Victor Wong

Life's Problems Worth Solving

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 17:10:05 -0800

Many conversations with other twenty something year olds out of college seem to gravitate inevitably towards what we’re doing with our lives — as in, what’s the point in what we’re doing and should we continue doing it? I often hear people ask what is “the narrative of my life?” as though their story will be told to posterity, which is an interesting way to examine what you’re doing and whether it is worthwhile.

After listening and participating in many of these dinner table conversations, I’ve settled on a framework for myself specifically and possibly more generally. I think it’s far easier to wonder “what does the world need” rather than “what do I want to do.” One is concrete and the other is fuzzy, if not whimsical. Before money and glory, I think people want more than anything is to feel like they have an impact on what they work on and that what they work on matters on some level. By pursuing “what the world needs” it’s far easier to avoid things that don’t feel like they don’t matter since you probably are already unsure whether it’s what you truly want, let alone whether it matters to anyone else.

I’ve decided for myself that the problems most interesting and worth spending my life solving break down as follows:

Access to Information (data, news, know how, etc.)
Access to Capital (funding, credit, etc.)
Access to Sustenance (food, air, water, etc.)

These basic inputs have massive “leverage” or multiplicative effects on output for people. Improving access to these inputs enables people to do a lot more in their respective fields and improves living conditions everywhere. On a high level, information helps people do anything better and make better decisions. Capital enables people to pursue opportunities otherwise impossible or risky. Sustenance simply makes life possible and enjoyable.

I will go into further detail in what I’m doing, what I want to do, and why I care about each problem in coming posts.

I’m sure there are other fields that have large impact that I may be missing. What are big problems that you are happy to work on for the rest of your life or that you know other people are dedicating their lives to solving?

What's Wrong With the Teenage Mind?

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 14:49:18 -0800

What's Wrong With the Teenage Mind? :

How earlier puberty is affecting society and people. Interesting take on how teenagers need more real world experience and perhaps less schooling to make better decisions.

"In a fight between a grizzly bear and an alligator, the terrain determines the winner."

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 13:00:06 -0800

“In a fight between a grizzly bear and an alligator, the terrain determines the winner.”

- Unknown

Helping the Little Guy: How Local Businesses Can Beat Walmart and Amazon

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 03:31:05 -0800

There’s something noble and attractive about the little guy standing up against the giant. We feel special and better about ourselves when we go to the local mom-and-pop establishment and give them our business — I know I do. I also know I don’t feel that way after I leave Starbucks or some other huge chain. Apparently, there’s a new trend for people to even rebel against giant web retailers by shopping at smaller online stores.

Yet, we all still frequent these same giant retailers. Why? They price everyday and popular items at the lowest rates. They are ubiquitous and convenient.

So how can the small guys compete with the big guys? This problem is something I spend an enormous amount of time and thought on — why I work on making display advertising work for local businesses so they have the same reach and capabilities as their largest competitors.

Thinking about these small brick and mortar retailers, I’ve concluded that they need turn their weaknesses into strengths if they want people to go to them for more than the occasional “feel good” purchase.

The rise of Amazon.com in particular has exposed several deficiencies of small local retailers:

Poor Selection. Amazon has the largest product selection because it isn’t constrained by local physical inventory capacity.
High Prices. Amazon can purchase items in bulk at such scale that it often gets the lowest prices for many products.
Physical Storefront — Amazon doesn’t have the cost of maintaining storefronts
Labor Costs. Amazon doesn’t have staff people to personalize experiences or address issues. Instead, Amazon can suggest purchases through data mining and clickstream data.

To change these disadvantages into advantages, local brick and mortar shops need to rethink how they design their retail experience:

Focused Selection. Local retailers need to curate product offerings and offer fewer choices. Amazon.com has 1,000 different brands and products for any given need which make choosing something quite difficult. Local retailers can learn from Apple and stock a very limited selection of items so they only have “the best” solution for a particular problem.
Special Products. Local retailers need to stock non-commoditized items. Any product that can be traced to a product number (ISBN or SKU) is always mass produced, mass marketed, and mass discounted. Local retailers need to focus on stocking more locally produced items or uniquely distributed ones so they aren’t competing on price directly.
Faster Delivery. Amazon.com can do 1-day shipping if needed but it cannot do same-day delivery yet since its fulfillment centers are too far from many consumers. Local retailers can offer same day pick up which needs to be emphasized more, but going further, they could make use of couriers to offer same-day delivery.
Human Service. Amazon.com doesn’t make it easy to reach a human being when you have a return or a problem. Shopping locally should be a human experience where a person is always there to help. The labor costs are really marketing costs as Zappos looks at it — when else do you get the undivided attention of a customer and chance to convince the customer to spend money with you.

