Bay Area Vibe

Everyone in NYC wants to be a star in some ferociously competitive industry, like finance,  entertainment, fashion. Every waiter wants to be a rock musician or top chef or something. Everyone’s very ambitious, yet the elites turn out to be old, white, male, tall, and business-y.

As an ambitious, driven person, the NYC atmosphere suited me better than Chicago, where I lived for the first 3 years after college. Chicago is a great city, but it’s definitely Midwest. People get married at age 23 and live super balanced, normal lives. They leave work at reasonable hours to go hang out at sporting events. Not feeling compelled to get married or settle down anytime soon, I sometimes felt out of place in Chicago.

Californians are as ambitious as New Yorkers, but in a more gadgety, nerdy way. Everyone seems to genuinely believe their new app is going to save the world, whereas most New Yorkers don’t seem to consider that when they talk about their work. Unlike in NYC, the successful Bay area people are nerdy, young, and not always white, male, or tall. I am nerdy, young, Asian, female, and average height. No wonder I keep going back to the Bay!

Here’s some photos of new places we hadn’t gone to before: French Laundry, Muir woods, Napa, Sonoma.

Staying with Anna at Mobi Headquarters

I’m trying to write some shorter posts because Anna said all of my posts are pages and pages long. Here’s a short post:

When Anna invited us to stay with her in Lincoln 30 minutes from MIT, Dilip was like, “I don’t know…” I told Anna I’d try to convince him.

Winding up the green, wooded driveway, we both said, “Let’s stay a few extra days.” I said this without even seeing the house- the sparkling smell of the air was enough. Maybe I was just overjoyed to be back on US soil.

A VC gave Anna and Nii the house for their headquarters. Although we didn’t use the underground movie theater or roof deck hot tub, we made good use of the gigantic pool. I loved all the light coming into the house- many walls were windows and the sunroof in each room made the air bright. Also who knew there was such a thing as doors in the back of your closet opening into the laundry room so you could put clothes straight into your drawers from the laundry machine? And there was a tiny treehouse and groomed grassy fields flanked by trees to tumble around on.

In addition to Mobi, Anna runs the Vehicle Design Summit and is doing a fashion startup Lorien. Anna grows corn and other plants in her greenhouse area and prepares yummy foods for us that I devour while imagining murderers creeping into the huge house through one of its million entrances to take showers or something. Every time I pass the sauna I speed walk in case there’s a sweaty murderer lurking inside. This is why I need a pack of ferocious dogs- to alert me of squirrels and murderers.

Push Past Pain To Pleasure

Although I sometimes make a comment that makes people think I’m hard hearted, like, “Oh, you don’t want kids? Great! More resources for my kids,” in reality I am a big softy. If you tell me an emotional story, I’ll probably cry, especially if your face morphs in a way that suggests pain. This is why 5 years ago when Hulu played some commercial about daily giving to poor kids, instead of muting the ad, I thought, “It’s not the kids’ fault they’re born in countries with no wifi and their parents keep having more and more kids. There but for the grace of God go I.” I looked through the website which showed brief profiles of hundreds of pathetic kids and chose about 10 that looked the most promising- one was deaf and some might have had minor health issues but they seemed like they could all go on to be high functioning members of society. Some even still had parents who were probably simply overwhelmed by an avalanche of random other worries. They varied in age from 4 to 17 and were from South America, Africa, and Asia. For the next few years, I gave about $20 a day to this program, ultimately giving thousands of dollars.

A few times a year, the charity would send me a bundle of handmade cards and photographs of my kids. These cards would say stuff varying from, “My favorite class is gym. I often baby-sit my 6 brothers and sisters,” to “My best class is maths where I got an 85%,” to “I was an orphan living in a police station until you gave me $2 a day. My favorite class is soccer.” As the cards accumulated holiday after holiday, I realized that this was a total waste of my money. There was no discernible progress occurring. I did not feel like I was making an impact. I didn’t feel the kids felt I was making an impact- they probably viewed their dutiful cards to me as some quarterly chore like filling out performance reviews for someone you knew was completely useless but was impossible to fire. Instead of feeling good about giving, I felt like this random cause was a laziness/guilt tax.

Thousands of dollars later, I eventually got around to canceling my sponsorship. Why was it that giving to this charity felt like a tax I was paying rather than a gift I was giving? Why didn’t I feel good about a great cause, a sponsorship I had initiated with only altruistic intentions? For a long time, I wondered if it was because I was just an ungenerous person who would rather spend thousands on the furniture-scratching cat at her side than on deserving human beings across the world. But I’m not ungenerous- I objectively donate a lot of money to various causes. Why was it that this charity made me feel nothing? Now I think I’m beginning to understand the answer.

