Learn more about what I am doing at xipuli.com/now https://xipu.li 2025-08-05 https://xipu.li/posts/from-wall-street-to-silicon-valley https://xipu.li/posts/from-wall-street-to-silicon-valley 2022-06-11 Office view from Edge in San Diego. Huge contrast to the forest of skyscrapers I was used to when working in Manhattan. A series of unexpected turns of life had brought me from New York back to the West Coast to pursue a career in Software Engineering. https://xipu.li/posts/new-things-2021 https://xipu.li/posts/new-things-2021 2022-01-16 Credit is all Frank's An uneventful year full of trying out new things and learning opportunities ), [graphs](), [lists](), and so on, to represent and build our world. Although there is a copious amount of resources online, many are of low-quality or contain fragmented concepts. I was lucky to avoid wasting time on those hours-long YouTube videos that most uninformed beginners would start with. Thanks to [a high-school friend](https://shumingxu.com/) who now attends UC Berkeley, I was able to get a high-quality self-study curriculum that was ridiculously simple: 1. [CS61a](https://cs61a.org/): an introductory course on programming offered by UC Berkeley 2. Algorithms ([Part I](https://www.coursera.org/learn/algorithms-part1), [Part II](https://www.coursera.org/learn/algorithms-part2)): coursera courses designed and taught by [Kevin Wayne](https://www.cs.princeton.edu/people/profile/wayne) and [Robert Sedgewick](https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~rs/) of Princeton University All of these resources are available to the public and free-of-charge, which makes me regret about picking finance as my undergrad major (the ROI and the utility are just subpar). High quality learning should involve [robust and frequent tests](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/researchers-find-that-frequent-tests-can-boost-learning/), and I benefitted a lot from the challenging tests and projects designed by best-in-class professors in the field. To work in tech as a software engineer, I would have to obtain a degree in Computer Science or related fields due to my visa status. Meaning, there is a good chance that I will be attending a grad school. As a non-CS major, I face a very limited choice when selecting schools. Currently, I have submitted my application for University of Washington, and in the process with Northeastern and Brandeis. From what I learned, grinding LeetCode seems to be more important than the prestige of the school. So, I optimized for location and affordability. After drafting a list of potential schools, I started planning for something that I thought I would never have to touch again in my life: the standardized test. Preping GRE was quite an experience. It refreshed my understanding on foundamental math concepts, but more importantly, it taught me how to engage in critical thinking. Within the reading section, there are logical inference questions like "_Which of the following is an assumption on which the argument depends?_", or "_The argument is most vulnerable to criticism on the grounds that it fails to consider the possibility that..._". Answering lots of these questions had left a mark in my mind. I found that most reading sources online are either biased or outright misinforming. By simply asking what assumptions the claim is based on is a worthwhile mental exercise to help gain clarity and stay objective. I'm still learning and breaking into tech, but so far, I've been very much fascinated by the power of technology and excited to see how emerging tech like blockchains can transform and empower individuals. [It's time to build](https://future.a16z.com/its-time-to-build/)! ## Trip to California (Nov) I went to [Bishop O'Dowd](https://www.bishopodowd.org/) for high school and naturally, a good amount of my friends stayed in Cali in pursuit of computer science related majors. It had been more than three years since the last time I visited California, so I decided to take advantage of the Thanksgiving break to pay a visit. With a duffle bag and a backpack, I hopped on a Uber. Destination JFK. Once I passed the security check, I kinda just walked into the plane as there was no line at the terminal. I later found out that the gate was supposed to be closed 15 minutes before departure but since I hadn't taken a flight for so long, I thought I was early by being there 5 minutes before the departure time — I had certainly taken so many subways. In other words, I almost missed my flight but because I was not aware of the urgency, the whole process felt was personally tailored. The next I knew was me, three-hour younger, bathing in the San Francisco sunlight. California had a unique vibe. There's no exhaustive way to describe it, but many things were of stark contrast to that of New