Nancy Hua

For the past 6 years, I was scared to openly share my writing because I feared it might somehow “matter,” ie. negatively affect my company or be misconstrued. But in 2019, my company got acquired! Now, I’m a cat of leisure so I can post whatever, starting with these notes on my 2019 and 2020 goals.

I had 3 big goals in 2019: 

1. exit Apptimize (done)
2. finish writing my YA sci-fi novel (not done)
3. go on a date with 1 person monthly with P score of 70%+ (done, although currently single)

Let’s drill in on each goal!

Apptimize learnings: 
I ran Apptimize for 6 years, constantly hero-ing before I became aware that there was another way to operate. After all, who else could possibly be held responsible for anything? Not only was I the founder and CEO, I’d always been the one responsible for everything I wanted my whole life, never viewing my teachers or parents as authority figures, always questioning directives. It wasn’t until the final version of my executive team that I was able to recognize I was working with people who were smarter than me about everything. Then I felt I could stop hero-ing and risk learning what happens when I stop (big thanks to my CEO group).

I wrote a post mortem of my experiences running Apptimize when we hired a new CEO in 2018. I was still technically at the company while he was selling it, but I was figureheading and not part of the acquisition. LMK if you want to see the post mortem bc publicly sharing my failures scares me. That was one of my learnings— I can talk myself into a lot of stuff that I don’t actually want for the sake of wanting to view myself as “successful,” but I don’t want to operate like that anymore. 

My new rule of thumb is to only do stuff that I’d do even if I knew it was likely to fail and if no one knew I was doing it. That eliminates me doing stuff out of ego/ fear/ status. This way I’m only doing stuff for the joy of doing it and not ascribing meaning to whether I achieve my preferred outcome. I’m always going to be an ambitious, driven person, so I don’t need to solve for that part of the equation as long as I’m focused on something I enjoy the process of doing, which brings me to my writing. 

Writing my book: 
Although my 2nd major at MIT was writing, I’ve never written a book and I almost gave up wondering, “Why am I doing this?” Writing a novel is easier than running a company (or possibly any job) in almost every way because it has no grounding in reality. Except writing’s harder in 1 way, which is staying motivated. I miss having a team I love. Writing is isolating and I’ve enjoyed partnering with Eva on our writing project and taking writing workshops at Stanford. After my 5 why’s on how I’ve missed my goal of finishing my book last year, I’m going to be at Stanford 3 or 4 days a week for the next 9 weeks because I have so many workshops. I feel like I’m back in school, except Stanford is so relaxing and resort-like compared to the Spartan halls of MIT. But to be clear, both schools are way easier than running a company.

I’ve learned life lessons from writing fiction. For example, you can increase drama in a story by amping up the subtext. The more desire, emotion, and expectation that’s unsaid, the more tension and conflict you can generate in a scene. There’s a gap between an external conflict and an internal conflict that drives all the action. Eg. the more the hero views climbing the mountain as somehow equivalent to gaining his dad’s approval, or the more the lovers are uncertain how they each feel while they’re competing against each other for the same trophy, the more emotionally turbulent the story. Drama entertains me in fiction, but is not fun for me in reality. Thus, even as I’m amplifying the subtext in my stories, I’m minimizing the subtext in real life. You know I’m already really direct, but now I’m even more direct about what I want. 

I realized that I had been in denial about some of my more “needy” needs, which was creating unnecessary drama in my life. My goal has been to delete the gap between my internal and external goals, between what I feel and what I communicate to myself and others. I’ve told people, “I’m afraid you’re going to think I’m weak if I admit to wanting to impress you.” Up until last year, I never would’ve admitted even to myself to caring what others thought of me except as a vague preference. I view myself as strong, independent, iconoclast who authentically does whatever she wants without considering outside approval, but I now recognize the part of myself that does very much care about being liked, being seen as successful, etc. Recognizing and embracing these internal drivers by bringing them out into the external realm has minimized the subtext in my relationships and drama in my life.

Other than drama, I’ve learned that the quality of my hero depends on the quality of my villain, and that this is analogous to real life. 2D villains are a missed opportunity for building a better hero, and that’s why my favorite villains (and corresponding heroes) are complex anti-heroes like the Joker and Batman, Magneto and the Professor. In life, whenever I’ve viewed a VC or competitor as an obstacle or antagonist, they’ve turned out to be my greatest ally in growth. It’s the challenge that defines the hero and gives you the opportunity to change and affect change. The villain in my book is my favorite character, and he’s taught me to appreciate the “villains” in my life too.

