Seed Fundraising in 2013 after Y Combinator

Raising our seed was totally different from raising our series A, which I did 12 months later. Our fundraising history might look ok from the outside, but I messed up a lot. Even though our situation was atypical because of Y Combinator, hopefully some can learn from what I wish I hadn’t done for our seed, and what I’d do again. This is the story of how, when Apptimize was 6 months old, composed of consultants and 2 unpaid employees (me and my cofounder), and had zero revenue, I raised $2M in convertible notes.

I. How we started
II. What to talk about
III.  The week of demo day
IV. Who to talk with first
V. Closing the deal
VI. Mistakes with VC’s
VII. What I pitched

I. How we started

The first money into Apptimize was $50K that I put in before we incorporated. We wanted to pay our consultants: my friends around the Bay and people from hacker news. When we got into Y Combinator ~2 months later, they gave us ~$100K.

During Y Combinator, my MIT and trading friends were the first people who gave us money, not because they knew anything about what we were doing but because they knew me and know I’m a smart bet. Our founder friends also introduced us to a ton of investors.

The majority of the money we raised was through introductions through friends, such as Adi who introduced us to a bunch of amazing investors including Merus. One of our investors and friends Tom was the one who introduced us to Google Ventures during Y Combinator. He also led our Angellist syndicate. Friends were invaluable in helping us raise our seed because of the connections and advice they gave. Looking back over my notes, I’m struck afresh by how right they were about everything.

II. What to talk about

When talking with investors, I had 2 areas of discussion: topics that would lead to closing the investment, and topics that would not. Everything was either a selling point, or not. Non-selling points were barriers to go around so that we could go back to talking about Apptimize’s unique advantages. I visualized the conversation as a ride to the mobile monetization bank. I was talking with someone who, like me, believed that putting money and other resources into mobile monetization was a great idea, and I was taking them with me on this journey. If we started detouring into topics that weren’t going to lead to an investment decision, I figured out how to get us back to the freeway towards the goal. Before the end of the conversation, they had to believe that riding with me was equivalent to going to the mobile monetization bank by seeing enough signs that Apptimize would take them there.

Questions like “How much are you raising?” “What are the terms?” “How much are you going to charge your customers?” “How many people are you going to hire?” “Will some competitor do this?” were in the category of “not selling points.” There was little chance of any answer causing them to decide to invest, so the point of the answer is just to say something normal that allowed me to transition to talking about something that will improve the investment decision. The worst type of answer is the type that risks lingering over something that isn’t going to improve the investment decision, because this would waste time. Wasting time is the deadliest sin.

My strategy for these distractions was to answer in a way that didn’t invite more questioning, and transition back to the path to a decision. For example, I didn’t want the amount I was raising to be a topic of conversation because it wasn’t likely to affect the decision, so I gave a normal answer. For our fundraising environment, this was ~$1.5M. I kept all the non-selling point answers short so I didn’t derail and detour into irrelevant weirdness; non selling points were not things I had time to talk about. I didn’t want to linger at the stop signs or create unnecessary stop signs because nothing is happening there. I wanted to just check it off and pass go.

III. The week of demo day

During Y Combinator, PG made ominous remarks to me and my batch mates about how I would have no problem fundraising. It was nice that PG was so confident, but I was unsure. Preparing for demo day, PG told me, “Say in your presentation how successful you were in algorithmic trading. That’s frightening.”

A week before demo day, Tom introduced us to Google Ventures and they were the first institutional money we got for our seed. After 1 meeting, the next day MG emailed to say they were investing.

“We’re getting money!” I showed Geoff the email on my computer while jumping up and down.
“An email is not money in the bank,” he said.

In between demo day rehearsals, banking this money became my #1 goal. Google Ventures’ legal team said, “This was the fastest turnaround we’ve seen.” I kept on top of everything and made sure I got whatever docs they needed within minutes because I was optimizing for getting the money ASAP. Waiting for the wires to hit, I refreshed our bank account every hour. The few weeks I was raising, every morning when I woke up, I’d open the banking app to check for the money.

