Job Posting from a Friend

I generally don’t do this, but Yang Meng is so special to me so I promised to post a job for him to my expat community, although I warned him not many people are still following this blog. :-) Here you go.

Make life better. Get in on the ground. Start a career at Anker.

Started by a few ex-Googlers in 2009, Anker set out with one goal in mind: to design reliable, affordable yet inspiring products which we would use ourselves. Today Anker has 100+ employees globally, spread among Changsha, Shenzhen, San Jose, Tokyo and Beijing.

We’re passionate about technology and looking for ways to make life easier, more convenient, less consumed by the day-to-day. Anker thrives on the enthusiasm of a hardworking, earnest family of employees. If you’re looking for a job to challenge, inspire and reward you, we’d love to sit down and start talking about adding you to our team. We could be reached via recruiting@ianker.com. If you know someone who might be a good candidate, we’d also love to hear from you and hopefully thank you with our $2,000 referral bonus once the person is hired.

Position 1: Copywriter (in Changsha/Beijing)

As a copywriter at Anker, you will serve as a representative of our brand by producing the written materials necessary to interact with customers. Both individually and as part of a team, you’ll find ways of reaching out to the public. By thinking from a user’s perspective, you’ll determine how to illustrate our products to the world.

Job Description

– Consider newly developed products from the consumer’s point of view.
– Craft compelling storylines, taglines, and other narrative “nuggets” to introduce our products to a Western audience.
– Serve as a written ambassador of our brand by contributing to the company website, leaflets, promotional events, etc.

Job Requirements

– Strong written and time management skills.
– Ability to view products from the customer’s perspective and figure out ways to attract them.
– Interest in gadgets and technology (smartphones, tablets, etc.)
– Outgoing personality with the humility to work as part of a team.
– Comfortable expressing him/herself in a Chinese work environment, preferably in Chinese.

Position 2: Marketing Supervisor (in Changsha/Beijing)

Be the mouthpiece of our company. We’re looking for someone with a flair for influencing others. Whether this be face-to-face or through online social media, you will be the person who works to spread our name. We need a juggler for this role – the ability to multi-task and plan ahead will be crucial to success.

Job Description

– Build lasting relationships with members of the media to trumpet our brand.
– Create a strong online presence for our company through social media websites.
– Wear a variety of hats to communicate with consumers via forums and other channels.

Job Requirements

– Warm personality and eagerness to meet new people.
– In tune with tech media, preferably with established contacts.
– Well-versed as to the ins and outs of social media.
– Excited to use persuasion and influence to ignite our brand.

Learning from ARM

Long time no blogging, right? Here is the new stuff. I am writing in the conference room at Goldman Sachs Private Internet Conference at Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas.

I just finished a great talk with Tom Lantzsch, from ARM. It was a 1:1 – that type of session you register and spend about 30 minutes with people you want to meet alone. I regret a little bit to request that session when it is approaching because I suddenly realized that I don’t have any intersection between my business and chip design business, and I worried that it may end up with nothing essential and waste both party’s time, and it turned out to be exactly the opposite. Here is a brief note about what we can learn from ARM.

1. Long Term

ARM is a 22 year company. In its first 20 years, 20 billion chips was using ARM architect, and they got 6 billion on the 19th years, and about 10 billion after that. It was then ARM become widely known. They charge license fee, and royalty fee, and in the first many many years, they only run the company to be covered by the immediate license fee. Royalty fee is the big part (0.07 USD per chip) but that came much later. This is not common even in semi-conductor field, and their success is really postponed by focusing on long term.

2. Keep Small

ARM is a 17 billion USD company now. However, it only has 2000 full time employees. They intentionally keep the company small.

3. Run it Cheaply.

ARM is about cheap. They build a culture of cost. As executive committee members, Tom still travels on economic class, and most of ARM’s clients sitting in the section before in flights. Although it does not impact the company financially for CEO to fly business, it does affect the culture. We talked about Google, and talked about the expansion in people, and the luxurious travel package. We all agreed that it is one way road, and cannot come back. ARM charges 0.07 USD per chip (this includes the more expensive chips), and that is the core of its business.

4. Run it Different.

ARM is not a design firm. They feel lucky that several of their principles worked so well in the last 20 years. Thanks to the slow advancement of battery technology, ARM’s core competence around low power consumption chips are stronger over time. I assumed a senario that battery life goes 10x, whatever ARM does not matter that much. Tom agreed.

ARM is also about partnership. Since they don’t design chips, they set standard, and create the architect, so they have few thousand partners, and they used that as a big network effect component: More partners on the equipment side, the more partners on the chip designer side. They played it in a really big and long term way.

