m-cubed resumes..from Up North
Hello! After what seems like an eternity(10 months in Internet time) since I last wrote here, I have decided to resume. This might easily be my physical attempt #11 (and mental push #253) at maintaining a consistent stream of thought in writing. The ghosts of my blogs past often flash before my mental eye each time I attempt to write. However, persistent effort is my saving grace here ☺ Besides, if at first you don’t succeed, then try, try again, right? I digress.
This resumption of writing coincides with a few big and exciting changes in my life.
First, after 11 years and numerous adventures of all sorts, I moved away from Silicon Valley to Toronto! The reasons are varied, and I may get into them in detail at another time. I can say that I have been thinking about this with gradually increasing focus over the past 2 years. More importantly, I am excited to begin life in a major world city about which I only knew a little from visiting a few times. Toronto has seasons (unlike SF of course), maple syrup, amazingly diverse and rapidly expanding urban architecture, strong ethnic diversity (and this is coming from a longtime Bay Area resident), and, well, much more. I’ll save my detailed emotions for another post, but will say that Toronto will feature regularly in my narrative here on m-cubed.
Second, after almost 8 years of working together, I’ve very amicably parted ways with my co-workers and co-founders at Dynamic Signal. I’ve worked with many of them at Adify too. This decision, from inception to execution, unfolded over a full year; it was hard. 80% of my professional life up to this point was with some of these guys. But, I am glad I did it, and also glad to have built amazing relationships with many many of the team members from Adify and Dynamic Signal. A number of my personal and professional attributes were honed (some voluntarily, some subconsciously) during my time there. At the end, I am thankful for coming out more experienced, educated, aware, patient, and resourceful than when I went in. Many major startups lessons = learned.
Third, I am working on my own venture! It is a gamified messaging app called Hynt; it lets users create hidden messages and simple+fun instructions for their friends/audience to reveal these messages. The app sits at the nexus of casual gaming, messaging, and social networking. Much more on this very soon! Creating something from scratch and making it helpful to many has been a dream, nay, a passion for as long as I can remember. The underlying desire to build new ideas/objects/procedures/software that can positively impact as much of the planet as possible is an idea that in my head is almost as old as myself. It took shape in many forms over the past 20 or so years. The earliest instance I recall was opening up my own open-to-all-for-50c library with my uncle’s vast book collection (and unbeknownst to him, and therefore getting into trouble) at age 9. Then came the business plan for a virtual reality service that allows people to shop for groceries or visit tourist destinations all from the comfort of their own home, back in 2001. It only took the world about 15 years to catch on to this ;) I kid, kinda. This idea came in as a semi-finalist in a nationwide student business plan competition in Ireland along with a good friend. Then at Stanford, I learned lot and had a ton of fun co-organizing innovation showcase events at Stanford as part of BASES, with him and him. After becoming a working professional, there were a Foursquare-checkins-based-avatar iPhone app (with this good friend)and a Twitter-feed-classification web service (that essentially allowed you to rate each tweet as ‘funny’, ‘silly’, ‘interesting’, etc. kind of like what Buzzfeed do at the end of each article). Some got me publicity, while others taught me many lessons on failure, though I am not as witty as this great man in phrasing takeaways. Now, it is onward and upward with Hynt.
So: new city, new country, new endeavour, new friends, new place to live, [insert other suffixes to ‘new’ here]. However, after many many years, I feel like I am once again at the stage in life where my personal and professional direction and motivation are firmly in my control. (If it is not evident that I am a little overwhelmed, then, well, I must not be a good storyteller.) I am excited for what lies ahead, about building new relationships, inheriting new lessons, crafting new experiences, and forging new ways to make a positive (and ideally substantial) mark on this planet. I hope you’ll drop in on this journey, even as just a spectator. I foresee sharing it in writing will remain a challenge, at least for now and the near future, but I will do my best. Comments, suggestion, encouragement (& venture capital), all welcome ☺