Going into demo day, with $500K+ committed but little of it banked, I was paranoid because a million things could happen- another financial crisis could destroy the global monetary system and wipe out all our would-be investors, even Google! However, I decided to always talk as though we were definitely getting all the money so that I was in a position of power while raising. In private I was preparing for the worst and called everyone I knew to ask them to invest. Until we had banked the whole $2M, I was still calling people.

We obsessed over our demo day deck. Rehearsing, I paced the Computer History Museum for hours. We kept changing our pitch up until the last moment. Asking PG to listen to an updated pitch, he exclaimed, “No, I don’t have time for this.” We slunk away as he grumbled, “You’re already doing well with investors.” We’d deviated significantly from the PG approved pitch, but we had our plan and felt good.

Demo day happened.

On demo day, after my pitch I stood at a table while investors crowded around. I did some handshake deals and enjoyed myself. Demo day was really successful for us, and we raised all the money on the most founder favorable terms possible. In the week following demo day, I had more than 25 investor meetings. Jeremy said, “Maybe you should be more selective who you meet with because we’re closing money as fast as you can take the meetings.”

I was still paranoid and almost didn’t go to burning man because the money hadn’t been banked yet.
My friend said, “You’re leaving me hanging here.”
“I can’t think about burning man right now. This raise is my #1 priority and I need help with that.”
He instantly connected me to a ton of investors. He’s amazing.

IV. Who to talk with first

Because we did well on demo day, we were connected with about 100 investors. How did I decide who to meet with in what order? I first figured out if they wanted to go where Apptimize was going. If they weren’t clearly into mobile, I put off the meeting. I also figured out how much they tended to invest. If I couldn’t figure out if it was >$50K, I would put off the meeting. The common theme behind all this was optimizing for my time. If I met with the bigger, more interested investors first, I’d have all the money sooner.

V. Closing the deal

From my experience, there are 2 main types of decision makers: fast and slow. Signs of fast decision makers include talking fast, irritability if you wander off topic, and indifference towards details. Signs of slow decision makers include lists of detailed questions, talking carefully, and wanting more of your time. Slow decision makers might be the first investors I started talking with for my series A, but they were the last ones I talked with for my seed.

Fast decision makers were my targets because my seed was about getting the money as fast as possible and moving on with life. I wanted people who could decide fast, in 1 meeting. When I met most investors, it was clear to me they were fast decision makers and had already largely decided to invest in Apptimize the instant we met. My goal was to go in there, verify their instinct was correct by being badass and answering what they wanted to know, and then getting the money.

I was constantly preparing for the moment when they investor has decided whether Apptimize was the path to the bank. The instant I sensed they’d decided, I asked for the money. This was usually 30 to 45 minutes into the meeting. It was different for different people. I didn’t try to change anyone’s mind, because changing someone’s mind (and keeping it changed) wasn’t an efficient use of my time. I just wanted to get them to decide anything, and then to get them to tell me their decision.
When I sensed they’d decided, I’d say, “Are you interested in investing?”
“Yes.”
“How much do you normally invest?”
If they didn’t have 1 number, and said something like, “A range,” or “It depends,” or “I have to run this by whoever,” I would assume they decided not to invest and figure out how to leave for my next meeting.
If they gave me a number, I’d say, “Great, I’ll send you over the docs tonight via Clerky,” and figure out how to leave for my next meeting. Easy. Despite my worries, no one ever backed out.

VI. Mistakes with VC’s

As soon as we started Y Combinator, VC’s asked mutual friends to introduce us. I was torn on whether to take the meetings because during YC you’re supposed to focus on building, not fundraising. Plus there was overall an antagonistic vibe towards VC’s. It was weird because on one hand they’re mocked as herd animals that string you along, waste your time, and pass your information to competitors. On the other hand, they’re everywhere and clearly an important part of the ecosystem.