The little guys need to be scrappy and change the terms of the battle. They have a fighting chance and I hope they win.

"Entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled"

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 14:59:57 -0800

“Entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled”

- Inc. Magazine - “What’s an Entrepreneur”

The Quiz That Shows How Human Decision Making Fails

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 08:50:05 -0800

The Quiz That Shows How Human Decision Making Fails:

Interesting demonstration of how humans tend to make the wrong decision based on framing.

"Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when..."

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 12:38:37 -0800

“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

- Thomas A. Edison

Resolution: Taking A Stand

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 17:03:05 -0800

One resolution I’ve made for 2012 is to take a strong stance on more issues. I’ve always felt some people are too opinionated about things they don’t know enough about, which probably made me overcompensate and not form strong opinions to share. Some friends have pointed out that even when I know a lot about things, I often times don’t take a strong position about them. Instead, I comprehensively recite both sides of an issue, but I don’t pick a side for things like:

Is this startup idea good?
Which design looks better?
Who deserves more from a partnership?

I used to think the easiest think to do is to have a strong opinion while the harder part was having a true understanding of both sides. However, a good friend recently shared the following with me, which completely changed my perspective:

Strong opinions are important because you need to believe in something to guide your decisions in order to accomplish anything. It’s the difference between being an author and a book reviewer. The author has to decide what is important and what should be cut and what the point of the book is. Every word that is in the book is there because the author decided it should be there. The book reviewer can read a book and comment on the decisions that were made by the author, but he will never be able to write a book because he can not make the important decisions, he can only comment on the decisions others have made.

Being well rounded and understanding that both sides of an argument have pros and cons is easy. It’s moving past that and making a decision that is hard. As an entrepreneur by definition you can’t be content to accept both sides of the coin and sit idly by. You have to consider both, and then fully commit to one. Strong opinions lead to vision because only when you have made a decision about what is important and what is right can you start to see how the future should be.

So maybe by having stronger opinions this year, I’ll have a better sense of what’s coming the following years. That seems worth trying for at least.

What are the most common cognitive biases seen in the Silicon Valley?

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 05:55:06 -0800

What are the most common cognitive biases seen in the Silicon Valley?:

I wrote an answer to this question on Quora. There are few things more interesting to me than the intersection of behavioral economics and startups.

"All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake..."

Sun, 25 Dec 2011 10:00:05 -0800

“All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did.”

- T.E. Lawrence

Hiring The Best and Those Even Better

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 16:15:05 -0800

Reading the biography of Amazon.com’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, I came across this quote on hiring:

“One of [Jeff’s] mottos was that every time we hired someone, he or she would raise the bar for the next hire, so that the overall talent pool was always improving,” said Nicholas Lovejoy, who joined Amazon in 1995 as the fifth employee. Bezos put the philosophy this way: Five years after an employee was hired, he said, that employee should think, “I’m glad that I got hired when I did, because I wouldn’t get hired now.”

I thought this is a terrific approach to hiring. At first, it seemed to conflict with some common advice about hiring only A-players. How could you hire better people in the future if you already were hiring the best?

I realized the way to reconcile these bits of advice is that there are A-players for different stages of the company and also some A-players who can scale across stages. Hiring people who will do a great job at the current scale and have the potential to punch above their weight class can still leave room for “even better” future hires who come from even larger scale organizations where they succeeded. In spite of how far I’ve taken my company, PaperG, from its inception, I am still in awe of outside executives interested in working with us who have far more experience and success to date from their times operating much larger companies.

PaperG is in the midst of a mini-hiring spree (expanding the team by about 20% in a month) to help us as we scale the business to enable some of the largest media companies go after one of the most exciting markets, local advertising. In some open positions, we just need to compare whether the new hire is much better than someone already in a similar position.

