About
About This Site
This is my personal site where I share my own thoughts and opinions on random things, but mainly on tech, startups, finance, and my own journey in creating generational wealth for my family. If this sort of thing piques your interest, I hope you’ll come back to read more.
For the nerdier tech folks who are curious about what I’m running this site on, it’s a basic Jekyll site running on GitHub Pages. I didn’t want an overly complicated, bloated blogging system or CMS. This was lightweight, did exactly what I wanted, super fast to deploy, and aside from the cost of renewing my domain, didn’t cost me anything else.
About Me (Short Version)
I live with my wife and our four amazing kids in the Greater Seattle Area. I grew up in the Pacific Northwest but spent about eight years living in the San Francisco Bay Area, before moving back.
I self-identify as a founder, investor, engineer, and marketer. I previously co-founded and successfully exited a startup, and currently work at a fast-growing tech unicorn. I have a background in Computer Science, specializing in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn.
My Myer Briggs is INTP. My Enneagram is 5w6. My Chinese Zodiac sign is a Boar. My Horoscope sign is an Aries. Note, I don’t follow any of these. Just listing this here more for fun. I’m also an Agnostic Atheist.
When I am not working or spending time with family and friends, I enjoy reading, learning, coding, woodworking, traveling, dabbling in electronics, snowboarding, and 3D printing. Some day I hope to find the time to learn to fly and get my pilot license.
About Me (Longer Version)
The Vietnam War
Both my parents came from Vietnam, which at the time was one of the poorest countries in the world. It didn’t help that their entire childhood was marked by the hardships of an ongoing war, which only deepened their struggles. My dad dropped out in the sixth grade to help earn money to support the family, while my mom left school in the ninth grade as the war intensified and safety became a growing concern.
When the war finally ended, Vietnam had become a communist country. Martial law was declared, and the capital of South Vietnam fell to the North, triggering mass panic, as many, including my parents, tried to flee the country. Fighting for their lives, separated from family and loved ones, and boarding overcrowded boats in a desperate attempt to escape, they became refugees.
At a refugee camp in the Philippines, my parents met for the first time. There, they would stay for months alongside other displaced refugees, not knowing when they’d be able to leave, hoping for resettlement in another country. Eventually, they fled separately on different boats and container ships, making their way to America. Months later, by chance, they met again and formed a relationship, bonding over their shared experiences, trauma, and hardships.
Financial Woes
Eventually, they settled in the Pacific Northwest, where I was born and raised. Life, though, was a constant struggle. My parents were two uneducated immigrants who fled their war-torn home, leaving behind everyone they knew and loved, who came to a foreign country where they didn’t speak the language, with nothing but the clothes on their backs, trying to build a better life. There weren’t many job opportunities for people like that.
As such, I grew up poor, borderline in poverty. While we were lucky enough to have avoided homelessness, there were so many times my parents couldn’t afford to pay rent, when our utilities were shut off due to multiple missed payments, and times when even the bare essentials felt out of reach. Despite being on government assistance programs like welfare and food stamps, it just felt like it was never enough. I share all this only to say I deeply understand what it means to grow up struggling.
When I turned 15, both of my parents were laid off from work due to an economic downturn. They struggled to find jobs, and with no savings or family to lean on, they were in serious trouble. A family friend suggested they move out of state to find work. Being an ignorant, rebellious teenager, I didn’t want to leave. After arguing for two weeks and going nowhere fast, my dad said that if I decide to stay, I need to understand that they couldn’t afford to support me. Without hesitation or even thinking clearly about the situation, I said, “Okay, I’ll be fine”. While my mom was not okay with this, my dad eventually convinced her to let me stay.
I called a friend whom I had only just met about a month earlier, had the most ridiculous ask, in seeing if I could stay with him and his family for the next three years while I finish high school, since my parents were moving out of state. In a surprising turn of events, he didn’t mind at all as long as his mom said okay. She agreed, on the condition that she could speak to my parents first to make sure I wasn’t a runaway. They met, talked, and the next thing I knew, I was moving out at 15 years old to move in with a family I had only just met. My parents packed what they could into the one car they had, left everything else behind, and moved the next day. Looking back, it was both incredibly selfish and unbelievably surreal that any of this even happened.
Figuring Things Out
For the next three years, I continued finishing up high school and worked multiple part-time jobs to earn a living. My friend, now roommate, was huge into computers, and through the osmosis of living with him, I started getting into computers and programming as well. Oddly enough, I never considered pursuing it as a career. Instead, after high school, I decided to study biochemistry and pre-pharmacy with the intention of becoming a pharmacist. Junior and senior year of my undergraduate studies, I got my pharmacy technician license and worked at a variety of different types of pharmacies, only to realize I hated the career.
With no backup plan and not wanting to continue school with a different major, I got into real estate investing because my college roommate at the time was into real estate investing. I wasn’t really passionate about becoming a real estate investor, but I figured it was better than nothing. I eventually bought several condominiums. During this time period, it was really easy to qualify for mortgage loans, despite the fact that I shouldn’t have been qualified at all. Months after closing the deal on my last condo, as you might have guessed, the real estate market crashed, leading to the global 2008 financial crisis.