I hated the idea that someone might waste my time, so I was often suspicious and impatient with VC’s. This was unproductive because I should’ve been either not meeting at all or figuring out what I was looking for in a long term partner. I didn’t understand anything about how venture capital worked, how VC’s are incentivized, or what they cared about. If I went into it thinking this was going to be a waste of time, it did not go well. In addition to naiveté, it was a culture clash because in algorithmic trading everyone is incredibly secretive. I’d often say, “I can’t answer that.” Thus the VC meetings only went well when it was through a warm intro or if I felt a personal connection because I became less guarded.

After we raised $2M, I should’ve stopped raising but we had VC’s who wanted to do our series A. We didn’t need the money then and I was clueless what a series A and having someone on our board really meant.
PG said, “Nancy, don’t get addicted to fundraising.”
“How did you know I’d be good at it?”
“Duh, I’ve seen more than 550 startups. Try to do the A now if you can, but stop if it gets hard.”

It took a few weeks for me to realize it was getting hard, but looking back I could’ve realized it faster if I’d known how VC’s work. This experience is what led me to realize that raising seed money is like consumer sales, whereas raising a series A is like enterprise sales. This is not to trivialize the seed- I lost 5 pounds in 1 week going to all those meetings.

After we raised our $2M, I had 40 more VC meetings over the next month that were largely a waste of time because they did not result in much additional money. We were debating whether we should just do our series A at that moment because we had verbal offers, but in retrospect we should’ve stopped, I shouldn’t’ve been so cagey, and I should’ve learned enterprise sales and how VC’s worked. I didn’t fully understand everything I’d messed up here until after our Series A, and that’s another post.

VII. What I pitched

Above I describe avoiding the non-selling points. What were my selling points? What did we actually talk about during the meetings?

My team is the first thing I explain when I introduce Apptimize to anyone. I confess my team is the best team in Silicon Valley (and thus the world) and that getting to choose exactly who I want to work with is one of the main reasons I started my own company. It’s one of my favorite things about being CEO. It’s why I’m dedicated to building the best team in the world and why the best people want to work at Apptimize. Seriously, check out apptimize.com/team and message me if you want to join us.

The next thing I’d do was show our kick ass demo. Every single person told me they were amazed. Their jaws dropped. They called over their partners to come over to look at it. They’d never seen anything like it, no one they knew had seen anything like it, and there was more magical technology where that came from.

I’d always talk about the vision. Apptimize is about reinventing mobile development. Making and maintaining native apps is totally broken and Apptimize shows people a better way. Anyone who develops on mobile can tell you all the things they hate about it because there are barriers like the app store approval process, the release cycle, the app being installed on a device that doesn’t always have internet, every minor change needing to be put on the roadmap, the difficulty in rolling back a suboptimal change, the mounting challenges in dealing with the fragmentation and variety of mobile users, the opacity in figuring out what’s working and what’s not. Is this how people are going to be making apps in 10 years? Are today’s apps anything like what apps will be in 5 years? Of course not, of course not. Apps will be better and smarter than they are right now. Mobile development will be faster and easier. Apptimize is 10x better than anything else out there and we’re going to be the drivers of that change. Apptimize allows people to innovate 100x more effectively.

The reason I started Apptimize is because we’re enabling mobile teams to innovate more intelligently and efficiently. We enable an effective process for continuous innovation. Right now I see the pain app developers deal with. I see so many apps that flounder despite a lot of work and creativity. It hurts because it’s such a waste of life. Apptimize is fixing this. It’s a no brainer. Do you want to invest?

Ambitious without an Ambition

My best friend in 1st grade was the first person who ever told me I was the most ambitious person she knew. As a kid this was easy because most people I knew weren’t very ambitious. My parents were so swamped with work they were hands off raising me, so maybe my Asianness sensed the power vacuum and stepped up so that I effectively tiger-mommed myself. (My team has called me a tiger CEO, which is maybe not entirely flattering. For example, during a team meeting I said, “Hitting this revenue target would be a B+, which is an Asian F.”)