York. The foremost difference was how Uber drivers were so talkative in San Francisco, whereas their New York counterparts were more taciturn. Another difference was obviously the weather. I took the photo below when I was in high school, but didn't start appreciating the picturesque view until after having lived in New York's concrete jungle for a while. I had a great catch-up with the Berkeley friend mentioned before. We grabbed [pizza](https://www.sliverpizzeria.com/), enjoyed [boba](https://www.instagram.com/hayteaca/?hl=en), and talked hours about everything from what's up with our high school teachers and friends to investing strategies. Next day was Thanksgiving, and knowing I came to SF alone, a co-worker at my [current company](https://www.edpr.com/north-america/) invited me for a family dinner (Thank you Louis!). The most memorable thing was when kids asked what superpower they should have, a girl answered "hugging", which resulted in kids running around the house hugging everyone. Very wholesome! The care-free vibe, the weather, the hospitality, and the tech scene finally convinced me to go back to California in the future. ## Things learned from the ski trip (Jan 2022) A whimsical call to my friend Frank led to an excursion to Vermont. Up until then, I hadn't engaged in any outdoor sport since I moved to New York in 2018. At Penn Station, Frank, Tom and I convened. We took a train to a parking lot in Long Island to pick up the car, and then drove into a very large boat that could accomodate vehicles. We offboarded in Connecticut and took a break at a Domino's in Massachusetts. Two slices of pizza and three chicken wings later, I learned that Tom and Frank were working on [a startup idea](https://www.etroduce.net/) that sounded quite interesting. The remainder of the drive to hotel, therefore, was dedicated to an intensive conversation about growth strategies, margin projections, and how to pitch the idea to VCs.
Basically, they thought the rental market was inefficient as brokers get paid handsomely (usually a month of rent) by just showing potential renters around the apartment. Instead, they were trying rebate a portion of that commission back to renters. So, if I decide to rent a studio for $2,000 a month, then I will get, say, $500 back from their startup. Two founders were thinking about hiring agents on a full-time basis and paying a generous, albeit fixed, salary instead of commissions. They were also envisioning a one-stop shop where people who are poor on paper can get a guarantor service to fulfill property owners' requirements.
This would be a heavy operating leverage with which the profit margin scales dramatically with revenue growth. Evidently, the hardest part is to ramp up the business to hit that critical mass point. I hope by publicizing their ambition through this blog, Tom and Frank can get an extra boost of motivation.
Next day, we arrived at [Okemo Ski Resort](https://www.okemo.com/). And the fun began! As a total beginner equipped with overweight cheap rental gears, I could not possibly enjoy this sport without Tom's patient training. With over a decade of experience, Tom was an expert skier who could do things like spinning and dancing down a [black trail](https://www.skiclub.co.uk/info-and-advice/before-you-go/how-to-read-a-piste-map) or ski on one leg — all without wearing a helmet. With Tom's robust training, I was on a lift to [a green trail](https://www.trailforks.com/trails/expresso-409525/) on the second day. Everything was enjoyable until I suddenly face an intimidatingly steep slope. I could barely [pizza](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowplough_turn) well, so the slope looked a suicide mission to me. I was paralyzed with my mind envisioning all the epic falls that could happen to me. My legs were shaking. Every cell in my body was in survival mode. Fear took over. I ended up stood there for quite a while. I tried to postpone the inevitable by telling myself "I will go once there were fewer people". But there was a constant stream of people breezing past me. "There will always be people", Tom said, "the only way to go is down. If you fall, you fall." I did fall, multiple times. But Tom's words sank in. If you fall, you fall. Our fears and worries are what prevent us from achieving amazing things in life. But life has taught me that the things we fear and worry either 1) did not happen, or 2) happened to us but we've already gotten over with them. Another thing I learned from skiing was that going too fast can result in dramatic failures. When I just started, I didn't know how to stop, so I dashed down steep slopes like a bullet — into the woods. The lesson applies beyond skiing. According to [a podcast](https://open.spotify.com/episode/3roDdtLjzduKgLDG0Y8CD9), one of the major reasons why