Edwin Nov Update:

One of my readers suggested I organize my newsletter in a different way, so I’m going to try it out (with a few modifications). Let me know if you have any strong opinions on this new format!

Job/projects: So last time I wrote a newsletter my second manager just declared that she was leaving Amazon. Since then I’ve gotten a new manager and my role has shifted to focusing more on controllership and FP&A rather than strategic finance. This is a huge bummer. I fully feel like my work is meaningless because it is literally making sure that we are accurately keeping track of our costs. The last last straw was when my manager suddenly told me “you will be doing the 2024 plan adjustments for the two European sites” told me “just look at the files I sent you and figure it out” fully knowing that I had no idea how OP2 is supposed to be done. It took me a cople of meetings of badgering before I finally was able to get enough information to understand what he was looking for, a really frustrating experience all in all. I’ve also started my job search in earnest, and I’m committed to applying to 5 new places every day. If you or someone you know is hiring for VC or any roles in a bay area startup, I would greatly appreciate an intro! In fact, I'm gonna attach my resume to this newsletter in case you are hiring or wanna help me recruit!

Chinese American History Class: In the past I had said that I wanted to write up my lectures as articles, so I tried my hand at one of them… and it didn’t turn out so well. I realized that because my lectures were synthesizing articles it was hard for me to write them as articles without feeling like I was plagiarizing, so I’ve scrapped that idea for now. Instead, my new angle is to push for more students of high school age next semester because I feel that the content and discussion questions in the class would be most engaging for students that age. I plan to accomplish this by 1) targeting high school asian/civic clubs 2) marketing the course as a class/guided project, where students plan and execute a community event/program which (hopefully) is exhibited in the Wing Luke Museum at the end of the semester. If you have any input on these ideas, or can help get me into the Wing Luke or another museum (without playing like $10,000), please let me know!

Entrepreneurship/Innovation class: Nothing to report here! Waiting for Holli to assemble a killer team of pilot teachers, then we can really get the ball rolling 😎

AHN Ventures: We are officially raising our $1M microfund! If you are an accredited investor (net worth of >$1 mill or annual income of over $200,000 for the past two years) and are interested in investing, please let me know and I can schedule some time for us to pitch you. I'll also attach our microfund pitch deck for you to peruse. Today we had our first LP meeting and my biggest takeaway is that people ask a lot of questions when it comes to matters involving their money. This is intuitive, but maybe not something salient. Anyways, it was a good experience and pitching felt a lot more intuitive to me than I thought it would, which is a huge relief. I’ve also been kickstarting a newsletter focusing on advice for Asian founders from Asian founders for AHN Ventures. So far I’ve been able to interview Bryant Chou from Webflow and Kevin Chou from Kabam, both monster founders who I respect immensely. I’ll link to the articles here when they’re published but my high level takeaways are that they both feel that being Asian is significant, but they approach this issue in different ways. While Bryant chooses largely to ignore it because there isn’t anything you can do about it, Kevin leans into it and tries to leverage his Asian-ness to his advantage.

One interesting thing to note is that I am cold emailing founders to get these interviews, I think my success rate so far is 2/45? (but I am currently scheduling one and have 2 punted to next year), that’s about a 4% success rate. Make of that what you will.

If you know any Asian unicorn founders, please introduce me, I’d love to interview them!

Health: I’ve completely stopped running and am on a hiatus for 6 weeks (at the advice of a reader) which means I am out of commission until December 4th. Maybe a week ago I was running to my car to avoid the rain and I realized I was jogging without limping! So I know for a fact that my legs are healing :) In the meantime–to stay active–I’ve taken up swimming instead! The first time I went swimming felt like death (I think I almost drowned) but after going a few times it has started to feel really good and invigorating. I initially thought I would hate swimming but I’ve actually really ended up liking to swim (except I still hate changing to get in and out of the pool).

One piece of advice I received from someone I respect a lot was to do 2 days of strength training and 3 days of cardio every week in order to be healthy. I kind of have an aversion to strength training–but I’d like to hear your opinion on how marginally necessary/beneficial strength training on top of cardio is to general physical and mental health.

Relationships: Some of you don’t know me too well on a personal level, so if you aren’t interested please feel free to skip this section! Anyways, my parents are doing well–it’s almost my dad’s birthday so I need to start thinking about what to get him. I feel like my gifts to him are always kind of a dud, a few years ago I got him “The Book of Joy” by Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama which I thought he’d love since he’s Buddhist but I don’t think he’s touched the book to this day 😂. Maybe I’ll get him some clothes, that’s surely a good bet right? I’m also super duper proud of my sister. She’s been killing it this year. Firstly, she got the Red Bull Marketing job she’s been gunning for since last year. She put together a very, very, impressive VC climate strategy deck for her fellowship at Amino Capital (better than my deck I made for JAZZ VP), she’s learning Vietnamese (which I failed to do), she led her sorority’s rush, and she’s learning front-end engineering. Seriously–what isn’t she doing!?

On my end, I recently entered a relationship with a girl named Selina. Selina is seriously awesome, she is an immensely thoughtful, caring, cute, and smart person and I feel very lucky to have met her. She’s moving to the bay area soon which is an additional reason on my list to get my butt over there! Last thing I’ll say about this is that I had forgotten about the interaction effects of having OCD with being in a relationship (serious overthinking), but so far I have been significantly better at dealing with it than in the past which is a promising sign 🙂

All in all, I feel very blessed to be surrounded by so many driven and talented people who are putting themselves out there and being epic. Hopefully I am as much of a positive force on you guys as you guys are for me.