As a kid if I underperformed my expectations, friends would try to comfort me, “You did way better than most.” This type of thinking was alien to me because I held myself to a higher standard than others. Should I compare myself to a girl born in Sudan in the 13th century and congratulate myself for being literate? Of course not- it’d be a miserable failure if I were illiterate and I should compare myself only to people who have my privileges, and I unflinchingly admitted that I sucked compared to Einstein, etc. (who didn’t have half my privileges!).

Growing up, ambition was all I had, and all I understood. I liked proving I was the best. Demoralizing friends during casual games delighted me. Once I challenged my cofounder to photograph Dustin and forced our team to vote on which anonymized photos were better. Afterwards I rubbed in my victory a lot, because, although Jeremy did the camera settings for me (“Nancy, your photo isn’t even in focus”), I was 1) president of the photography club in high school, 2) a classically trained graphic artist, and 3) generally the best at everything. I was only satisfied after he verified, “You’ve crushed my spirit.” I still get competitive about everything from how fast I am at email (I send 400 emails a week within 1 hour of receiving them) to how much Lynn loves me relative to her husband (“You don’t love me more? But you’ve known me longer”).

Ambition as my primary motivator started running out of fuel around when I started considering what my wikipedia article would read while googling myself from my deathbed. (At this time, my mom was on what I hadn’t acknowledged to be her actual deathbed (My mother does not have anything remotely resembling a wikipedia article).) I modeled my deathbed wikipedia article with the most optimistic fit springing from current data, “HFT billionaire, MIT philanthropist, personal history includes leaving at the altar Justin Bieber and Peeta Mellark.”

I noticed I didn’t feel excited by this forecast. Thus was the hallmark of a bad plan: both unlikely to happen, and undesirable to happen.

This feeling was like sighting an iceberg in the horizon. I continued charging towards the South Pole, plowing through the ice, but glanced over every once in a while- had the feeling maybe gotten imperceptibly bigger? I brushed away the suspicion of lostness because near the pole all my compasses point due South- if you blindly follow ambition, direction is meaningless. For most of my life ambition was all I had. It was all I needed. It had taken me far, and it was always there. (I can be sharkish in my inability to not keep pushing. If my life were an epic poem, my fatal flaws would include my drive.)) What would I do if ambition stopped telling me how to go?

I left HFT. I read and I wrote. I walked the earth. My world was Apptimizes all the way down. I built my team. I thought about things you wouldn’t think about unless you were fixated on specific goals that are unusual and hard.

One day I was pondering the 7 deadly sins and thought, “I grapple with few of these. Lust? As if.” I decided I could write a better religion than the Bible and wrote my own version of deadly sins with corresponding virtues:

1. long term thinking vs impatience/ short sightedness
2. curiosity/ learning vs mental laziness
3. agency/ courage vs fear/ passivity
4. sincerity vs dishonesty
5. empathy/ compassion vs cruelty
6. love for something greater than oneself vs selfishness
7. commitment/ passion vs indifference

As I was wordsmithing my list (I never finished that project), I realized I had another thing that motivated me outside of “ambition:” Nancy’s virtue #6: love for something greater than me. For one thing, I loved my team. I learned the power of teams after high school, but I also recognized that the point of Apptimize was not to provide a cozy haven for us to live happily ever after. The point was the users. They’re the thing greater than myself or my team, the ones we must love.

I admit love for users was not natural. In HFT I never had users or clients- we traded our own money because it was all proprietary. I quickly discovered users can be annoying. They are silent, and then they ask something but it’s unclear if they really mean that thing. You try to help but they don’t listen and then you have to find another way to help and suppress the urge to point out if they’d just listened the first time it would’ve been much better for everyone.