startups fail was that they grow too fast to maintain control. Now I can do black trails without fears (still with falls, though), and I intend to ski as many times a month as possible. So if you are into skiing, definitely hit me up! ## Inspirations (Jan 2022) Early in Jan, 2022, I stumbled upon [Nathan Leung's blog](https://www.natecation.com/) on [how to become an accredited investor](https://www.natecation.com/accredited-investor-investing-startups-series-65/). I thought he was a finance-major but as I explored more of his posts, a new world just opened up to me. There are so many talented college students in the startup game! I was amazed by the things they are building and lifestyles that would be considered as odd in New York. Somehow, I felt a sense of belonging. That had motivated me to learn more and build more. One thing I learned from reading Nathan's blog was his strong networking skills. This year, I strive to walk out of my comfort zone and meet more people in the startup field. And that's one of the reasons [why](https://www.julian.com/guide/write/intro#:~:text=3-,Human%20connection,-The%20most%20efficient) I was motivated to start this blog to share my journey and updates with my network. I will start my full-time job in Feb 2 in New York but always willing to meet and chat. Feel free to drop me a note via [email](mailto:xli347-contact@fordham.edu) or a DM on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/theXipuLi). I hope you stay safe and healthy and wish you a wonderful new year ahead! ]]> https://xipu.li/posts/the-last-programmers https://xipu.li/posts/the-last-programmers 2025-09-07 To vibe code, or not to vibe code. That's the question. We're witnessing the final generation of people who translate ideas into code by hand. https://xipu.li/posts/year-2023-reflection https://xipu.li/posts/year-2023-reflection 2024-01-21 EthDenver 2023 Bought and sold a car, started a company, and one-year anniversary with my girlfriend. ### Regrets and Opportunities Once my excitement receded, I felt stressed. I ignored other costs came with the car: insurance, the sky-high fuel price (I had to use the premium gas, which was around $6/gal at that time), penalties for parking at the wrong places or at the wrong times, and most importantly, my health. I realized that my typical day had become either sitting in the car or sitting in the office or sitting at home. Fatigue and lower-back pain soon became daily. It was a huge relief after I sold the car after 6 months. In total, I spent $17k on the car, which was equivalent to $90 a day. It wasn't the best financial decision but I got to explore the Bay Area: … and Taylor Swift's Era's Tour in Santa Clara. Beyond fun and sceneries, my car also changed my life trajectory. ## May - Cofounder 2023 was the year when generative AI took off. There were plenty of hackathons going on in San Francisco. Having a car allowed me to participate in a Microsoft sponsored hackathon: AISF. I was building an AI motivational speech app during the three-day long hackathon. And in the last day, I was selected to demo the product. That's when I met [Eugene Yao](https://www.linkedin.com/in/eugene-yao-nz/), who was working on a AI guided meditation app. He approached me because he wanted to do something in the wellness space, and my hackathon project resonated with him. Eugene felt that we shared the same passion and was searching for someone technical to build something big. So, we decided to work on my AI motivational speech app during the summer when he was in New Zealand and I was doing my Amazon internship. The “trial” period went well for both of us, and we decided to official form a cofounder relationship to build something useful. More on that later. ## June - Aug: Amazon Internship ### Luck I got very lucky with this internship. One year prior, I applied to the summer internship program as soon as it opened because I was panicking that the tech industry was experiencing layoffs. And as soon as I got Amazon's email for an online assessment, I started feverishly study all the past Amazon coding problems leaked online, and was doing LeetCode all day long. I was lucky that the online assessment consisted of the same exact problems that I already practiced. So I was invited for the final round with an engineer. I was lucky that the interviewer did not ask me any algorithm questions that were commonly expected. Instead, he just asked me something so easy that my answer "just use a [hashmap](https://www.