltech physics PhD and a MIT graduated director of engineering, allegedly critical to “optimize our revenue platform”. Read this, there is no magic in earning customers’ trust, hence “revenue”, the hedging technique used in search engine bidding war was rather not high tech at all, as the result, achieving sustainable profit from that technique is just not sustainable, much like real estate bubble’s burst. The firing was anticipated, but certainly sooner than everyone thought it would come.

2008 to today: Embracing a growing brand

One thing I am good at is to be optimistic. I never really got nervous when I was out of job, or running alone a startup project; I remember my professor told me that I am an opportunist. I know it sounds better when it comes from an investor, business partner rather than your academic advisor. When I was thinking about what to do next, I took the time to fly my aging parents to bay area all the way from China, showed them this country that has become my 2^nd home.

With deep understanding about search engine marketing platform, I soon got two companies competing  to hire me, while an online shopping company offered me better compensation, I chose the company I have been with till today: fitness anywhere, and moved up to my beloved San Francisco from also beloved Palo Alto. Fitness Anywhere (the inventor of TRX brand) turns out to be an amazing company, an amazing story. And I am lucky enough to witness how a great brand (called TRX) is being born and grows to be a world class one. It teaches me every day the right things to do to grow a startup (Fitness anywhere was funded by one person in 2005/6, now we have become the go to choice for fitness training).

Life has become slight easier and more enjoyable when you have pleasant work environment, friends, comparing to running a venture alone. But I know the real fire inside of me is to become someone who can create. The success of our founder convinces me more: create something valuable for the society, become a fearless person who dares to chase his/her dream, no matter what circumstances are.

2009: Getting onboard with current technology

Starting from the end of Mar. 2009, I started to use this blog to analyze Twitter applications, its eco system and twitter.com itself, which in many sense resembles Google in 1999/2000 in its growth rate. Twitter has grown extremely fast for its simplicity, stories-sharing and viral effect: it’s so easy to share information in real time. As the twitter’s real time information network explodes, it comes with a billion dollar question: how to better use these gazillion tweets? Hence the twitter’s app world is exploding, with a few twitter apps/websites announced each day. Who are the signals, who are the noises? Who are in for the long run with good cause, who are in for the short term, and quick bucks?  For about 4 months time, I did a lot of research about this eco-system, had tons of interviews with notable or nameless twitter app developers which resulted many blog entries. Around summer time 2009, this blog was getting a couple hundred visits a day. And I have become confident about what type of web applications can become sustainable success.

It’s time to strike out. Yes, I am throwing it out there about what I am working on. Yes, I need your help, you, brilliant engineers, and brilliant business guys!

And confident I have become, I am ready to strike out again. This time around, I have been through a lot more in my life, had and still have ton of problems that are personal to me that I want to find solutions for, and of course, I am more experienced about what web entrepreneurship is about. With social media reaches its tipping point in 2009/2010, I feel the timing is right to do something that utilizes this unparalleled momentum and technology available to create something that simply works and give more power to everyday people.

Yes, I am in the game of building a useful recommendation system to connect people. This system will not solely rely on either human or machine, but it’s smart enough to offer manageable recommendations for people to enjoy their life more and connect with each other more.

Thinking back, I am still proud of full ride research scholarship I earned at Stanford business and medical school, working with world class mathematicians and medical researchers. I have gained a little bit exposure in the applied mathematics areas and consider myself a mathematical inclined entrepreneur at heart.

But, I am not a great software engineer, and I am not sure if I am a great marketer. I figure: instead of figuring out stuff on my own, I rather become more social and open to society, let talented people in to become better at what we do to build something useful, influential to the society we live.

I will continue to use this blog to share entrepreneurial insights. I sincerely welcome entrepreneurs, bloggers and engineers to contact me without hesitation to share your insights and stories. I will be gladly publish your opinions should it become obviously beneficial to the circle of entrepreneurs, hence humanity.

And finally, my vote to most inspiring to me

Most inspiring entrepreneur: Neil Patel

Most inspiring startup: Aardvark

Damon Horowitz (BS. Columbia, MS MIT, PHD Stanford) Cofounder of Aardvark.com spoke at TEDxSoma on Jan. 22, 10. He said “..the primary goal of technology should not be replacing human intelligence, rather, facilitating human interaction..”

That is why I think the focus on entrepreneurial pursuit should be the web application sifting through people’s social graph: application should be naturally similar to human interaction and inspire humanity. I think Aardvark.com has done a great job on that, as such, Google acquired it.

Read more on “Anatomy of a Large-Scale Social Search Engine” published by Aardvark, the paper was accepted by www2010. This paper was inspired by the classic Google paper, “Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine”, in which Sergey Brin and Larry Page originally describe the algorithms and architecture of Google. This paper was published 12 years ago in the same WWW conference.

The interview is NOT done by me.

With twitter and facebook, now google buzz become mainstream media, it’s a matter of time for more “status update” ad network. I have written about “how to make money with tweets” through this type of ad network such as revtwt.com, but I have not come across a legit ad network focusing on facebook status update. Facebook has been very aggressive on shutting down any ad networks that serve “sketchy” ads, and I can’t agree more with that. Just take a look at revtwt.com which is the #1 “tweet” ad network you will find many advertisers are really sketchy. For a new ad network to succeed, it has to add value to facebook eco-system using the core of the facebook platform: social graph. There also has to be a quality control system in place to preselect the advertisers, only allowing the formats and contents that are in par with Facebook.

