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On Having Kids

The excellent luminary and essayist, Paul Graham, articulates what it’s like to have kids and why we shouldn’t be afraid -- a younger me may have been cynical enough to dismiss it but now I whole heartedly agree as a parent.

We project our current selves out 10 years and think we’ll be the same person just older and armed with the same perfected knowledge we have now. However we definitely think we are much smarter and wiser than our younger self. We never quite reconcile those conflicting thoughts and I’m guilty of that as well especially when it came to parenthood. I was so wrong years ago about parenthood and that peak adulthood experience would be before having a kid.

A lot of that has to do with the “selection bias” Paul refers to where pre-parenthood we only notice kids and how it makes us think of the parent experience:

when things were going wrong. I only noticed them when they made noise. And where was I when I noticed them? Ordinarily I never went to places with kids, so the only times I encountered them were in shared bottlenecks like airplanes. Which is not exactly a representative sample.

Now as a parent, I see kids everywhere I look. Most of the time they are quietly observing the world, they are sharing a touching moment with their kin and friends, or they are just eating something (kids eat and drink a lot!) -- very much the definition of living. Having a kid reminds me of what it means to be living and being human. It has taught me empathy!

I think the word Paul chooses to describe moments with your own kids as a “kind of peace” is closest to articulating how I feel.

And while having kids may be warping my present judgement, it hasn't overwritten my memory. I remember perfectly well what life was like before. Well enough to miss some things a lot, like the ability to take off for some other country at a moment's notice. That was so great. Why did I never do that?

I too can recall life before partnership and before kids. Before finding a partner, it was filled with constantly finding distraction and luxuriating in freedom I never truly exercised except in a few narrow realms. After having a partner, any loneliness was lost and we had plenty of happy moments. But as Paul says,

there are more after kids than before. Now I practically have it on tap, almost any bedtime.

On the occasion of the 2017 Cannes Lions Creativity Festival, I spoke with Victor Wong, co-founder and CEO of marketing tech company Thunder and his journey to building a creative management platform business he hopes will compete with Adobe.

Forbes interviewed me about the story behind my entrepreneurship and Thunder

Staying the Course

Sitting in a Lyft the other day during rush hour traffic, I couldn’t wait to get to my destination. Checking the traffic apps, it appeared we were on course with the best travel time.

Without warning, the Lyft driver pulled us out of the lane and turned to a side road and floored it for all of 1 block before screeching to another halt. He glanced at the GPS as it attempted to reroute us -- only to suggest we go back to where we were. Again, he darted to another road, progressively taking us off our original course but at least not having us sit in the traffic -- or so he thought.

I furtively checked my phone to see if we were actually improving our estimated arrival time but only saw the time tick up. The driver rhetorically asked me “This sure beats traffic right? We’ll be there faster.”

As I hostage in a moving vehicle, I could only bob my head in acknowledgement and offer a mention of “the GPS seems to say this will take longer.” The response: “GPS is just leading us into traffic.”

In the end, we arrived 10 minutes later than the estimate if we had just stayed the course and our route looked like a roundabout journey to get to the destination but I’m sure it felt like time went faster.

This errant ride made me ponder what compels people to ignore the data in front of them. You are on course and while it may not feel like the fastest journey, you still feel the need to detour. I suppose it’s human nature, but that can certainly work against us as we make incremental progress on the best path forward.

How many times are we on course but just don’t feel like we’re making progress fast enough, only to detour the long way because the original path feels like the progress had been too incremental and the other way initially feels faster -- and then, we arrive later than we would have had we just remained steadfast?

The economics of running a restaurant in SF, NYC and LA. Guess CA has some advantages

New York restaurants merge the low-margin world of food businesses like grocery stores with taste-predicting industries like Hollywood.

My dream... sounds like a nightmare.

#restaurants

The methodology behind our story on Broadway economics

Wished I had gotten those Hamilton tickets when I had the chance

Platform seeks to enable creative that's better aligned with programmatic targeting.

I remember when we first started PaperG 8 years ago and the actual moment we were brainstorming ideas and searching for domain names. Since then, the company has grown incredibly to over 70 people across multiple offices with some of the biggest companies as clients.

Deciding to rebrand the company was another big decision but the timing felt right to reflect our ambition to be the dominant creative platform in the post-Flash world. We want to be the creative management platform for global brands to ensure targeted and consistent messaging across channels, regions, and teams. The new brand would have to convey how powerful our solution was and how it helps our customers rise above the noise.

This week we announced our rebrand to “Thunder” and I’m looking forward to the years ahead as the company achieves its vision.

Westeros is in the grip of a sovereign debt crisis. Queen-Mother Cersei needs to hire an economic advisor before the money runs out

In a 2014 interview with Rolling Stone magazine, George R. R. Martin, the author of “A Song of Ice and Fire” (the series on which the HBO show is based), complained that fantasy authors often fail to engage with economics. “As much as I admire Tolkien, I do quibble with him… What was Aragorn’s tax policy?” Martin – unlike Cersei – has thought deeply about the economic systems underpinning his imagined world, so it’s worth taking a closer look at how they function. For Cersei’s predicament, it turns out, largely derives from her failure to understand the nature of international credit.