Dating: 
I’ve “dated” dated 4 people in the last 15 years. I started 2019 resenting dating. Dating was a waste of my time, not fun. I had a scarcity mindset about the candidate pool— the single guys my age were defective, hot guys tend to be idiots, etc, etc. I had a spreadsheet that estimated the probability with error bars that a particular candidate might be a match for me based on previous data points, eliminating candidates as soon as they became “known defective.” Although I’d update the weightings as new data came in, this scoring system proved faulty. Since I wasn’t running a company anymore, my executive coach refocused on my dating life. “How many dates do you need to go on this month to hit your goal? Your coaching worksheet says you went on a date with this high scoring guy but you’re not attracted. How will you adjust your process and scorecard as a result?”

Adjustments I made to my dating process: 

• Asking for playful interactions. I don’t find judgment fun. I also find talking about the past boring— I don’t care to hear a rehearsed spiel about the dude’s past and he can google me if he wants to know my resume.
• Guaranteeing 2 dates because I hate everyone on the first date.
• No longer using dating apps because I’m shallow and random when on apps— I don’t find judging fun. Now I’m back to dating people in my network after we’re friends, which is how my best relationships have started.
• Recognizing when I’m lonely so I can avoid dating in that state, because when lonely I throw the scorecard out the window and choose whoever’s most obsessed with me. Instead, when lonely, I should be snuggling cats, reading and writing, and hanging with friends.

I’ve also learned that my scarcity beliefs were false, which was a relief to discover. One of my board members caused me to realize one of my scarcity fears had to do with fearing being a single mom like my mom was after my parents divorced. I lived with my mom while she was dating and I was a teenager, and I had this narrative that it was tough for her because of me, and I was afraid of enduring something similar one day. I’m nowhere near being a single mom, so I wasn’t aware I had this fear, but it was great to identify it and realize it was irrational. This crazy unconscious fear had been making dating not fun for me, but now dating is fun. I also rediscovered this book while on the Southern Startup road trip and now aim to run all relationships with this type of integrity.

Going into 2020, this is the first time in maybe 7 years that I haven’t had a company or relationship goal. Company and dating goals were my top 2 goals in previous years, so this is a big change! I do get depressed when I’m not intensely working on something, and I miss working with a team I love, and I still want to build a fulfilling relationship with a man who inspires and loves me, but somehow I trust that those things will work themselves out without having a plan or goals. 
My goals for 2020 more have to do with all my writing projects, plus I want to make a short film (survey says the “dates with Nancy” short film sounds most fun. Sign up to see it when it comes out because whatever I make will have a limited, non-public release). At Apptimize we did pre-mortems in engineering. I like doing that for my goals: checking in on how shocked I’d feel if I didn’t accomplish a particular goal and then asking how I can make a plan and block out time to make myself more shocked to fail. If you want to share goals, let me know! I am a collaborative planning nerd. Happy 2020!

When I think about all my failures, I don’t regret any of them, except my mom’s death because I didn’t do anything to delay it. My friends told me I did a lot, but they don’t know. The thing with failure is that no one else knows the gap between your reality and your potential the way you know it. No one can judge yourself the way you can.

My dad found he had stage 3 colon cancer at the same time as my mom’s cancer. My mother had left her husband and I was visiting her in Virginia where she’d found a room in an old lady’s mansion. We went to the doctor together to learn what was causing my mother’s back pain. The doctor said, “You have stage 4 lung cancer. I take cancer very seriously. We’re going to fight this.” My mother wrote an email to her friends that she was coming to live with me in Chicago, eliciting responses with references to Jesus.

The next day she told me she was going back to her husband, which filled me with both relief and doubt. That was certainly more convenient for me- I’m not a naturally nurturing, caring person because I’m monkishly devoted to work, but how could they get back together so suddenly?