In other open positions, we have to think whether the new hire will be doing a better job than a founder could if he did it full-time. It’s a high bar — but even founders should want to feel lucky they were the ones to start the company and not be the ones who are applying for the competitive position.

"I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the..."

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 14:34:02 -0800

“I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.”

- Steve Jobs

Grit is the Secret to Success

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 01:05:05 -0800

Growing up, I always believed anything could be accomplished through “sheer will.” Most childhood challenges for me fortunately related mostly to school work so it was easy to see the linear relationship between time spent and output. As I grew older, I began to wonder if “sheer will” was enough, especially as I entered into more and more competitive academic environments where my peers were smarter at certain subjects than I was or at least knew better ways of doing things.

I started to wonder if there were just simply shortcuts I didn’t know about or if I should do something with a more obvious proportional or exponential outcome from effort. Thankfully, that belief in “sheer will” persisted, and I’ve come to realize that anything worth doing in life is hard and many people just give up, which means it’s a whole lot easier to win for people who are just persistent. Often times, this has been why I succeeded when I probably shouldn’t have.

I’ve always struggled to find the right term for this characteristic since “sheer will” somewhat ignores the external pressures and challenges and focuses on your own drive. Recently, I’ve stumbled on a worthy contender — it’s “grit.” It captures well the hardships you need to go against to succeed. A recent Fast Company article does a good job defining someone with grit as possessing:

A clear goal

Determination despite others’ doubts

Self-confidence about figuring it out

Humility about knowing it doesn’t come easy

Persistence despite fear

Patience to handle the small obstacles that obscure the path

A code of ethics to live by

Flexibility in the face of roadblocks

A capacity for human connection and collaboration

A recognition that accepting help does not equate to weakness

A focus and appreciation of each step in the journey

An appreciation of other people’s grit

A loyalty that never sacrifices connections along the way

An inner strength to help propel you to your goal

Apparently, having grit is the top predictor of success according to a University of Pennsylvania study, which makes me feel a lot better for having relied on this characteristic so much to get through life. You can actually quantify this characteristic by taking a grit test devised by the study. Try it! If you don’t do well, I’m sure that can change over time through enough effort and persistence ;-)

Is It Irrational to Give Holiday Gifts?

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 10:00:05 -0800

Is It Irrational to Give Holiday Gifts?:

Interesting take on gift giving by a behavioral economist:

Behavioral economics has one more lesson for gift givers: If your goal is to maximize a social connection, don’t give a perishable gift like flowers or chocolates. True, people enjoy them, and you don’t want to impose by giving something more permanent. But what are you trying to maximize? Is your goal to avoid imposing on them or for them to remember you?

Behavioral Economics Study: scarcity imposes huge mental burden

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 17:31:58 -0800

Behavioral Economics Study: scarcity imposes huge mental burden:

An interesting new study suggests that the poor have more to think about in terms of trade-offs which costs them financially.

The Hardest Thing in Life To Do

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 16:52:00 -0800

From Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:

“Which road do I take?” (Alice)

“Where do you want to go?” (Cat)

“I don’t know,” Alice answered.

“Then, said the cat, it doesn’t matter.”

“If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.”

I’ve come to realize that the hardest and most important thing in life is to figure out what you want, the rest is a lot easier. Once I have something to orient my actions towards, I can make plans, go forth and do. Until then, I feel paralyzed by indecision since I don’t know how to decide what is the best action to take.

What you want has to be very specific to be useful. It’s not enough to say “I want to be happier” since there are so many ways to be happier that you still don’t know what to do. You have to decide what specifically would make you happy. That way when a good opportunity comes by, you will recognize it immediately as what you need to succeed and can act on it. Otherwise, plenty of good opportunities will pass you by which you don’t know how to use since you don’t know what you’re trying to accomplish.

So if you ever find yourself unsure of how to decide where to go or what to do, it might help to ask yourself what you want first.

"You tend to get told that the world is the way it is, but life can be much broader once you discover..."

Sun, 27 Nov 2011 17:43:05 -0800

“You tend to get told that the world is the way it is, but life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact; and that is that everything around you that you call life was made up by people no smarter than you … Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”

- Steve Jobs in PBS’ “One Last Thing” (via lilzet)

Future of Retail: Why It Won't Be Empty Windows

Sat, 26 Nov 2011 10:18:05 -0800

Recently, I received a nice postcard from a friend who was explicitly trying to prop up her favorite dying US agency — a beautiful, thought though likely futile effort. It made me wonder about the future of businesses that primarily operate offline.