Part of the answer is that I can’t give what cost me nothing. This money I was sending to these kids was nothing to me. I could easily afford $20 a day- I almost never bought groceries because most of my food came from my company where I spent 90% of my waking hours. The moment I gave them my bank information and this charity stopped being a deliberate decision, it became something that cost me nothing. When you choose which brand to buy at the store, you’re making a deliberate decision that costs you some brain cycles. You choose the organic, all natural cleaner because it’s better for the environment and in case your cat rolls around in it she won’t get poisoned licking herself clean. I feel good about this action, the extra thought and effort I put into it, and this extra cost to my autopilot shopping experience matters more to me than the cost to my wallet. I don’t value something if it costs me nothing, and if I never have to think about it, then it costs me nothing.

The main project that has been costing me time lately has been fund-raising for PGSS, a nerd camp I attended in high school that went defunct in 2008 when Pennsylvania lost all its money due to financial chaos caused by evil high frequency traders.

When Joel first told me about this program, he said, “I LOVED it.”
“Did you have sex?”
“…Everything but.”
“Wow!”
“It’s great for other reasons too- when you drive up to the dorm the TA’s all greet you by name: they’ve memorized all the faces off the face book” (this was a pre-Facebook use of the term face book). Joel went on to describe how the classes were actually really hard, how the team projects were real work, how the other kids were awesome, how you get an Erdos number of 2 (or 3?) if you work on the math team project with that one ancient professor. The best part was this program was totally free! What would normally cost >$4000 per student was all free. My parents couldn’t afford to send me to CTY the summer I’d wanted to go- my dad said he was always sorry about that. I had subsidized meals from school and we were pathetically poor compared to my suburban peers. Most of Pennsylvania is not hugely rich. Outside of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania has lots of rural areas where kids don’t get to take AP classes or spend a few grand on a summer program, which meant we would be behind other kids when it came to applying to colleges, which was the ultimate goal we had been toiling towards for 12 years. PGSS was selective- it took 60-90 kids across the different districts in Pennsylvania, most of them the top kid in their high school, and brought them all together for a great summer.

Part of me had wondered if, when I left Pittsburgh, no one from Pennsylvania would hold a candle to the new people I’d meet at MIT, but that didn’t happen: apparently human intelligence is not distributed like that. The smartest people I know from Pennsylvania are still the smartest people I know, and most of them went to PGSS. Whenever I go to a party with a lot of high powered, super educated people, I run into someone from PGSS. This nerd camp is how I know all the smartest people from Pennsylvania! Well, all the ones who were high school juniors before 2008.

When I first heard about the Pennsylvania Governor’s Schools being shut down, I thought it was such a waste. I donated my $4K, the cost of sending 1 student to PGSS, figured I’d done my part, and then sat back. After not even getting any acknowledgment of my donation, I was mad and wondering how incompetent the people running this revival were. Who doesn’t even send a thank you note? And $4K is nothing to sneeze at! After all, I’m only a few years out of college. There are people who’ve been out of this program for 20 years and are richer than me! Why am I the one donating $4K when some 46 year old should be spearheading the effort with $30K or something? What’s the point of a program where 80% of the kids who go to PGSS go on to MIT, Stanford, CMU, Caltech, and Ivies, where half the people have Ph.D.’s and/or M.D.’s and/or J.D.’s (some of them all 3 degrees), and they can’t even raise enough money to get the program back? I only have 2 B.S.’s and both are completely useless! Are these brain surgeons and rocket scientists and patent lawyers too busy floating on their yachts to cut a check?

I forgot about Save PGSS and went on to donate to MIT and some other charities (a charity event is how I got this photo with Mr. Damon- he begged to be photographed with me, a real MIT Good Will Hunting genius, and I can never reject my fans). Then a few weeks ago when I was in California, there was word of a SF PGSS reunion. I brought tim rogers to pose as a 17 year old math prodigy and intended to shake hands with a few tech founders with one hand while stuffing cherry tomatoes into my mouth with my other hand before zipping away in my rented Nissan GTR, the front of which bottomed out even easier than the Tesla roadster. I couldn’t drive in the city with that thing without repeatedly asking tim if he was sure there weren’t really steep hills en route that would require my swerving into the other lane to avoid scraping the bottom of the car against the road.

At this reunion, I learned that the PGSS revival effort was basically Jeremy, a few alums, and his mom tracking down all the alumni and doing a million annoying tasks. I felt so humbled by how much Jeremy’s mom was doing for this program, a program that I had benefited from. I thought about all the ways PGSS has benefited me. For one thing, it was a great thing to put on my college application. In fact, my team project was mentioned in the application notes (everyone my year got to view their admissions notes).