I was unkind to our first users. I feel sorry for our early cohort and am amazed by the ones who stuck with us. I was like the crotchety, unfeeling businessman who reluctantly gets won over by exuberant wise child despite repeatedly trying to abandon her to a maid or an intelligent family dog (don’t remember if this is all the same movie, whatever). I thought I knew everything and that it was somehow all about me, but I realized when I don’t listen to our customers my decisions are confused and myopic. When I listen to them I learn so much. My users are the smart ones and I have to pay obsessive attention to everything they say and do.

The instant we had a user tell us they discovered a valuable insight, with the extra exclamation point in their email conveying excitement, I saw that customer success is what it’s all about. No matter how frustrating and exhausting, we’re nothing without our users. The smallest sign of excitement or happiness from them makes my day.

I stopped thinking about my own achievements or my team achievements and started thinking about our users’ achievements. Instead of how much more badass I would be, I thought about how much more badass our users would be. Instead of being ambitious for me or my team, I am ambitious for our users. Instead of my wikipedia article saying anything about me taking over the world, I think of how our users’ wikipedia articles say they took over the world, and it won’t mention Apptimize because our users do it on their own and we’re just one of the ways they figured out how to kick more ass.

Everyone on our team from sales to engineering has woken up at 6am and stayed up till midnight to take customer calls and push new builds. Once we accidentally forwarded an internal support discussion to users and were proud of not being in the least embarrassed by our casual thread- in fact we were secretly going the extra mile to make sure everything would work swimmingly. My team has worked on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Saturdays (while calling it vacation)- not for the team- but to keep our promises to our users. That’s love. That’s commitment. That’s the right kind of ambition. That’s my religion.

I’m excited for 2015 because I can’t wait to figure out how to help our users accomplish even more this year. In case you want to try out some new apps for 2015, here are some Apptimize customers who kick ass (Maybe Apptimize is installed on your mobile device right now! (If you use one of these apps and say, “I summon the spirit of Apptimize,” 3 times I’ll jump out of your phone and tell you to stop goofing off and get to work!)):

Health:
Strava: Top 10, running and biking
Omvana: #1 meditation
Runtastic: #1 fitness in 80+ countries

Entertainment:
Vevo: #1 premium music videos
Rhapsody: Top 10

Business:
Glassdoor: Top 10 jobs postings and reviews
eToro: Top 10 social trading

Social:
Yik Yak: Top 10 anonymous social media
Glide: Top 10 video texting
Flipagram: #1 free app in 80+ countries, make video stories

Travel:
cars.com: Search 4 million cars
Autotrader: Buy and sell your car
HotelTonight: Book a hotel instantly on your phone

Commerce:
Rakuten: World’s #7 largest e-commerce company
ReTale/ KaufDA: Weekly offers
OLX: Top 10 in >100 countries, classifieds
Stubhub: #1 ticket marketplace

The and My Future

“Why are you taking the 101? Can’t you see your iPhone 5 is lying to you? Its map was wrong in Santa Clara and it’s wrong here.”
“The 101 is the 280’s uglier sister. Clearly Steve jobs wanted us to take this route. Anyway now we can have a nice talk where you advise me on my finances.”
It’s funny how I’m the financial expert amongst my non-trading friends even though my opinions are almost certainly things no financial advisor would recommend to anyone.

When I first joined GETCO, I introduced myself to a new employee saying, “GETCO is my first job after MIT,” and the closest person I had to a boss interjected, “And your last.” At the time I sincerely believed and hoped that this would be true. In 2007, the company had 30 traders across 4 offices. Each trader did whatever they decided was optimal in a market that bloomed with opportunity: it was like the wild wild west- so much fertile terrain waiting to be conquered by a few explorers, populated only by some occasionally annoying but generally innocuous natives. I loved it. I never had someone telling me what to do, or really even anyone questioning what I was working on. I didn’t think about the future after GETCO because who would ever want to leave? The business was exploding, we were at the forefront of technology, and if you hesitated to size up your coworkers would make increasingly loud chicken sounds.