The Internet through the spread of email has permanently disrupted the main business of the US Postal Service, and the uptick in shipping packages to homes from e-tailers hasn’t quite made up for the lost business. That fact surprises me as I consider my recent Black Friday experience seeing many retail spaces remaining empty, big box stores appearing desperate, and online stores doing better than ever. The future of retail feels like it will be largely online with offline delivery for anything that doesn’t have to be consumed or used immediately. Such a future feels a little bleak when you try to imagine all the empty street windows.

That said, I don’t think that could really come to pass since some equilibrium will be reached. I have started to wonder what would keep retail spaces filled and bustling with business. I’ve come up with five ways this would be possible:

Experienced based retailing. I believe either offline retailers are going to have to be like Walmart or be like Apple in the future. They won’t be able to charge a 20-50% markup on a pure commodity shopping experience; instead they must produce an amazing retailing experience or they must simply have cheaper prices than the Internet has to offer.
Pop-up retailing. Internet companies have already begun this season tocreate pop up stores in cheap, empty retail spaces. These pop up stores enable online stores to have a real world face.
Online Sales Tax. Federal enactment of such a tax would remove the uneven playing field that sites like Amazon enjoy right now. This would certainly help make offline prices more comparable to online prices.
Better Online-to-Offline Advertising. If there was a way to use the Internet to better market and direct customers to offline locations, then bricks and morters would have a chance. Right now, most online advertising focuses on online-to-online conversions (something I’m trying to change through PaperG).
Advertising retailing. It’s possible that retail spaces will get so cheap that they become effectively three dimensional advertising spaces. Brands can rent out the space and fill it with their goods supplemented with representatives to answer questions.

Some or all of these will likely to come true. I hope so because I would hate to live in a world of empty windows.

"Dreamers need the realists to keep them from soaring too close to the sun. And the realists, well..."

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 12:08:00 -0800

“Dreamers need the realists to keep them from soaring too close to the sun. And the realists, well without the dreamers, they might not ever get off the ground.”

- Cam from Modern Family

Founding Foodies: Gourmet Startups

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 17:03:48 -0800

As a bit of a foodie myself (just made Yelp Elite! screw useless Foursquare badges. I can’t eat them), I’ve always been fascinated by entrepreneurship in the food space. I still can’t believe the crap most people eat and that there aren’t better choices available for some people. People are forced to eat unhealthy take out food or junk food because of a lack of fresh, tasty options. Here are some of the coolest ideas I’ve seen to address this problem:

Gobble lets you order meals from neighborhood chefs. It’s basically a marketplace for locally prepared, healthy meals that can be picked up or delivered. Strangely, I came across this Internet startup first in the real world when they set up a kiosk outside a building I was at. The food they prepared was terrific for $9 and I would gladly use their service again if they setup outside my office building. However, after trying to use their service online, I realized there were two shortcomings still: (1) can’t sort meals by neighborhood and (2) delivery fees are quite high. I realize the first problem may have more to do with the lack of enough chefs still given the early stage the marketplace is at. There aren’t any local options for me that I can easily pick up in North Beach or in the Financial District so I would consider delivery except I wouldn’t pay $10 for delivery for my own meal. Once this startup gets critical mass on the customer and chef sides, it will be quite powerful.

Kitchit tries to democratize fine dining by enabling you to book a top local chef to cook for you and your guests. This service certainly isn’t for everyone as it normally costs $50-$100/person but if you host fancy diner parties, it could be a great solution.

Stockbox Grocers is trying to get rid of “food deserts” — low-income areas that lack access to healthy, affordable food. There are a lot of urban areas where the cornerstore doesn’t stock fresh fruits and veggies, which leads to a lot of health problems. Their solution is unique: convert reclaimed shipping containers into miniature grocery stores which operate out of parking lots. I guess they redefine what it means to think inside the box.

These companies probably are just some of the many tackling the problem. In San Francisco, there’s a whole meetup called “Food Startups” which deals with it. Food is such a basic problem in life and it’s surprising it hasn’t been disrupted by the Internet yet, but it will.