I made friends that are still my best friends, people whose judgment I trusted. I think it was one of my first real confirmations that me and my dad weren’t the smartest people on Earth (thankfully one of many such confirmations). I mean, I had suspected we weren’t the smartest people who ever existed since we had, like, cars and computers and other technologies that I wouldn’t have come up with, and plus there were all these otherwise inexplicable books. But there was almost no one whose judgment I actually trusted. It was such a relief to make friends who you knew you could rely on, and to realize that you weren’t the smartest person on Earth, otherwise you’d be the one that would have to advance civilization (trust me, you don’t want to rely on me for this).

And everyone was really nice! Sometimes high school kids are mean, but every single person at PGSS was really nice to everyone else. After just one summer together, I became closer to these people than people I’d seen every day for years during high school. mitri has helped me move into every place I’ve lived since college. I’ve spent weeks at Tony’s lake house and he journeyed all the way to the Village from the Upper East Side to cut my cat’s nails. Ray let me drive his Miata even though it became clear that my understanding of manual transmission was more theoretical than practical and more nonexistent than theoretical. It’s not like PGSS happened for a summer and then was over. It touched the rest of my life. I’m still friends with these people and so proud we’re all getting more and more awesome as time passes. Everyone is either in the upper echelons of academia, working at a top company, starting their own companies- is there any other high school summer alumni base that can claim this level of achievement? I feel so proud to number among these illustrious ranks!

After hearing about Jeremy’s experiences, I said I wanted to help and added this page to his PGSS Alumni website to start thanking supporters. I want to donate a lot to the revival of this program.

Because I realized the way giving feels good to me is if I can push through the indifference zone, then through the pain zone, all the way through to the pleasure zone on the other side. After a bunch of charity events and decisions regarding allocating my wealth, I learned this about charity: if I’m in the indifference zone and it costs me nothing to donate, then it’s a waste of my money because it’ll be a laziness/guilt tax rather than a joyful gift. If I’m in the pain zone and regretting having given this much money, then it’s a waste of money because I won’t give again- I just don’t care about the program enough to have it be worth that much money to me. If I can get past the pain zone and still want to donate money, then that’s when I know I really care about the program. That’s when donating feels really good. PGSS allows top students learn and work on science projects together for free, selected on merit, regardless of socioeconomic background. What’s more inspiring than that?

I also realized that if I’m donating money to MIT, which I paid for, then it doesn’t make sense for me not to donate to PGSS, which was absolutely free. PGSS is one of the things that has touched my life in a big way- I can’t imagine life without the friends I made there. And life isn’t about what you get, life is about what you give! What’s the point of anything any of us are doing if we’re not giving back to the world?

I pledge to match up to $20K any pledges that come as a result of people reading this blog. Go here to pledge or email me or leave a comment. Your pledge will not be collected unless we raise enough to restart the program and you can make it conditional on random things like if enough other engineers/CEOs/doctors/people from your city also pledge as much as you pledge. Big donors will have honors showered upon them! For the first person to pledge more than $1K, I will blog about your greatness or topic of your choice, the only topic of censure being something too sensitive to high frequency trading strategies, although I may consider it for outstanding donations. Imagine- you could be getting investment advice from me! That’s easily worth billions.

Everyone’s in a Tech Startup!

Visiting friends at different companies around the Bay Area was an exercise in discovering which American Apparel cuts and sizes fit me best. For fully 17 years of my life I was an XS in everything. Then I entered the next phase of the Asian Woman’s life cycle where I’m generally an American Apparel woman’s medium.

In each photo I’m wearing some schwag I collected. Some friends are running startups out of their apartments, some work at medium sized places that had offices the size of my apartment, and some are at companies that have IPO-ed like Zynga, Facebook, and Google. Don’t listen to Yinmeng, Google has hands down the best food of our times. In fact, the first food I ate upon returning to NYC was Google food.

One of the parallel universe Nancy’s probably started Facespace in her parallel universe and looks at me with scorn, wondering why I’m spending so much time reading HPMOR while she’s out dominating the world. I have to show that chick I’m better than her! This HPMOR stuff is all part of my grand design.

The main impact of visiting the Bay area is that I am trying out all the things that have happened on the Internet in the last 5 years. When I signed up for twitter, I discovered @nancyhua was taken! The same thing just happened with tumblr. Hence @huanancy and nancythehua.tumblr.com. The inevitable conclusion is this: there can be only one. The race is on!

The possibility just occurred to me that, as long as True Names are still basically meaningless on the internet, @nancyhua etc could have been taken by people not named Nancy Hua… Probably always a good trade: buy domain and user names you think some future rich organization will pay a lot for. Maybe one day I’ll be a billionaire and pay 8 digits for nh.com like Facebook did with fb.com (Well played, Farm Bureau. Also flattering to know that the state of New Hampshire is so optimistic about my future greatness. They deserve the domain for now- what with having the best state motto of all time (Beyonce Kanye joke?)).