4.5 years later, after Singapore I went straight to my NYC desk to clean it out, then to Chicago to resign. I and everyone assumed I was going to stay in HFT because I’m a “world class expert in HFT,” plus headhunters were busy setting up lunches with billionaires with ambitions regarding their nonexistent/proto/growing/declining HFT operations. I was advised not to sign anything till the noncompete was up so I participated in some fantastic handshakes and told everyone I’d see them after my noncompete was over.

I’m not good at vacation so I viewed this year as a rumspringa world tour- I just got back from New Zealand and am writing this while jetlagged, thinking about how my paid vacation will be up in 2.5 weeks. This year I zoomed my head out of focus to see what everyone else is looking at. Let me tell you: Other People are looking at some pretty crazy stuff. I met Verner Vinge and Ray Kurzweil at the Singularity Summit. Compared to these impassioned singularity people, I feel like an ape for mentally shrugging when they bring up existential risk and AI. Nevertheless, my main impression is it’s cool these people are contemplating and perhaps helping decide a vision of mankind as a species. Most people never think about that kind of thing, as individuals or as a species. What is the destiny of mankind? Who even asks this question? Shouldn’t we wander blindly towards our fates like all other species? Aren’t we just dominant, blessed by god to be gods among animals? Anyway, the Singularity Summit led me to go to Rationality camp. This post was originally about Rationality Camp but I guess I’ll write about that some other time (sorry to leave you as irrational as ever, although I can tell you that I made $280+ from poker, won a prize despite not being the most rational (Dilip had the most points in the whole camp but somehow lost his prize to me. Yes! Plus I beat him at some kind of augmented reality game, which victories are documented photographically)).

This year has been upside down: I’ve been paid to not work, spent more time in CA than NYC, and I realized I’m old- I think I’ve aged relative to my non-finance peers. I’m 27 and I’ve started finding younger people annoying. Those fools have no idea how lucky they are. At my age, people are suddenly so hard to impress. If I were starting a company at age 17 people would say, “Awesome.” Now everyone’s like, “Whatever.” Too old to be effortlessly impressive, too young to shove offending kids off my subway seat, I’m at an age when I don’t really notice anyone else’s age unless they bring it up, whereas for years I was conscious of even a year’s difference. Looking back at my childhood, the hours reading in the grass, the biking with friends, my main impression is that an idyllic childhood is a colossal waste of time. Yes, even the priceless hours bonding with family had diminishing returns, and no one really needs to read the collected works of anybody- very few writers have anything to say after their first real book.

Sometimes I see flashes of myself 10 years in the future, so clear it’s almost a memory. This year I started seeing what future Nancy would be if I kept going down the trading path, and I didn’t feel excited. In fact I felt bored. Because it’s basically the same as always, except I’d need increasingly larger sums to get the same level of stimulation. For someone who lives so much in the future, I hadn’t really thought about what I’d think about the future after (if) it already happened. When I’m 40 will I see my 20’s and 30’s the way I currently see my childhood- objectively successful by most measures but privately viewed by myself as largely a waste of time?

I feel ennui regarding the kind of stuff people are supposed to do in their late 20’s, early 30s: the house and marriage stuff. My mom was in constant turmoil over the fact that she was too sick to see me “settled” in my NYC apartment. Prior to NYC, she had “settled” me into all apartments I’d ever lived in. Perhaps out of a desire to do what I thought she’d want me to do, I went out and bought my first furniture since she forced me to buy my mattress 5 years ago when I first moved to Chicago and needed a non dorm issued mattress. I ended up buying a $5000 coffee table made from a single solid cross section of a gigantic tree. Maybe I thought my mom would rest assured in my competence if I showed her this coffee table and other furnitures, that I was a grown up and finally handling this kind of stuff. I think I even bought a house plant of some kind, which never would have occurred to me to do in my youth. Mom just wanted me to be happy, which might not be what I want for myself. Now that I know what it’s like to have the perfect set of plates, I never want to own plates again. That stuff is all at my dad’s house now, completely out of place with his ornate, plasticky furniture.