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/comments/1rljsu/java_eli5_hashmaps_how_are_they_used/)" was sufficient. Another friend of mine who also got an offer from Amazon told me that he was asked a dynamic programming ("hell”) question. His interview was scheduled only one month after mine. Early birds do eat worms. ### What I did I was assigned to a confidential project that's related to building a new product related to FireTV. When I joined, the codebase was new and small. Everything was easy to understand and teammates were still figuring out basic things like code structures. It was a fullstack project, meaning I was responsible for building the user interface as well as the backend and for connecting the two. It wasn't difficult but as a large company, a considerable amount of time was spent on documentation and code styles. I went through very robust code reviews to ensure that my code can be used in the real world. At the end of the internship, my codes were merged into the production codebase. ### Learnings However, I was appalled by the excessive processes and reviews for a new project. It appeared that big companies were shooting themselves in the foot by being big. [It was near impossible to push new features/products to the world without getting through layers of approvals, comments, politics, etc](https://pravse.medium.com/the-maze-is-in-the-mouse-980c57cfd61a). An ocean of “[nits](https://www.codelantis.com/blog/code-review-acronyms-lgtm-nit)” on my projects was more than enough for me to remember never to build a company that ends up like today's big techs. The problem was from ill-conceived KPIs that prompted employees to pump out zero value work for the sake of keeping their job or for climbing up the corporate ladder. If I were to restructure the company, I would get rid of the ladder itself: a super flat org structure that compensate managerial and “do” positions equally. The more layers between an intern to the CEO, the closer a company to become IBM. ## Sep: One-Year Anniversary I fell in love in Sep, 2022 with my girlfriend, Nataliya. It was my first romantic relationship and it had been a very rewarding journey. ### Rediscover Myself It was a bumpy ride. We fought many nasty fights. We pushed and pulled each other. But overall, we both learned something and improved our selves. I wasn't aware of many flaws in the way I interacted with other people, and this relationship made me see those flaws sharp and clear. For example, I wasn't aware that the way I said things had unwanted effects. My sarcasms were often interpreted as serious criticisms. No one would point out these problems but Nat did a great job of making me see it and correct the course. Living together meant that I was finally able to acknowledge and tolerate different, if not opposing, individualities. It made my heart bigger, my temper tamer, and patience more. One interesting note, I reduced my caffeine consumption after finding out that I tended to get more anxious and easily annoyed after drinking coffee. ### Women Spending intimate time with a girl made me see how our world had made it difficult for women to succeed. There's period, which many places still considered a taboo topic. It's painful and the hormonal effects lasted weeks. The corporate world still refused to accommodate this biological bane. Making it worse, over-progressive western society perceived period leave as a sign of weakness and, ironically, sexist (“Women are not weak. We can still work while on period so we don't need special treatments”). It's relieving to see countries like India were making period leave into legislation. I hoped to see more countries do the same sooner. ### Personality One activity we enjoyed was to identify tech bros on the street. “Tech bro” was a personality, or the lack of it. San Francisco was the HQ of tech bros because here, the lack of personality and extreme minimalism were celebrated as must-haves for those who aspired to change the world. The Bay Area had a different vibe. Coming from Manhattan, one word to describe Silicon Valley was “dead”. Everyone's weekend activity was hiking, if not coding. This and the spread-out landscape gave me an intense [ennui](https://www.google.com/search?q=ennui+meaning&oq=ennui&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUqCAgAEEUYOBg7MggIABBFGDgYOzIOCAEQRRgnGDkYgAQYigUyBwgCEAAYgAQyBwgDEAAYgAQyBwgEEAAYgAQyBwgFEAAYgAQyCggGEAAYsQMYgAQyBwgHEAAYgAQyBwgIEAAYgAQyBwgJEAAYgATSAQgxMTQ0ajFqN6gCALACAA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8) (I've gotten used to it now, and found joy in my weekly bakery trip to [Arizmendi](https://arizmendibakery.com/)). I'd been to multiple “tech parties” in SF and found it a common sight of two people staring at each other in silence for minutes. Everyone wanted to build startups but many should build themselves first. I was a borderline tech bro, too. My entire wardrobe could fit one small luggage and you could only find black, gray, and white. Thanks to Nat, I reclaimed my personality. Now I [dressed like a