I alternated flying to Pittsburgh and Princeton to see my parents, 20x more than I’d ever seen them since I left for MIT. For a while it seemed like she was getting better. I told her I needed to go to the London office and didn’t have anyone to care for my cat, and she said she’d come take care of it for me. My coworker exclaimed, “Wow, that’s a VIP cat.” She gave my cat a name, Mimi. I loved this cat so much but I’d never taken the time to name it, and my friends would call it, “The cat w no name.” During her stay in Chicago, she nested the way she always does for me- she cooked, she got me a maid, she arranged furniture, she potted plants, she got them to hang the painting the founder of my company gave me. They were late to hang it and she was running (her, running, with her chemotherapy port!) through the airport to make her flight. Tearfully she exclaimed, “I give my life for you!”

Annoyed, I said, “I didn’t ask you to do that. Who cares about hanging the painting?” It’s easy to be short and mean to people who love you unconditionally.

When it seemed my mother was getting worse, I moved my team to NYC to be closer to Princeton. I neglected my dad more because he was only stage 3. Both parents tried to tell me their frustrations about the medical system, but I was impatient and didn’t want to think about it. I was selfish about my own stress. Wasn’t it enough that I went with them to the doctor even though it was boring and tiring and I would’ve rather been doing something useful like work? Even though I was there, I wasn’t present. I went through the motions without opening my heart. Even though my parents have always been proud of me and in most ways I was the ideal Asian child who independently, ruthlessly achieved more than what my parents could’ve imagined without anyone saying a word, I was a terrible child child.

My father sent her a cure that had something to do with aloe. I read a few books and websites on cancer. There are a lot of alt-medicine theories out there because people are fighting for their lives and need something to believe in. My mother wanted to move to Texas to try the Burzynski clinic. But I was slow to pay for the clinic because it didn’t sound like it could be real. People had sued this doctor as a fraud, and it was tens of thousands of dollars per month, and they don’t take insurance (or insurance doesn’t take them). Even though I could easily afford it, my mother knew I didn’t want to and at the last minute didn’t turn in the paperwork, saying she didn’t want to be a “burden.” There’s a Netflix documentary about this doctor and I have avoided looking at it because I’m afraid it’ll show it was legit.

She had problems with her phone plan and wanted me to deal with it because I was paying the bill but I was too impatient and hate these types of chores, especially talking with Verizon people. Thus towards the end she didn’t have access to good internet to stay connected with her friends. That must’ve felt terrible, to be so isolated while lying in hospice, because she was always texting and very social. I have a story that this phone problem accelerated her death and that it’s my fault she died so unhappily.

For a few weeks I had wished that she would die so it could be over. There was a ticking clock because insurance would only cover up to a certain date and everyone expected her to die before then. Her body had grown bloated and disgusting- I always washed my hands thoroughly after massaging the blood into her clay-like, swollen legs and feet, dying flesh that held the mark of my touch for an unnaturally long time. She had been incontinent for a while and sometimes we’d clean it ourselves when the nurse was slow and the smell started to sink in. My stepfather wiped with brusque efficiency while my mother gasped in pain. I watched awkwardly, embarrassed for her.

I wasn’t there when my mother died. Shameful. My stepfather even hinted, “I’ve never seen her look so weak.” I had a trip planned to go to Chicago for a short vacation, my first in years, so I still left. That night I got his voicemail at 3am saying she’d passed away. I flew back in the morning.

I’d never been to a funeral before. I had grown so thin the flower-y dress I’d long inherited from my mom hung off my body, but people who didn’t know why I was skinny would say I looked great, a real New Yorker with my blowouts and Pradas. Four men declared their love for me. I said that I appreciated it but it wasn’t necessary that they come to the funeral, especially on such late notice and in New Jersey. My team got me flowers.

Friends came and I’ll always be grateful. My dad drove from Pittsburgh and we didn’t know what to do with him, putting him in a back pew. He’d cried when I told him she had cancer. My middle school friend drove from Philadelphia and I took her to my favorite dessert places. Even though he hates taking breaks from his research, my best friend from high school nerd camp flew from Stanford to visit for 1 day and be with me at the funeral. Everyone thought he was my boyfriend and I was relieved to lean on him.

At the funeral, I gave a speech about how she sent me on a flight with a houseplant in my carry-on. My stepdad talked about how she’d get last minute tickets and magically access things and get people to do stuff for her, enigmatically explaining, “I’m Chinese.” The priest said how she had so much assertive personality and insisted everyone wear colors to her funeral. Afterwards, some fobby Chinese people posed and took photos with the casket flowers. I never talked with her church friends again even though they’d done more for her than I did, bringing soup and praying with her every day.

