A failed entrepreneur
Posted in Authentic Entrepreneurship, Personal on February 24th, 2010 by 2above – View CommentsI 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 2nd 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
