Victor Wong is an Internet entrepreneur who fantasizes about being a restauranteur or writer but needs to do something far more practical to pay the SF rent. He is the CEO of Thunder. i am victorious covers his musings on life, entrepreneurship,…
The excellent luminary and essayist, Paul Graham, articulates what it’s like to have kids and why we shouldn’t be afraid – a younger me may have been cynical enough to dismiss it but now I whole heartedly agree as a parent. We project our current selves out 10 years and think we’ll be the same person just older and armed with the same perfected knowledge we have now. However we definitely…
Cannes Lions Interview: Victor Wong, Co-Founder And CEO, Thunder : Forbes interviewed me about the story behind my entrepreneurship and Thunder
Sitting in a Lyft the other day during rush hour traffic, I couldn’t wait to get to my destination. Checking the traffic apps, it appeared we were on course with the best travel time. Without warning, the Lyft driver pulled us out of the lane and turned to a side road and floored it for all of 1 block before screeching to another halt. He glanced at the GPS as it attempted to reroute us –…
Is New York Too Expensive for Restaurateurs? We Do the Math
The Thrill of Losing Money by Investing in a Manhattan Restaurant - The New Yorker : My dream… sounds like a nightmare.
Breaking down Broadway : Wished I had gotten those Hamilton tickets when I had the chance
PaperG, now "Thunder," offering cross-channel creative tools for display and social : I remember when we first started PaperG 8 years ago and the actual moment we were brainstorming ideas and searching for domain names. Since then, the company has grown incredibly to over 70 people across multiple offices with some of the biggest companies as clients. Deciding to rebrand the company was another…
Game of Loans : In a 2014 interview with Rolling Stone magazine, George R. R. Martin, the author of “A Song of Ice and Fire” (the series on which the HBO show is based), complained that fantasy authors often fail to engage with economics. “As much as I admire Tolkien, I do quibble with him… What was Aragorn’s tax policy?” Martin – unlike Cersei – has thought deeply about the economic systems…
Why the Government Puts a Dollar Value on Life : In 1950, the U.S. Air Force asked Rand Corp. to develop a strategy to strike the Soviet Union if the order was given. “Rand was crunching thousands of numbers on flight range, different kinds of planes, how much fuel was required, what kind of weapons could the planes carry, what was the cost to make them,” said H. Spencer Banzhaf, an economist at…
Meet The Guy Who Solved Uber's Insurance Problem : It’s been 8 years since Gus stepped into my life and I gave up trying to be the smartest person I know. This guy funded PaperG when it was just a few guys and idea and guided us as a board member through many challenging times. Glad he’s finally getting the much overdue recognition!
You probably know to ask yourself, “What do I want?” Here’s a way better question : “How do you choose to suffer?” is more important and far more interesting. My theory of what makes someone interesting is what they do that I would never do because of some conviction or desire that I can’t comprehend. If you want a more interesting life, I think it’s great to ask yourself what would you suffer…
With the new year upon us, I’ve thought long about what I’ve learned in the last year and what I hope to learn over the next twelve months. One concept I’ve become familiar with and have embraced, especially after a trip to Japan this year, is “kaizen” (which means improvement in Japanese with the connotation of “continuous improvement” in modern usage). It’s easy to lose motivation if every day…
While traveling in Stockholm, I visited the famous Vasa museum, which is basically a giant ship raised from the water and enclosed inside a building. The ship itself is an impressive sight given its size and ornate decorations as the Swedish king’s flagship but what’s more fascinating is the story behind it and how the lessons from it are applicable today to really any project. The king ordered…
Up in the Air: Meet the Man Who Flies Around the World for Free : Every man made system has a weakness whether international or not. It is impressive sometimes the length people go and the ingenuity displayed to hack the system.
As PaperG introduces a completely new way to build ads at scale, I’ve noticed a lot of customers asking us similar sets of questions that made us wonder if we were explaining our value proposition properly or if they were listening to us at all. What I realized was that they had a checklist of questions developed over the years from evaluating other technology providers based on the status quo…
Your Salad Lunches Are Killing American Leather - Bloomberg Business : fascinating look at how leather became popular and its economics
Adblockers are immoral : I believe in increasing access to information. Most content is subsidized and only made possible by advertising. People who go out of their way to avoid helping pay for the content shouldn’t be proud of that fact but many are unfortunately. As an industry, advertising does need to improve so people don’t feel the need to avoid it. Targeting has gotten better to ensure…
Economics of Charcuterie : Lessons: do as much yourself, keep inventory that doesn’t perish, and track all costs
I had the fortunate opportunity to speak at SXSW the other week on launching a startup out of a dorm room. One audience member asked what’s the hardest thing about being an entrepreneur. It’s believing you’re right when everyone else seems to believe something else. A famous psychology experiment known as the Asch conformity experiment illustrates this. Participants basically were put in a study…
Standing this weekend in the Oxbow Public Market in Napa, I realized that industries (online and offline) really do go through cycles of bundling and unbundling. In the food retailing industry, for much of human history groceries were sold in public markets with independent stalls and merchants. Perhaps most famous among these markets in modern history, Les Halles in Paris was a monstrous…