I was in awe of their Christian charity because I doubt I would’ve done this for anyone else. When my high school friend Jeremy was dying of bone cancer, I thought of him and donated money to his causes, but I never went to Pittsburgh to see him. I would sometimes think of how often I’d walk by his house with the red door, how he introduced me to sparkling water, how we watched “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” and he explained how her head really did get hit in the blooper, how we lay in the sun room and stared at the strangeness of how it is to be human in high school, how his dad smiled with delight at the “elfin” portrait I drew, immediately grabbing it to admire and figure out how to display.

I flew a lot to see my parents during their sickness, but it wasn’t real sacrifice. I didn’t know what real sacrifice was. I’d never been self sacrificing. With my parents, I was willfully ignorant and didn’t take ownership of helping them treat their diseases. I never viewed them as assets or part of my team, more as a burden I had to dutifully endure. I had my own goals separate from them.

Years later, I was at Beregovsky’s wedding and my date translated the Jewish contract, “He vows to give her the shirt off his back.” I thought about that level of love and commitment and thought about how much I’d have to love and value someone to be able to make a promise like that to my husband. If my mate had cancer, and I’d loved them enough to have vowed to become one flesh and give them the shirt off my back in the first place, I imagine I’d quit my job, I’d move with them to be near the best hospital, I’d become a research expert in the field, I’d do everything with a smile because there’s nowhere else I’d rather be. Basically the opposite of what I did for my parents.

I’ve always been very focused on my own goals. When I set a goal, I know it’ll happen because I’m an effective person and I always figure out a way to win. Nobody bets against me- when playing poker people say I’m intimidating/ scary, and my coworker wrote a song about how everyone wants to be on my team.

For me, failure isn’t about not accomplishing a goal. I fail at having the wrong goals in the first place, a deeper problem. I have the arrogance to believe that if I’d made it my goal to delay my mother’s death, I could’ve. I just didn’t think about it because I was too selfish and on autopilot in my focus on work. Because work was always making progress and thus more fun and easy to deem worthy of attention, whereas she was not making progress, her health hard for me to control, and generally thus a distraction. I don’t regret not trying harder to keep her alive, but I do regret not showing her more love and connecting more with her instead of sitting there with my kindle and VPN-ing into work- so much wasted time.

Even though she didn’t seem like a big part of my world, her death changed my world. I’m grateful for how selfless and kind my friends and family are. I try to be a better person every day but it’s hard. Since I was a child, I’d grade myself and I almost always give myself a B-, which is, as I explain to my team when giving out our grades, an Asian F. I’ll tell them, “99% of startups die, so if we’re not at least 99th percentile as a startup, we’re getting killed.” I hired the type of people who find this inspiring. We like to work and we like to win. But every day I remind myself that success without love is the biggest failure.

I knew from the womb that for me a life without impact would be failure. I knew from all my reading that wealth without meaning was failure. I never need to worry about not being ambitious enough, not growing enough, not working enough, not being insightful/ introspective/ perceptive enough. I don’t even have to worry about not being compassionate or empathetic enough because when my attention is on you, I’m emotional, giving, thankful, and intuitive. The failure modes I have are the flip side of my strengths- I can be too focused, too competitive, too right. I have to be less judging and more patient, more generous with my attention. Since her death, I’ve learned that everyone I love is a chance to practice loving more, loving better. Grading myself, I’m still generally failing at this, but I’m thankful that the people I love don’t judge me too harshly for it.

Hart asked if I still write. I do, but I can’t blog as openly about life because of work. War stories are classified. Part of me wishes we’d followed through with filming everything with GoPro necklaces so we could carve the 99% that’s talking to computers to expose the gristle of business drama. But what’s the point? Nothing’s like what anyone can tell you.

Much work is objectively boring and hard for a long time. That’s what it takes to win, tens of thousands of hours of work that more reasonable people are unwilling to endure. It takes a wizard every hour of every day for years and years alone in a dark tower to draw the spell to craft and mark a new world. It’s pain, loss, sweat, time, boredom, all while fervently believing you must triumph.

More and more, I find myself saying, “I can tell you more in person.” I’m swimming the strange intersection between business and personal, because a startup is water that touches every part of you. In the ocean you feel the reality of constant motion, relentlessly pushed, engulfed by the smell and sound of the heavy waves. Fixate on the mission and row with boundless energy, lest you’re wrecked instead of carried. All your customers and friends and teammates swim together, making the same waves.

