2016, a reprospective.
It was a 💩 year. But that’s what makes it 👻
My mom used to say life is a sine / cosine graph. Yes, my mom is a middle school math teacher and I guess this is her way of saying life has ups and downs. This year was that lower end of the graph. I don’t know if this makes me feel better but I wasn’t the only one who had a shitty year:
Trump happened.
I really thought this was a no contest until 7PM November 8th. Then my Facebook blew up.
…and back in my motherland, we got rid of the worst president in our history.
I’ve never felt more ashamed of my country than this. For those curious here’s an excellent WP article that sums it up: Link
This year wasn’t the best year for me personally, either. It was one of those times where things seemed to get stuck, without much progress in both my professional and personal life. So what happened?
Pivots, Pivots, Pivots.
When I joined Instant eSports November 2015, I thought I was getting on a rocketship, destined for success. Little did I knew that joining a seed-stage startup is not really getting on a rocketship, but a rollercoaster.
Around May, we realized that our original value proposition — helping people keep up with eSports — was not a unique value proposition anymore with new competitors like theScore and ESPN eSports. The eSports space was becoming more of a content space, and we (as a team of techies) were reluctant to produce our own content. Shortly after, we pivoted from Instant eSports to Codex, an app that helps League of Legends players win more games by giving them accurate analysis of their opponents. It was a captivating idea, and we even spent weeks grinding on ranked as a team to figure out the heuristics to help people win more games. Unfortunately, we had to scrap the idea because of technical limitations in Riot’s API and difficulty in scaling to different games.
This August was perhaps the lowest point in my morale. We literally showed up to work at 11am and left at 3pm. Everyone pitched their ideas for our next pivot, and we shot down most if not all of them. It’s extremely difficult to come up with a startup idea in a meeting room, and it wasn’t the most productive use of our time. Frankly, I debated a lot whether to pursue another opportunity, and had I not had the confidence in the team and in our next idea, I might have. I knew, however, that this team has everything I imagined — from skillset and passion to team culture — and I didn’t want to give up on the opportunity to work with such a brilliant team.
We tried out another idea in September called Ramble — chatrooms for topics with your friends. It was an interesting idea especially for me because I had worked on a similar idea, Iris, two years ago. We took some of the lessons we learned from the past eight months and adopted a more rapid approach to product development. Everything we built was a test. We built a scrappy iOS / Android app in 2 weeks using React.js, shipped to around 50 beta testers, and saw how that worked out. We repeated this 2 week iteration cycle, and this helped us find a product-market fit much faster than launching a fully polished app that would take us a month with no guarantee of success.
An early stage startup’s challenge is that its product hypothesis hasn’t been fully validated yet. To overcome this, a startup must iterate fast through user feedback to find a product-market fit. This is precisely what gives startups its strength over bigger companies — the ability to move fast in short product cycles.
Essential ingredients to a successful startup team are skillset, team culture, and passion. When it came to Ramble, however, we weren’t as passionate as we were in Instant eSports or Codex. We were a team who came together with a passion in eSports and gaming. We still had office walls covered in League of Legends posters. We still played League of Legends together after work, and some times during work. Heck, we never touched Instant eSports app for half a year and we had the same number of active users. This November, we looked back on what went wrong with Instant eSports, and evaluated how we can make it better. We wanted to do content, in a much better way — one that’s more digestible, educational, and fun — like what Vox and NowThis is doing with traditional journalism. We were down to make Instant eSports great again. First, we are dropping that ugly long name and calling it: Blitz.
In 2017, I want to make Blitz the brand that people associate with when it comes to keeping up with eSports. With Blitz, I want to make eSports more accessible, digestible, and fun. I am confident that we can make this happen with our stellar team and the product lessons we learned over this past year.
Breakup.
I won’t tell the whole story here because it’s quite a personal story — if you are curious just hit me up and maybe we can get beer. Or soju, that works too. But long story short, I just couldn’t see us going long-term. About a year and half into a relationship is a point where you start to consider if this person is the one you should be with long-term, if not forever. Yes, we were really, really happy together and I loved her even at the point when we were breaking up, but I just didn’t see us a year, a decade, or a lifetime onwards. At first you would think this person is perfect, but over time, you see this person’s flaws, and each of these flaws started to overwhelm the fondest memories you had. The past year and a half was still one of the happiest times I had, and even now I sometimes look back and miss it, but I think it’s best to keep it as precious memory to treasure.
I want to take this as an opportunity to invest in myself. I am in no position to point out anyone’s flaws — if I want to be happier then I need to first improve myself as a person. With that in mind, I set myself three personal goals for 2017:
- Hit the gym. I’ve been saying this whole year but I didn’t do it. It’s not just for going to the gym’s sake, but it’s more for getting over my biggest flaws: postponing my to-dos. Fortunately, I’ve been at it for a month so far. If any of you are reading this and see me next year, feel free to ask me if I am keeping up my streak.
- Get a car. At the beginning of the year, I calculated the costs and found it’s actually cheaper to get Uber all year instead of having a car. However, I am beginning to realize that owning a car comes with not just transportation, but freedom to go wherever, whenever you want. Want to practice photography in Marin? Want to hang out with a friend in Sunnyvale? I can do this anytime I want if I have a car, whereas if I use Uber, I feel bad every time I see that fat $50 one way Uber cost. By the way, I am probably going to get a MINI.
- Practice photography. I always thought my iPhone 7 is enough for taking good photos. I took some good photos with iPhone 7 in my trips this year, but whenever I see quality photos from my friends with their DSLRs on Facebook and Instagram, I feel like my photos could be better. I gave up on DSLR last year because I always thought they were bulky and hard to learn. Now, I feel like I am only 24, and if I am this reluctant to learn new things now, then I would be even more reluctant to learn when I get older. That’s why I want to pick up a new hobby now that I have more time, and photography would best complement my career as a designer.
For 2017.
When I think about life as a sine and cosine graph, it means two things:
- When you think things are going well, that’s when you get complacent and are prone to falling off.
- To go back up again, you must invest time and effort into your personal and professional goals. If you solely think it’s going to be better because you just had a bad year and not really improve, nothing will change.
I think my 2015 was pretty good — I learned a ton as a designer at Box, joined an awesome team at Instant eSports, and I was having a blast in my personal life. Looking back, maybe I was a little complacent this year. For 2017, I want to try my best and make Blitz successful. For 2017, I want to improve myself as a person and accomplish the three goals I set. This blog post is a promise with myself and everyone who reads this. At the end of next year, I hope to look back and say — 2017 was 🔥🔥🔥
p.s.: One more goal I left out — I am going to hit Plat in League. I consider it as a part of my professional success.
