Moved to ahtang.com

Moved to www.ahtang.com. I've moved so many times :(. Hopefully, this is the last time (unlike last time lol).

Summer is here in Silicon Valley

I just realized it's been 6 months since my last blog post. How time flies! Here's what's been happening so far.

In late Oct 2011, I attended the legendary (at least to me) Y Combinator's Startup School 2011 in Stanford university (Thank you Paul, Jessica and Y C crew). It was a very unforgettable and rewarding day. I finally got to see many celebrities in the startup community in person, Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andreessen,  Max Levchin and Aston Kutcher :) just to name a few. Here are a couple of photos I took there (sorry about the terrible layout, it's blogger's fault):

One funny comment one of the speaker mentioned was a lot of startups are a lot like the South Park episode: Gnome. If you don't have time to watch the video, there's a wikipedia page. The business plan includes 3 phases: 1. collect underpants 2. ? 3. profit

I went back to Hunan province, China during Christmas to vist my parents. It was cold as usual. I got sick for the most part of the trip. But it was good to be home. A lot more ex-colleagues in Shanghai got cars now. About half of the people who went to dinner with me in Shanghai drove. I think only one person or none had a car when I left for the U.S. in 2008.

I attended the 2012 CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas in Jan, 2012 right after I got back from the holidays. It was an event I wanted to see for a long time. But it turned out to be a big disappointment. I like to interact with people and attend pannel discussions when I go to conferences. CES is more like a big trade show. If you're into gadgets and enjoy spending time looking at numerous electronics products with little differentiation, it's a good event. Otherwise, save yourself some money and don't go :). I'm speaking from a non-business attendee pont of view. If you go on business, that's a different story.

The only highlight of CES was seeing many Chinese companies coming up with Android devices. I especially liked the ones at Huawei's booth. They feel good holding in my hand and run the latest Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0) version of Android. Here is a photo of the booth:

It rained for 3 weeks or so here. For a State that's famous for its sunshine, that's a long time. It finally stopped raining a week ago and weather has been really nice since then. 

I saw a Techcrunch article: Stop Looking For A Technical Co-founder last week that really resonated with me. I find it very true that "Most quality software engineers today have offers of amazing work environments and 6-figure salaries from the likes of Google and Facebook. Few are crazy enough to say no to that. Those that do typically have their own ideas, aren’t sure they need you, and have heard enough cliche pitches to ignore you by default."

Fortune's article Warren Buffett's $50 Billion Decision was also a good read. "Although I had no idea, age 25 was a turning point. I was changing my life, setting up something that would turn into a fairly good-size partnership called Berkshire Hathaway. I wasn’t scared. I was doing something I liked, and I’m still doing it." If you're 25 and are reading this, this (doing something you like) is probably the best advice you can ever get.

If you're like me, living in a country other than your home country, this New York Times article probably will make you home sick: The New Globalist Is Homesick. "Like Mr. Valencia, 20 to 40 percent of all immigrants to the United States ultimately return to their native lands. They know that Skype is no substitute for actually being there."

economy is pretty unstable

Nothing much to update lately. Economy seems to be very unstable lately. Wall Street had a couple days loss then up and downs. Over all pretty bad performance on stock market.

London has suffered from riots all over the city. My colleague who moved to California last year told me he and his wife used to go to some of the places where riots happened.

Summer is almost over. A couple of interns last year returned as full-time employees. Current interns will be going back to school soon. We'll have enough snacks and food in the cafeteria soon :).

I've hit my one year mark at Google in July. So far so good. Interesting projects, smart people. I've learned a lot, especially in internet and mobile advertising space. I like this space because a lot of innovation can happen. The barriers to entry is still not very high. I often tell people that :" you & I can sit down for a few hours and start an internet advertising business.". It's not rocket science, publisher sends a request for an ad and ad server respond with a creative. Real ad serving is not that simple ( you have to deal with tracking, reporting, frequency capping, targeting etc). But you get my point.

Rumor says iPhone 5 or 4GS will launch next month. My AT&T iphone4 still has 1 year contract. So I'll skip a generation as planned.

Things move relatively fast. So we'll see what happens in a year.