Hobbies So I really haven’t been playing my saxophone or piano all too much, but I have been listening to music (as always) so here are some highlights from this month: 1963: New Directions –John Coltrane: This is a compilation album of Coltrane in 1963 (I assume) which is in between his albums Giant Steps and A Love Supreme. Basically, Coltrane right before peaking. It’s pretty standard Coltrane affair so if you’re a fan of Coltrane you’ll like it. I especially enjoyed hearing his untitled originals. It makes me think of how many pieces Coltrane must’ve composed which never saw the light of day. Pick Yourself Up –Nat King Cole and George Searing: Nat is just fantastic–always! I heard this at a Starbucks and knew I needed it in my playlist. It sounds very Christmasy without being cliche, I love it. Souvenir d’Italie –Lelio Luttazzi: Love the Erroll Garner like shimmering effect. My only criticism is why isn’t it longer 😭

In terms of readings, I didn’t read any books this month–nor were there too many good articles. But I will link the few good ones I did read here!

Medicine’s Endgame: talks about the history of cell therapy, the present state, and also the future. In fact–Exa-cel just became the first CRISPR (DNA editing) therapy to receive regulatory approval!

How Gen AI is reinventing Freight Logistics Technology & Some Musings on the State of Innovation in the Logistics Industry: Great set of articles which helped me better understand the logistics industry and the areas which technologists are pushing. FYI–Did you know that none of those tall Amazon Mercedes vans are owned or operated by Amazon? They are all third party carriers that Amazon contracts with.

Lastly, I want to link an article I was really disappointed by, The Future of Music: How Generative AI Is Transforming the Music Industry: No shade to the authors, it is a fine article detailing the market trends. However what I like about a16z is that they are technology visionary maximalists. In other words, they take a new technology and paint a vision of what our world would look like once this technology is pushed to the max. This article’s “ultimate dream” was “An end-to-end tool where you provide guidance on the vibe and themes of the track you’re looking to create, in the form of text, audio, images, or even video, and an AI copilot then collaborates with you to write and produce the song.” Seriously? That’s really underwhelming? Furthermore, I think they are focusing on the wrong aspect of music. The commodotiation of music creation is nice and all, but what about fixing the core problem plaguing music? The power imbalance between distributors (record labels and streaming platforms) vs the actual musicians. This article approaches it from a pure business model standpoint as opposed to a technological standpoint but it is a much better piece on painting a vision for the future of music.

I also had a reader learn about the weird stuff Selina and I have cooked and wanted me to do a write-up about them, so here are some of the weird things we cooked and the results: Watermelon Soup: this was surprisingly really good? In my opinion, the mint actually does a lot of heavy lifting, and the soup tastes even better if you throw an assortment of herbs on top of it. I would say the soup tastes really light without being that sweet actually! Would be a great little snack for the summer. Very low-calorie so you may want to eat it with something else. Japanese Curry Ice Cream: the original plan was to eat it alongside ground beef, but we made it at like 11:30pm on Oct 31st and I’m vegetarian in November so we just ate it without the ground beef… and it was pretty gross. Basically we made ice cream with Japanese curry and chocolate chips and it tasted like Japanese curry flavored ice cream with chocolate chips 🙃, I would not recommend.

Some upcoming projects which I will find a way to turn weird are making Cheesecake with my cousins and Christmas cookies with Selina. Let me know if you have any ideas for how I can “spice them up”.

I might as well use this space to explain my November vegetarianism. November is my paternal Grandpa’s memorial month. My grandpa had a very tough life. After serving in the South Vietnamese military fighting in the Vietnamese War, he was captured and put into a re-education camp. My family was able to bribe him out and he took my dad and uncle and fled to a refugee camp in Indonesia where they then were sponsored by a church to fly to Seattle. Obviously as a single father of two and a refugee who couldn’t speak English, his job prospects were pretty limited, so he worked as a janitor on the night shift at high schools. I can’t confirm, but I’ve heard my family say that all that stress may have contributed to his earlier death. Every November I eat vegetarian to 1) honor his sacrifices and give him good karma in a Buddhist way 2) make my life a little more difficult to remind myself how easy I have it comparatively.

Conclusion: Before I started writing this, I honestly thought I wouldn’t have much to say about November, but once I started typing those fears went away. Turns out I have a never ending fountain of things I want to talk about. One thing I really want for this newsletter is to become a board for you all to share awesome things across my network, so please tell me if there is anything cool you are working on that you’d want me to spread! Not sure how I’ll format it (maybe have alternating newsletters every 2 weeks or something) but I’ll figure something out!

Anyways, I hope everyone has a very relaxing and happy Thanksgiving :)
Bonus: I was gonna write about the topic below back in October but I didn’t, so I told myself I’d write it in November and I still didn’t. So I’ve made the executive decision to give up 🙂 If the title or skeleton interests you, shoot me a line and we can chat about it!

Pain/frustration in brainchild not working out: CA history class discussion failure, pain/frustration, and resolve to iterate Lynnes comments about “your work is meaningful, even if you touch a single person, because it will have an exponential effect” Later i actually got really sweet positive feedback Need to work on my negative spiraling

Pain/frustration in brainchild not working out: CA history class discussion failure, pain/frustration, and resolve to iterate Lynnes comments about “your work is meaningful, even if you touch a single person, because it will have an exponential effect” Later i actually got really sweet positive feedback Need to work on my negative spiraling