At this point in the story, I simply thought to myself, maybe real estate wasn’t the path forward after all. And just to recap, in case it’s not clear, I had dropped out of school, quit my job at the pharmacy, acquired several condos whose value was significantly less than the mortgages I now owe on them, had practically no savings, and the economy had just collapsed, where jobs were quickly becoming scarce. And you already know, I don’t come from money. So yeah… I wouldn’t want to be me either at this point.
I ended up renting out all my condos and, in a desperate attempt to survive, lived off what little money I did have and credit cards. I ended up moving in with my girlfriend at the time (who is now my wife). Long story short, another friend who was investing in real estate was getting out of it for the same reasons, and we began talking every day to try and figure out what our next steps would be.
Soon, he told me he met someone online claiming to be making $50,000 a day. I thought he meant $50,000 a year, but no, he did mean to say $50,000 a day. My reaction was “doing what, selling cocaine online?”. You have to understand, during this period of time, blogs barely existed, MySpace was still the dominant social network, Twitter hadn’t taken off, and nobody was sharing how much money they were making. Coming from a poor blue-collar background, hearing numbers like that sounded preposterous.
Learning About Affiliate Marketing
Intrigued, my friend and I wanted to learn more about what this guy was doing. And I swear it sounded so sketchy when he first told us. He said he was making $50,000 a day selling ringtones. Keep in mind, this was during an era when Nokia green-screen dumbphones were dominant. I couldn’t wrap my head around what he was saying. This made it all the more difficult to understand because nobody I knew, who had cellphones, went out of their way to buy custom ringtones. Essentially, I told him, make it make sense.
He explained that he was an affiliate for several ringtone companies, that he bought ads on Google and MySpace, and anytime someone searched for something like ‘Britney Spears ringtone’, or sees his ads and clicks on them, if they sign up to download ringtones, he’d get a commission. The difference between his cost for buying ads and his commission for ringtones was his profit margin. And he was earning $50,000 a day in profit from the sheer volume of people coming through his ads and downloading ringtones. I still remember that moment vividly. It was like getting hit by lightning. Everything suddenly made sense.
I was already in a deep hole, and going back to working at the pharmacy or getting a different job wasn’t going to solve my financial crisis (putting aside that the job market was abysmal). I was all in. So my friend and I decided to learn affiliate marketing together and attempt to do the same thing. This is the part of the story where I am supposed to tell you, it worked, I made a bunch of money, and miraculously climbed out of the mountain of debt I put myself in, right? Of course not. We lost money. Money that I really desperately couldn’t afford to lose. Not understanding what we did wrong, we went back to ask our affiliate buddy what we did wrong.
This is where he proceeded to explain that he spent the last couple of years and lots of money building a custom tracking system to help him measure how his ads performed so he could optimize them for success. It took a lot of work and testing in order to get to where he is now, earning as much as he was. That would have been nice to know before we spent money buying ads blindly, just expecting it to work. In hindsight, that was obviously dumb.
Necessity is the Mother of All Invention
So my friend and I tried looking for a tracking system, but in those days, ad tracking platforms were really made for enterprise clients, not two dudes who dropped out of school looking to make money doing affiliate marketing. We couldn’t afford any of the tracking solutions that existed, so out of necessity, we decided to build our own. But being new to all of this, we didn’t know what to build. We tried asking our affiliate buddy for guidance, but honestly, he was pretty cagey and private about how it all worked. So in a desperate move, I ended up signing up for hundreds of forums, spamming all of them if the forum was remotely related to finance in some way. The gist of the message was something like:
My friend and I are new to affiliate marketing. We're trying to build a tracking system so we can measure how our ads are performing, but we don't know what we need to build since we're new to all of this. So here's the deal. If you need a tracking system, tell us what to build. Help us understand why this feature matters. In exchange, you can use our tracking system for free. All we ask in return is for a bit of your time and feedback on how we can make this tracking system awesome. Here's our contact info...
Unsurprisingly, I woke up the next morning to being banned from most of those forums and my posts deleted, but enough people saw my message that we had roughly between 30-40 people reach out. We jumped on calls with everyone, created our own free forum for them to join, and created a makeshift Digg/Reddit-type page where anyone could post a feature they want, and others could upvote if they wanted the same feature. The highest upvotes became the roadmap. It was a simple system but highly effective. Two months later, we had a working prototype that we and those members were actively using, and started to make money from this. I was far from out of the hole I dug myself, but at least I was now surviving with money coming in.
It was around this time when one of the members in our group asked a question that forever changed everything. He asked, “Have you guys ever thought about selling the software?”. To be frank, no we hadn’t. We were so busy trying to build this software and make it work, we never considered turning it into a business. But it was a great question. My friend and I who had been building this tracking system, decided to be co-founders and start a SaaS business together. Next thing we knew, he, my girlfriend, and I moved to San Francisco (because that’s where all the tech companies were). And that’s how I accidentally co-founded a startup and got into tech.
If you’re interested in the full story and details about my startup journey, I’ll cover that in a separate post.