HBO channel showed Katherine Heigl's movie "life as we know it" on Sunday afternoon. I watched a little but didn't finish it. Her last movie I saw was "the ugly truth". She seems to be good at playing sweet yet kinda tough girls. 

Summer time (some news updates and thoughts)

As more and more attention shift from traditional media to new media, it's no surprise to see some old media companies struggle  from recent earnings announcements.  There's no question that mobile ads will grow as more and more people adopts smart phones. some recent news that caught my eye
Is Apple's iAd dying a slow death? 7/8/2011
Steve Jobs Says 'Most Mobile Advertising Really Sucks' 4/8/2010
It doesn't seem like Jobs has figured out this one. But Apple's recent financial performance has sent the company on the trajectory to be the highest market cap company. The #1 right now is  Exxon Mobile ($419B). Apple right now is $364B. Google right now is $199B.

Here is Google's very own Vic Gundotra's Mercedes-Benz ad:

A few interesting articles

• if you only advertise on iAd, you're only reaching 27% of the market according to tech crunch.
• No body is buying your app now what? 
• For as little $50, you can test out names with AdMob
• What do Warren Buffett and Marisa Mayer have in common? They both invested in getaround according to WSJ

p.s. if you haven't read in the plex, Charlie Munger recommended it at Berkshire's annual meeting. 

bonus video Jawbone boombox. It's a really good portable speaker. I tested one out at San Jose airport.

Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham

I spent the weekend finishing reading a book. I wonder how good Pirates of the Caribbean 4 is.

Just finished the book I wanted to read for a long time this weekend. Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham. I learned a lot from the book. Highly recommend for people with a tech background.

I think if you want to focus on high tech industry. You can save your $150, 000 investment on going to a business school. You can learn just as much, if not more, from good books and resources available on the internet.

I learned a lot from series of videos Paul's Y Combinator, a silicon valley incubator, shared on the internet. Here are some of the YC videos I enjoyed in the past:

Groupon's Andrew Mason

Airbnb's Brian Chesky

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg

SXSW 2011 notes

The above image has nothing to do with my experience with SXSW. It's the first image that came up from Google image search for "sxsw girl". Trying to see if this increases readership if I put random attractive female picture on my posts.

3/11 Day 1

I test drove Chevy Volt. It's an electric car for the first 40 miles or so. When the batteries run out, it runs on gasoline. I didn't think it's such a revolutionary car like my colleague does. Certainly not for the $33 000 price tag.  But I praise the marketing people working there. Chevy hired the fight folks. They did a good job generating buzz for the car.

The most interesting session is the one Brain Wong a 19 20 year old entrepreneur held about how to succeed being young. Later, his company Kiip received $4 million funding and is generating buzz. 

3/12 Day 2

My colleague was very impressed about the conference. He made a comment something along these lines: "All these wonderful things could be happening right now and we would have no clue if we weren't here". I think a big part of SXSW interactive is about generating serendipity and there's plenty of it.

Another thing I learned at a session is stop listening to your customers. Don't bore them with your surveys. Observe your customers instead. I think it's a very useful advice. People often lie or can not articulate about their needs. This resonates with another useful advice, especially for girls. If you want to know whether someone loves you, do not listen to anything he/she says. Only pay attention to what he/she does.

Life after YC is a very interesting session with founders from Airbnb, dropbox and two other companies I can't recall (one of which Jessica Mah is the founder). 

Keynote from Seth Priebatsch is good. He is in his early 20s and have done some cool things. No excuse for the rest of us:).

Frog's party is less interesting this year after hearing the augmented reality toilet thing they did last year. Nothing particularly memorable.

The rest:
Groupon's marketing person did a funny session about corporate creativity. I start to pay more attention to the text they write on their web pages. 

Keynote by Chris Poole from 4Chan is kinda boring. I think it mostly have something to do with his presentation skills and my unfamiliarity with 4Chan. Now my profile image on my instant messenger is from 4Chan.

Google party is okay. At least there is a Google party.

Vimeo party is awesome. It's a rave party in a power plant. Well done. 

In conclusion: It's a cool conference if you have some $2 000+ to spend. Or if you have never been to Texas (like me). For the lucky ones working in marketing department in some startups, it's a conference where you get made, paid and laid.