I think I might’ve reassessed my trajectory sooner if it weren’t for the parents’ cancers. Cancer put me in a mental state of martial law where I was single-mindedly attacking obstacles without considering the problems of philosophy- who cares about higher ambitions when it’s life or death?

Now I feel like there’s more pressure. Maybe this is true for us as a species too- just as we’re most successful, there’s the most danger. Humans have accomplished a lot relative to other animals so the universe is ours to lose, plus we have to decide the extent of our future ambition. Similarly, as a kid the difference between working a little and a lot was the difference between an A- and an A+, whereas now there’s so much at stake- it’s now the difference between losing money and making money.

I’m acutely aware of being the writer of not only my writing but also of my own life. It’s exciting and scary and writer’s block-inducing to decide the next act. But from my life there’s just one thing I ask: don’t tell me how it ends.

What is Nancy Hua going to do next?

Someone asked What is Nancy Hua going to do next? on Quora and then people offered me credits to answer. Who can resist Quora credits? This question has been on my mind a lot. Whenever I dwell on something, it tends to degenerate to the terminal question, “What is the meaning of life?” How often do people think about this? Talking about my weird thoughts caused someone to tell me not to have a midlife crisis. I haven’t even said all the most outlandish things I think. But here’s another taste:

I don’t think I’ve achieved very much in life yet. Looking at people who’ve changed the world and helped so many others, relative to them I haven’t accomplished anything. However, I don’t feel like they’re fundamentally better than me because they’re not superhuman- they’re people just like us, and many of them were born in vastly inferior circumstances, often simply because the past sucks compared to the present. A person born in modern times can impact billions of people with a few years of work, which wasn’t true for anyone even 100 years ago. Newton’s knowledge of science and math is nothing compared to mine, and forget women born even a few decades before me. By virtue of birth, I understand the nature of reality better than Benjamin Franklin- isn’t that awesome? I don’t idealize any past golden age because it’s obvious that now is the best time to have been born. I’d rather be me, right now, than an 18th century king.

The suggestion that our species may have peaked 50 years ago is terrifying and sad. If anyone believed our species were degenerating, it’d be their top priority to try to reverse this trend. Wouldn’t it be tragic if our children looked back and wished they’d been born 100 years ago, or that things became so bad they would even prefer to have been born in Victorian England?

Similarly, there shouldn’t be a golden age of my life either- I want to always want to be what I am, to never look back and wish to be a previous version of myself. I think so far that trend has held- whenever I remember previous Nancy’s, their stupidity mortifies me and I feel thankful current Nancy is so superior in comparison, and I happily anticipate my future self dismantling my current self. I want to always feel that way, just as I always want to feel that human beings are getting better and better.

This trend of progress doesn’t arise without deliberate work. If many people hadn’t dedicated their lives to advancing our race, if Nelson Mandela hadn’t been courageous and self sacrificing, if Turing hadn’t been patriotic and determined, it’s quite possible that I wouldn’t feel blessed to have been born in this age, that our species could’ve peaked decades ago and all that would await us would be pollution and mutual annihilation. We must choose to continuously improve, both as a species and as individuals. When I think about what I want to work on, it’s with both humbleness and boldness. Why not reach for greatness? What do I have to lose- I haven’t achieved anything yet!

In general I’m looking for enormous growth. Our world has several areas offering exponential growth so there’s a lot to learn and consider. Due to my noncompete period, I can’t discuss work with non prospective partners, so ask me in 2013.

Current projects include
1) fundraising for PGSS, a nerd camp I attended in high school, http://pgssalumni.org,
2) blogging at http://nancyhua.com (this blog will probably exist until December),
3) writing screenplays,
4) trading my personal account (allowed iff I manually enter every trade),
5) researching startups.