#economics

The Numbers: The EPA values a life at around $9.7 million. The DOT puts its figure at around $9.4 million. And the FDA values a life at about $9.3 million. Columnist Jo Craven McGinty explores the reason the government puts a dollar figure on the value of a statistical life.

In 1950, the U.S. Air Force asked Rand Corp. to develop a strategy to strike the Soviet Union if the order was given.

“Rand was crunching thousands of numbers on flight range, different kinds of planes, how much fuel was required, what kind of weapons could the planes carry, what was the cost to make them,” said H. Spencer Banzhaf, an economist at Georgia State Universitywho documented the Cold-War origins of the VSL. Rand concluded the Air Force should fill the skies with clouds of cheap propeller planes.”

Under the plan, only a few of the planes would carry nuclear bombs, but the Soviets wouldn’t know which was which. There was a significant downside: The casualty rate would be high.

“The Air Force general said what about the pilots?” Mr. Banzhaf said. “Rand said it didn’t include the pilots because they couldn’t come up with a number.

The Air Force rejected the plan, and Rand started over, but it continued to struggle with how to account for airplane crews.

It wasn’t until 1968—almost two decades later—that an economist named Thomas Schelling hit upon the idea of using consumer responses to everyday risks to calculate what he dubbed the value of a statistical life.

#economics

Gus Fuldner had no insurance background when he joined the ride-hailing company two years ago. His secret? An unusually high tolerance for fine print.

It’s been 8 years since Gus stepped into my life and I gave up trying to be the smartest person I know. This guy funded PaperG when it was just a few guys and idea and guided us as a board member through many challenging times. Glad he’s finally getting the much overdue recognition!

#uber

If I ask you, “What do you want out of life?” and you say, “I want to be happy and have a great family and a job I like,” it’s so ubiquitous it doesn’t mean anything.

“How do you choose to suffer?” is more important and far more interesting.

My theory of what makes someone interesting is what they do that I would never do because of some conviction or desire that I can’t comprehend. If you want a more interesting life, I think it’s great to ask yourself what would you suffer for?

Kaizen Resolution

With the new year upon us, I’ve thought long about what I’ve learned in the last year and what I hope to learn over the next twelve months. One concept I’ve become familiar with and have embraced, especially after a trip to Japan this year, is “kaizen” (which means improvement in Japanese with the connotation of “continuous improvement” in modern usage).

It’s easy to lose motivation if every day you look at how far you are from your goals but if you look at every day as an opportunity for incremental improvement, you can feel the progress easier. Scott Adams explains this in his concept of systems versus goals where having a singular goal may be demotivating but having a system to improve in an area is more likely to succeed.

To be the master of anything, I believe it’s a matter of continuous improvement and I know that it is not going to happen overnight or even over a year.

I was fortunate to witness the culmination of decades of such skill mastery in Japan when I dined at Sukiyabashi Jiro, made famous by the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi.

This master chef produced the best sushi I’ve ever had over the course of 30 minutes, seemingly effortlessly, but thirty years of perfecting his craft is what really produced the artfully executed meal. That experience reminded me of some wisdom in the documentary about Jiro:

Shrimp Dealer: “These days the first thing people want is an easy job. Then, they want lots of free time. And then, they want lots of money. But they aren’t thinking of building their skills. When you work at a place like Jiro’s, you are committing to a trade for life.”

Jiro: “Once you decide on your occupation… you must immerse yourself in your work. You have to fall in love with your work. Never complain about your job. You must dedicate your life to mastering your skill. That’s the secret of success and is the key to being regarded honorably.”

That exchange left me thinking about entrepreneurship and leadership. You have to be committed for life to mastery of these areas to be any good at them -- it has for me often meant no free time, no easy job, and no mounds of money.

I can say I have fallen hopelessly in love with the work, which means suffering through the downs and enjoying the ups. I can’t say I’ve never complained on the job, but I can say I’ve never complained about the job.

I resolve that each year that I can claim to have become better at what I do and remain optimistic I’ll reach mastery someday.

#entrepreneurship

What a Sunken Swedish Warship Says About Project Management

While traveling in Stockholm, I visited the famous Vasa museum, which is basically a giant ship raised from the water and enclosed inside a building. The ship itself is an impressive sight given its size and ornate decorations as the Swedish king’s flagship but what’s more fascinating is the story behind it and how the lessons from it are applicable today to really any project.

The king ordered the construction of the Vasa during a war with Poland. This ship was to be the first double cannon deck vessel for the Danish fleet. However, the Danish never built one before so they hired a Dutch shipbuilder to do it since the Dutch had been building these types of vessels for a while. Unfortunately, the Dutch shipbuilder they hired had never built a double cannon deck before.

After years of construction, the ship was finished and on its maiden voyage, it sank in less than a hour while still within the Stockholm harbor where it was built. The flagship basically tipped too far to the left cause of a gust of wind and as a result, took on water since its lower gun deck flooded as it was too close to the water. The fatal flaws in the design were that the ship wasn’t built wide enough, the gun deck was too close to the waterline, and there wasn’t enough ballast stored to keep the ship from tilting widely. Over a dozen sailors and much of the pride of the Swedish armed forces went down with the ship.