Gen-Z](https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=596298580&sxsrf=AM9HkKmdZgoX10xgeuWTeWTkoCJw2yEwaQ:1704602234689&q=gen-z+fashion+men&tbm=isch&source=lnms&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiR-bmVusqDAxX0J0QIHXY0CYMQ0pQJegQIDRAB&biw=1440&bih=702&dpr=2). Many would argue that a lack of personality was the sacrifice needed to change the world. But they failed to understand that the world is made up with people. Tech bros who actually ended up changing the world did not bring any positive value or beauty but only toxicity (Facebook, Web3, Metaverse, etc. The only exception I could think of was Google). To change the world is to dream big while not losing touch with reality. ## Sep - Now: My First Startup Eugene and I started working on the motivational speech app during the summer. However, that direction didn't seem to be too great as AI voice generation had its limit and we were not sure the product met a real world problem. So, we went back to square one and started problem discovery. This was a missing step for many of my side projects. I was, like many tech bros, excited to build something that sounded cool but no one wanted to use. Eugene, having founded a startup, saved us many unnecessary mistakes. We stopped jumping into coding and was meeting daily to clarify problems that were relatable to ourselves and that we're passionate about solving. ### First Attempt We found that many people suffer from procrastination, which led to stress and overwhelm when deadlines drew nigh. Initially, we thought a solution was to break down big tasks into manageable chunks. This was a well-researched technique called “microtasking”. With the rise of generative AI, we thought that it's a good timing to work on microstasking. Plus, an AI product would be easier to get funded. Our product asked users to input their tasks, choose a duration, and add additional context, then GPT would spit out a todo list of small steps that would lead users to complete their tasks. People liked the UI/UX but we quickly found out intensive editing was needed to modified the AI generated list. No matter how we prompted the AI, we couldn't make it consistently output high quality and accurate lists. The lack of control over the AI eventually led us to pivot away from AI. The most valuable feature from the product was the editor. So, we decided to make it a non-AI product. ### The Story about Forget The idea was simple. You wrote down your daily todo items on the list, then you could enter the “focus mode” with a click of a button which would display the current task with a visual banner that expanded with the progress of time. We also discovered a way to have Chrome popping out of a window that always stays on your screen. This addressed the “out of sight, out of mind” problem ubiquitous to people with ADHD — who happened to be our target user group. We made mistakes of jumping ahead of ourselves by wanting to build out more features that sounded cool, scalable, or theoretically would bootstrap network effect. The result was a low retention. Currently, the product was called “Forget” to make it sound less toxic as a productivity tool and more consumer friendly. In the early days, we'd do Reddit launches to share the tool as a way to acquire users. However, this was not a scalable strategy and our product didn't have any moat. Toward the end of the year, Eugene started creating short-form videos on social media platforms. And now we're seeing this investment paying off: 1) his Instagram follower counts were growing quickly to almost 100k and 2) about 30+ new sign-ups to the product everyday. As we gained more users, I got more and more product feedback. People wanted all sorts of things. But this was the real danger. If we didn't have a strong filter to say no to many of the feedback, our product would look like something we tried not to be: yet another business productivity tool with cluttered UI and overloaded features. The product had to be attractive. This was the core of our product strategy. Design was a first-class citizen that triumph over other factors whenever there's a conflict. Our thesis was that a beautiful UI would earn us some free passes to compensate for the stuff we compromised. This was also true in the real world (just think about the dating). ### Onward As of writing, we're preparing to raise a pre-seed round. With the current MVP, we have validated the market and are ready for building out a more refined product. So, I will be spending less time on coding, more on designing and innovating. Eventually, we'd like to have some experienced developers to build out a robust product. Closing with Scott Gallaway's sign-off: life is so rich. ]]> https://xipu.li/posts/year-2025-reflection https://xipu.li/posts/year-2025-reflection 2026-02-08 Last day at Icon Moved to New York City. An imploded startup. Humans getting ruled by AI.