SXSW 2011 notes 3/10 day 0

Ever since I got back from South by South West or SXSW this week, I got some questions about the event. So this will be a relatively long post. If you work in the tech sector, it's hard to avoid hearing about SXSW in the past week. All the major press have some coverage for this event. In this post, I hope to add some of my personal takeaways and share some of my thoughts about the event. So you don't have to spend money and vacation hours to be there. 

SXSW is a conference/festival held at Austin, Texas every year. It contains 3 major parts: interactive, music and film. Traditionally, Music has been the most well-known portion of the event. However, this year, more people attended interactive than music. 

I attended the interactive portion this year from 3/11-3/15. Everyday, there're around 300 events scheduled in Austin Convention Center and surrounding hotels. Events includes keynotes, pannel discussions, presentations, core conversations, meetups and etc. Every night, there're at least 7 or 8 industry parties organized by major companies like Google, Microsoft and 20 or 30 parties organized by startup companies like Foursquare, Groupme. 

While sitting at San Francisco airport terminal, the first thing I noticed is that almost everyone on the flight is going to SXSW. I convinced my colleague Suresh who recently switched job to Product Manager in search to come with me to attend SXSW. Since he want to go again next year. I guess I've made the world a better place by influencing one person at a time ;). Suresh is Indian. I'm Chinese. Neither of us have been to Texas before. I kind of felt like the movie Herald & Kumar where an Indian and a Chinese go on a funny trip. 

Just before we boarded the plane, we noticed a prominent silicon valley angel investor, Dave McClure, is about to board the same flight.  Dave gave me his business card last time I met him at a SXSW meetup in San Francisco. I had no idea who he was at the time. He sat 3 rows behind me. I had a hunch that I'm going to the right place this time. 

After we landed, I noticed there are a lot more white people around us compared to the bay area where there are a lot more Asians. I've occasionally heard things like rednecks and roadkill about Texas from Californians. So I was a bit alerted about the environment and surroundings. The rest of the trip proved me that it's unnecessary. I was surprised how nice people are there. I had a great time in Austin. Suresh said he want to stay there forever:).  

We spent the rest of the day checking in the hotel and getting our badge at the convention center. Getting our badge before the 1st day proved to be one of the best decisions we made on this trip judging the length of the line the next day. 

It's good to see Google's "old friend" Aol's presence at SXSW:

Smiley Media opened its office to host a party with free booze. I've never heard the company before. But hard to resist free drinks. The office is in a very nice hotel building which I can't recall the name. The interesting thing about the office is that it has a secret room behind the book shelf. What a brilliant idea.

Going to Warren Buffett's annual meeting this year

So I've told a few friends that I am going to Berkshire Hathaway's annual stockholder meeting this year in April. I got very polarized response. A few friends are very excited. I also got laughed at quite a bit.  So before anyone laugh at me again. Let me explain why I am going to Nebraska in April.

For those who get excited, it's easy. Warren has been a great investor. Beating S&P500 consistently in 5 year moving window over 46 years. It's like if you invested $19 at the beginning, your investment becomes $95,000 now.

It's quite remarkable if you think about it.  Consider making money by investing is similar to flipping a coin, In effect, Warren's firm has been winning the game of flipping cois in the past 46 years or something like that, you know what I mean.

In the annual letter to shareholders which Buffett published last weekend, he mentioned: "When Charlie and I met Todd Combs, we knew he fit our requirements.". Although Warren is in great shape, we can't ignore the fact that he is over 80 years old. He is not going to be with the company for that many years. Finance  and investment is something I was interested when I attended business school from 2008-2010. Now I'm back in technology. I feel that if I don't attend a Berkshire annual meeting soon, the annual meeting might be different without Buffett.

Basically what triggered me booking the flight tickets is the following in Buffett's letter :"Come to our Woodstock for Capitalism...". For those who are less familiar with American culture, WoodStock is "one of the biggest rock festivals of all time and a cultural touchstone for the late Sixties" according to Wikipedia.

To prove that I was interested in investment, I did a quick stock analysis last year. It was made in a few hours. So it wasn't very detailed. But it was a good call. The stock price has gone up almost 100% since I did the analysis. STEC analysis

View more presentations from Alan Tang.