It was pretty embarrassing and a largely avoidable catastrophe. Apparently there were several major mistakes that any project could learn from:

Hire a person based on the right experience. The king made a fatal mistake by assuming that because the Dutch built these types of ships, that any dutch shipbuilder could do it. Often times I’ve seen companies hire people because they had the right brand name on their resume but the reality is the person never did what they are now hired to do.

Sign off on the spec only after reading it carefully. The king couldn’t get compensated for the lost of the ship because he technically signed a contract for the ship to be built as it was. He didn’t evaluate the specs fully or thoroughly enough but instead just assumed that someone else had down the proper measurements.

Test thoroughly and early before shipping. The king actually did test but didn’t do it well. Before a ship was released from dry dock, they would simulate winds by having the crew together run from one end of the deck to the other to try to get it to rock. The test was done right before the Vasa was to be released from dry docks. The test did show that the ship would sway too easily but they had already built the boat. I’d wager they could have tested things a little more earlier which would have made telling the king that his warship wasn’t ready yet. This leads to the last lesson.

Build open communication channels. No one wanted to tell the king that the ship sucked. Everyone wanted to tell the king that it worked cause the project was already delayed. No one had any upside to telling the king. The king did not build an atmosphere of trust and transparency where people would feel rewarded for being accountable and open; instead, they feared the king and didn’t want to be the one to nay say.

I certainly learned something from my time in Sweden. That and don’t trust the Danish army when they say let them into your city and they won’t harm you.

Every man made system has a weakness whether international or not. It is impressive sometimes the length people go and the ingenuity displayed to hack the system.

Time Traveling Salesmen: Selling future technology paradigms

As PaperG introduces a completely new way to build ads at scale, I’ve noticed a lot of customers asking us similar sets of questions that made us wonder if we were explaining our value proposition properly or if they were listening to us at all. What I realized was that they had a checklist of questions developed over the years from evaluating other technology providers based on the status quo paradigm. They were evaluating the future based on the past way of doing things.

It was akin to evaluating a microwave for re-heating food based on the criteria for a stove top pan like evenness of heat dispersion, pan stickiness or durability over intense flames. It’s not that the microwave is strictly superior to the old way of doing things but it perfected a use case for re-heating leftovers and making it more convenient.

In many ways, selling a new technology paradigm is like being a time traveler coming from the future where that paradigm is the norm and ubiquitous and you need to convince someone in the present why everyone today is crazy.

I think about the first guy who had to sell enterprise cloud storage -- some sales leader from Box or Dropbox probably. Going into an enterprise that is used to only buying on-premise hosted storage solutions, you’d be faced with questions that overlook all the benefits of the new way of doing things and instead position you poorly given an outmoded way of thinking. Today though, cloud storage has overcome doubts of security and reliability and is the new paradigm that everyone will evaluate new solutions against.

It’s not that the cloud or the microwave solved all the problems of the users better than the solutions they sought to replace, but the world changed what primary benefit they valued the most and would rather have over all other tradeoffs. Over time as the new technology paradigm emerges, it’s possible it becomes superior in all ways but it’s not necessary so long as the world increasingly values the main benefit of the new technology.

So how do you sell the future in the present? If you came from the future and knew something would be ubiquitous eventually but in today’s world from the evaluation criteria it may seem silly, then how do you convince people to buy?

I am convinced they solved it by re-defining the evaluation process by getting the customer to first accept the premise of where the world is moving and tracing it to some big bang moment that unlocked the new opportunity. If you saw that more enterprise users were getting more devices and being more mobile thanks to the smartphone, you would know that you’ll have to support a distributed storage model that was easier than on-premise. You’d value the benefits of the cloud much more and may overlook its downsides. If you saw that the average household had less time to prepare meals as both parents started to work, you might anticipate that convenience and usability might trump taste and therefore value what the microwave brings.

For PaperG, it’s explaining that we’re moving to a world of infinite ad sizes and ad versions thanks to the advent of programmatic media and targeting. You can’t be caught up on customizability for every version. You need to think about scale now.

To sell the future to the present, you need to connect the dots first of where things are going. Otherwise, the future will look like a crazy outlier rather than the logical next step.

#entrepreneurship

fascinating look at how leather became popular and its economics

I believe in increasing access to information. Most content is subsidized and only made possible by advertising. People who go out of their way to avoid helping pay for the content shouldn't be proud of that fact but many are unfortunately. As an industry, advertising does need to improve so people don't feel the need to avoid it. Targeting has gotten better to ensure relevancy but we haven't quite fixed the creative problem. Rich media drives consumers insane by hijacking the web experience through takeovers and expandables. Normal display ads aren't intrusive but often fails to get updated cause it's too hard so ads get repetitive fast and can feel annoying. It's also too hard still to just design a simple good looking as with the right messaging and frequency/sequence. My hope is to make it easy to create ads so advertisers can make better ads, consumers can enjoy better ads, and publishers can sell more ads. We will all enjoy a better Internet as a result.

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