Who can build that out?

Rose started Digg with $1,200 and an insight about the changing nature of news. Thanks to cheap broadband and easy-to-use blogging software, there was suddenly an endless stream of news, gossip, and rumor about pretty much any obscure topic — say, new versions of Linux or 9/11 conspiracy theories — spread across millions of blogs and websites. Rose and others like him were spending hours digging through these stories and then passing them around to their friends. What, he wondered, would happen if someone harnessed that energy?

Rose signed up for a cheap hosting service and hired a Canadian programmer he met online. He designed the site himself, giving it a utilitarian — even ugly — look. It had no graphics, but it did offer something special: a way for anyone to get his or her news in front of lots and lots of people. In addition to his promotional efforts on TV, Rose started talking up his venture on his blog, which had nearly 10,000 registered users. In January 2005, he described Digg as “a friend’s site and one of my favorite technology news websites.”

Just a month later, a hacker somehow managed to download and post the contents of Paris Hilton’s cell phone address book, and a link was submitted to Digg. Within a week, the site saw its traffic quadruple as the Hilton story wound up in The Washington Post and The New York Times. Digg had its first major scoop, and Rose realized for the first time that he was onto something. He left television the following month, with a plan to make Web videos for fun and to pay for his life by selling advertising on Digg using Google’s AdSense service. “I’d always liked the idea of being independent and working for myself,” he says. “I was sitting in my room thinking, If I can just make a few hundred dollars a month in ad revenue, I’ll be able to support myself, pay my rent, and have a good time.”

The site grew faster than he could have imagined. Rose rounded up $50,000 in angel funding, hired a real designer, and started getting acquisition offers. That summer, just months after Digg’s founding, Jason Calacanis, the founder of Weblogs, offered Rose $4 million for the site. Rose said no. Instead, he persuaded his mentor, Jay Adelson, the founder of a data center company called Equinix (NASDAQ:EQIX), to join him as an adviser and then as CEO. The pair raised $2.8 million from Greylock Partners and some angels. “Jason could have had it, if he had been cool about it,” says Rose. “But he was pressuring me so much that I kind of stepped back and said something isn’t right.” Calacanis was so taken with Digg that, after he sold Weblogs to AOL, he started a copycat site under AOL’s Netscape.com brand. He even offered Digg’s most active users $1,000 a month to defect. (The effort failed: Traffic was flat, Calacanis quit, and the Digg clone was moved off the Netscape homepage in 2007.) Digg’s traffic, meanwhile, exploded. By late 2006, the site had 11 million users.

ps. This article was originally posted on INC.com back in early 2008.

With Google buzz rolling out today, Google cofounder Sergey Brin spoke up about why he thinks it’s important. Pay attention: there are lot of hidden wisdom in his words that our entrepreneurs would find valuable.

This one hints social media/personal communication will become extremely lucrative market just like web search.

“Extracting signal from noise is one of our core competencies, it’s one of the key things we do in our web search product every day. And I think that now peoples’ personal communications are getting to be on a scale comparable to that of web search, so those technologies are becoming far more critical.”

This one hints the state of today’s recommendations technology (hence, lot of room to improvement)

Brin says that he’d like to make the recommendation technology more transparent (as opposed to a black box) but hasn’t yet discussed those details with the Buzz team.

This one hints how to have a successful technology (it’s detail, detail, detail, lot of work, not just ideas)

“I think if you look at the history of technical products, there are a lot of details that matter. It’s not just the general idea, oh I have Email and social. And you know maybe, maybe we got the details right, maybe we didn’t, we’re going to see from today on out. Internally I’ve been very happy with the result. There are a lot of detailed things. If you look at the success of the world wide web, you look at Xanadu (an ongoing Hypertext project founded in 1960) for example by Ted Nelson that had a lot of these concepts yet it wasn’t so successful. There are a lot of details, perhaps chance and timing. I wouldn’t discount something because it’s similar to something in the past…”

Yes, New Orlean Saints has won the super bowl. And Drew Brees the super quarterback is the super MVP!! Why am I so excited? I am not even an American. I did not even like football anywhere close to soccer, or, should I say, the real “football”. How can I be part of Saint’s victory?

Let me tell you. Yes, I have a dream to be a successful entrepreneur, and I am working on it. At the same time, I have a terrific full time job at fitness anywhere, inc., one of the greatest companies one can beg to work for. Bear in mind, I have worked for many cool companies including Google back in 2002! And I still like fitness anywhere better. Fitness Anywhere invented the TRX suspension training, or the brand “TRX”. And Drew Brees trains on TRX, and he is the first NFL player we sponsor, or “partner” with. Drew loves TRX, watch this

Isn’t he a great person? Easygoing, hardworking, just like average Joe. But this guy won superbowl!! He is the most desirable athlete in the United States of America!! and He loves us, the team TRX! Isn’t it exciting? Being part of the superbowl victory!

Watch out, Drew Brees wants to be the best that he can be. In 5 years, he will become a successful entrepreneur. He is working on it very hard, and very smart.