Another reason I wanted to go to Omaha, Nebraska is that I just got my first DSLR camera (I got a Canon T2i or 550D for international model. 18M pixels). I wanted to get out more and take some pictures. I think if it isn't for Buffett's annual meeting, I probably wouldn't visit Nebraska. There're still a lot of places I want to (re)visit (Italy, Greece, Spain, France...)

Here is my first picture taken outside my employer's laundry room while waiting for my laundry to finish. I disabled flash and the picture come out much better than what I got before in similar low light situation with a point-and-shoot camera.

Android gaining ground

I was surprised by Android's success a few times this week. One is from a youtube video visualizing activations over time.




Another one is after Gingerbread release hit my Nexus One Android phone, I posted a twitter message. Within a day, a few people replied my tweet. I've never got much response from my hundreds of past tweets. I was surprised to find out there're people out there who cared about Android OS releases on Nexus One.

I've also played around the Xoom tablet. It's pretty sleek. However, I'm still gonna buy an iPad2 when it comes out next week. Pretty similar reason why even though I have 2 Android phones (Nexus One and Nexus S), I still use iphone 4 on a daily basis.

jobs at Google and DTS

A Google mobile ads product manager I work with is trying to hire a few product manager in mobile ads. If you think you're qualified, please drop me a line.

My friend's company DTS (Dolby Lab's competitor) is hiring a couple of PM, Biz, tech positions in LA http://www.resumeware.net/dts_rw/dts_web/job_list.cfm. Let me know if you are interested.

Google's acquisition

I found a very interesting image detailing Google's past acquisitions. Too good not to share :)

bets on mobile

Entrepreneurs in technology industry like to make bets. They bet on technologies such as PHP, JSP, ASP/.Net; Oracle Database, MySql; iPhone, Android...They bet on the kind of business to go into.  Perhaps the most important decision an entrepreneur can make is what business to go into.

I recently read Tony Hsieh's book: Delivering Happiness. In The book, he mentioned that the most important decision a poker player can make is which table to sit down. I really agree with that.

In retrospect, I think Tony didn't pick the best table to play his cards. He mentioned that Zappos made $100 Million in enterprise value annually on average. It translates well in to its $1 Billion sale to Amazon 10 years after it was founded. $100 Million a year seems to be a really big number. But when I look at a few companies in the mobile space, I realize wealth was created much quicker there.

For example, Admob was acquired by Google for $750 Million less than 4 years after it was founded. On average, it created about $200 Million a year. Twice as much as Zappos.

After a few months working in the Internet industry, I'm convinced that there're still a lot of money to be made in this industry.

Google TV thoughts

There is one thing I agree with Steve Job's talk this Wednesday. That is listen to the users. I really liked the new Apple TV from the demo. It's small and simple. It does HD streaming for movies and TV shows that's it.  There're only power cable, HDMI, Ethernet connections at the back with built-in wifi. What Apple learned in the past 4 years is that people don't need another computer on their TV. I hope Google TV gets that.

I think Google is trying to catch up on user-friendliness. Unfortunately, people tends to hire people who share similar traits. Collectively, it's hard for Google to design products that are very easy to use, good quality and elegant. Because Google engineers are hired to solve difficult problems not to listen to the users:).

I'm turning into an Apple fanboy

I got my first Mac computer a couple of weeks ago after my friend Rahim described me what a versatile platform it is. I ordered my ipad online because it's sold out in 4 stores near Sunnyvale. I even called a store today to make sure they had it in stock. But when I got there 1.5 hours later, they were sold out.

I use Nexus One Android phone and really want Iphone 4. However, I liked Tethering support on Froyo (Android 2.2). It helped a lot when I first moved to the bay area since there was no internet in my apartment. I could just use my laptop's wifi and my Nexus One as an AP. I got decent Internet speed for browsing and chat. Also, when I visit countries outside the US, unlocked Android will really help my phone bills. Because I can basically buy a local pay-as-you-go plan and not pay outragous International roaming.

Before I started my job at Google, I went to Yellowstone national park in Wyoming. It was a very good experience. I camped by the lake with a few friends. We even rented a moter boat and had a fun ride on the lake.

Very useful battery saving Android apps

The biggest problem I had with my Nexus One smartphone is battery life. It took me a while to figure out how to extend it. So now with the help of three apps I am able to use the phone for a day and have about 50% battery left. Usually the battery just dies within a day.