The amount of change Apptimize has gone through this past year is staggering. We’ve all changed. I was always ambitious, but my drive was as nothing to my fresh hunger, now that I know more what’s possible. Interviewing an executive candidate, he said, “Your words make me restless,” probably a funny reaction to debating the nuances of sales pipeline definitions.

A year ago, Apptimize was totally different. We made less than our server costs. Much of the impossible stuff we did, we were only able to do because we had no idea what we were getting into. I’ve seen us get so much stronger operationally, starting with learning the difference between strategy, plans, and goals. We’ve rebuilt again and again. We’re now about 25 people, long past fitting around the dinner table at my house, even with all the leaves in.

I’m different. After my previous life of prop trading our own money, I realized I love sales and the responsibility of customers. After 30 years of disdain, I started wearing high heels. I bought a brass rat; maybe one day I will consider actual jewelry. I finally started drinking alcohol. I’m learning more how to wield my weirdness: once upon a time, minutes after meeting someone I’d be ENTJ-ing them towards increased efficacy. Now I give it more time.

The last time I changed a lot was when I moved from NYC to the Bay. That was hard because I loved NYC. No matter how deep you get, NYC shows you something that takes your breath away, realizing you didn’t begin to know her yet. Deep was my love was for New York, the people, myself. I’d take the train down weekends to see my mom in Princeton. When Mom died, one of my best friends since 6th grade drove into NYC from Pennsylvania and I took her to my favorite foods. I had no hunger for food. A few months later, I moved from NYC to Palo Alto because I felt useless. You can’t be useless.

An addiction, NYC poisoned SF for me. I’d plan clandestine visits around NYC wishing we could get back together if it’d change just 1 thing. I’d fantasize about a bicoastal relationship, a modern jetsetter, brimming with love for everyone and no one, ready to forsake town whenever it threatened to get tiresome.

What is a home? I find my home whereupon returning from a journey the smell of the street fills me with gladness and relief and I restrain my haste in knuckling keys into a door to find a friend waiting inside to swing me in her arms and bring me tea.

For the last 3 years I swore I couldn’t find such a home in SF. The homeless people: that’s one of the first shocks. It still astounds me, the looks on their faces, approval through our mute acceptance. I drown in disgust and shame for them, myself, all of us. I lash myself to the mast and sail through the tempest. I staunchly ignore them and consider my own fortune. I resolve, “One day I will fix this pain. I’m still getting stronger and one day this will be simple to correct.” I retort, “Another empty, foolish, impulsive promise.” I rationalize, “This isn’t the most important thing.” I anguish, “But how do you know?” How much can you harden your heart before you’re no longer human? How much can you reach back towards suffering before your life is no longer yours? Torn and bloodied I reel until another of my multitude rips me from the centrifuge, sighing in my ear, “Enough, enough.”

Contemptuous and hating SF, 3 years ago I moved from NYC to Palo Alto. The South Bay has its own sedate majesty. Driving down from SF it’s like descending from Mount Doom into an Eden of sweet, warm air. Understated and grand, even the woods are a suburban paradise. Everyone’s changing the world in their garage- NBD. I plucked giant, perfect fruit from yielding trees, sucking the juice from my wrist. But I can’t stay still no matter how comfortable and serene- onward, onward, pushed out of paradise by the waves of the world.

In December 2015, I moved from my house in Mountain View to an apartment in SF. It rained and the streets were unprepared so I took off my wet socks at Plow. My soaked book crumbled. It rained as we explored an abandoned nuclear site. Nick reassured, “I’ve been over this area with my geiger counter and it’s not that bad.” I like cold, I like temperamental weather, I like Land’s End, the way the wind blows the water white and black. I don’t live next to water or eucalyptus; I’m tabling that until after I settle this next thing with my business. Today I live in the Mission, a place Dan took me years ago and I instantly hated. Love blooms more lustily out of the ash of initial, prolonged dislike. Love: you don’t say it yet but you start thinking it. NYC has much of the best of today, but SF is the swan of our hopes for everything in 100 years.

That’s what you discover in a startup- even after sighting product market fit, you never stop pushing the market and product and reinventing everything. I love my startup. I love SF. Join my SF crew! Come away with us to navigate this life together! Shall we press forward together no matter how comfortable each stopping place is? Shall we strive and adventure together until we die?