1. Advanced Task Cleaner 2.0 which allows me to add apps to auto kill list. It is a useful feature because multi-task drains battery. Automatically killing apps running in the background you don' t need saves battery.

2. Advanced Task Killer which allows me to kills apps instantly. It's like task manager in wnidows.

3. JuiceDefender. This app almost doubles the battery life. It disables 3G and other services while the phone is in sleep.

I think I'll get Iphone 4 in 2 months when it becomes readily available. Now I just need to decide whether to get a ipad or not :).

Some updates

There has been a lot of changes in my life. I don't really know where to start. So basically I studied 3 years Engineering in lovely Belgium. After getting my Bachelor and Master's degree I returned to Shanghai as a software engineer. After 3 years in Shanghai, I decided to get a MBA in the U.S. After 2 years MBA school, I finally got my MBA degree last Sunday.

When I look back, it all start to make a little bit more sense now. Just like Steve Jobs said in his famous Stanford Commencement speech: "you can only connect the dots when you look backwards".

So much for my student life. On the technology front, I recently started using a macbook pro. After many years struggling with the PC, I have decided to make the switch. It surprises me that Mac has became a very versatile platform both for daily internet use and development. I've been using the macbook pro for over a week now. Didn't miss my Dell laptops a bit.

I don't have my windows 7 setup on the Parallels Desktop yet. So occasionally I would go back to my old laptop for school email, play music at the background stuff. Now it's summer, my dell xps laptop gets very hot. In case you didn't know, I had the hard drive, mother board, lcd screen and heat sink replaced in the less than 2 years time I owned the xps m1330 laptop. Dell's 3 year extended warranty is good. But it's a poorly engineered laptop. Latitude line seems much better. But it wasn't available at the time through my business school's purchasing program.

Another surprisingly pleasant benefit on mac is that it's super simple to setup Android, iPhone and PHP development environment. I used Ubuntu on my dell Inspiron 510m before and had a lot of problem with the upgrades since I don't upgrade regularly. So I had to revert to Debian on the Inspiron. However, Debian requires a lot of time to take care of the hardware drivers and setting up the system. So long story short, I've setup an Android, iPhone and PHP development environment on my MacBook Pro in less than 2 days. I can also do my day to day internet stuff. MacBook Pro has acted as a versatile platform. The best computer experience I ever had so far. Don't see myself going back to PC anytime soon.

Since I have the Nexus One, I am trying to see if I can develop some simple app for fun. Let me know if you're an android developer as well. We can share some learning experience and bounce ideas off.

OOB for two weeks or so

Out Of Blog because of secret project again. Will update with details in 2 weeks.

Work till you can not work

Just finished "reading" the book called "Free" by Chris Anderson who authored the famous book "Long Tale". I used "read" because I actually listened the whole book while driving and on my trip to Silicon Valley for my job interview.

It's a brilliant book. It explains the "freemium" and "googleconomy" pretty well. I gained additional insight into the Internet industry. It even helped adding information to some of my responses of the interview questions a little.

The title of this post is from an article I was reading today. I was trying to solve an issue caused by the upgrade of my older laptop's Ubuntu's version to 10.04. I managed to get a work-around so the laptop can dual-boot Ubuntu or Windows XP. I certainly missed the days with Debian when I didn't have to deal with much upgrade issues.

As I was dealing with the Linux distribution, I wanted to know what Linus Torvalds is up to. Then I started watching a tech talk he gave to Google about Git. The next person I thought about was John Carmack. Then I started reading an interview someone had done with him. In the interview he explained the beauty of programming and said something like: you don't rely on anybody else; you just use your computer and work until you can not work.

This reminded me the 10000-hour rule mentioned in Gladwell's book "outliers". I read this book briefly before. Now I loaded the audio to my Zune player (as a poor student, can't afford a ipod). I'll "read" the book the second time thoroughly.

OOB for a few days

OOB (out of blog) for a few days because I will be on a trip to Mountain View, California till Friday. Then come back in Friday evening for the MBA end of the program Awards dinner. 

4 weeks till I finish the MBA. Hectic times. Hopefully good times.