Inspiration for me

I was impressed. Many great companies share some common ground. That is very different from the majority. “Luke 13:24: Strive to enter the strait gate”. Follow what most companies are doing and suggesting, and you are doomed.

By talking with great leaders, I can understand how to keep the peace inside, and keep doing what we believe to be true.

jswang@microsoft.com Still Available

I sent an email to jswang@microsoft.com, my old email at Microsoft.

Can you receive this mail?

This was my email alias many years ago.

Jian Shuo Wang

Very soon, I got mail like this:
postmaster@microsoft.com
to me

mail.microsoft.com rejected your message to the following email addresses:

jswang@microsoft.com (jswang@microsoft.com)

mail.microsoft.com gave this error:
User unknown

The email address you entered couldn’t be found. Please check the recipient’s email address and try to resend the message. If the problem continues, please contact your helpdesk.

Diagnostic information for administrators:

Generating server: BY2FFO11HUB004.mail.protection.outlook.com

 

Bingo! My email address is still not occupied by someone else. Just for the record, I checked just because we were at a Microsoft gather, and some conversation inspired my curiosity.

 

Knowledge vs Resources from Friends

Mr. Systrom, now 29, offered this as a parable for the roomful of would-be entrepreneurs who came to hear him talk at Stanford last spring: in the intensely competitive start-up scene here, success is as much about who you know as what you know. “Make sure to spend some time after the talk getting to know the people around you,” he told his audience.

 He is right in both China and US. But in the valley, although people provide connections, most people provide knowledge and advice, just as Adam D’Anglo did for Instagram, but in China, people generally expect resources.

Some of My Old Photos

I took a lot of photos with people I met, and many of them are good friends, but I never spent the time to organize them in a good way. Here is my attempt to make it happen.

Sanjeev Singh and Jian Shuo Wang. January 18, 2012 at Facebook Office in Melon Park, CA. Sanjeev was creator of Google Mail, and FriendFeed.com. I visited Sanjeev in Facebook after FriendFeed.com was acquired by Facebook, and had wonderful lunch together in the newly opened cafe.

Jack Ma, President of Alibaba.com. September 30, 2011 at Stanford University, CA. We attended China 2.0 Conference by Stanford University and Jack delivered closing speech after my pannel. We met briefly at the backstage.

Paul Halen, former China Director of National Security Council of White House. Taken in  Oct 29, 2011 in Xi’an when we went to Karaoke together.

Jan Berris, VP of National Committee on US-CHina Relationships (NCUSCR). Taken on December 1, 2007 in Nanjing during the Young Leader’s Forum. Jan participated US-China relationship building from leading the US Ping-Pong team to visit China in 1971, and brought Jet Li to US.

Zhu Tong and Jian Shuo. November 2007 in Nanjing, China. Rose Zhu served as interpreter of Zhu Rongji and Jiang Zemin.

With Meg Whitman, former CEO of eBay, and currently CEO of HP. Taken on March 28, 2005 in Shanghai, China. Worked with Meg for about two months in Shanghai during the summer of 2005.

With Mark Zuckerburg, founder and CEO of Facebook. February 25, 2010, in Facebook, Palo Alto, CA. Mark hosted me when I visited Facebook office with Matt Colher.

Photo with Prof. Tan when I delivered speech on September 21, 2010 at Computer Department, National University of Singapore.

With Zhang Jie, president of Shanghai Jiao Tong University on October 3, 2011, in San Jose, CA.

Group photo of few day gathering Young Leaders Forum gathering in 2007. Among them are Christopher Cassidy, astronaut of NASA and visited space station; Matt Isler, Colonel of USA Air Force with a squadron of F-15C airplane. etc…

New Generation of Tech media in China

I am trying to collect a list of interesting media that is raising these years, and it is very different from the last generation. It is typically created by an experienced media industry person, but jumped out of the old framework. Here is the starting and I will keep updating the list.

  1. The Founder by former Chief Editor of China Entrepreneur editor Niu Wenwen
  2. Huxiu.com by former chief executive of China Entrepreneur editor Li Min
  3. TechNode by Lu Gang
  4. PingWest Just saw this morning. Chief Editor of CBNWeekly, editor Thomas Luo
  5. 36kr

 

10 Year Anniversary of Blogging

Today is the 10th anniversary of my blogging.

Starting from Sept 11, 2002, with my first blog, I have been blogging for ten years. I cannot believe it! Ten year doing one thing everyday seems crazy for anyone, and I am surprised I am that crazy guy.

However, the bad news is, I realized that I am not as calm and as peaceful as 10 years ago. With the increase of age, and increase of responsibility, it is harder and harder to sit down at the desk, and write something. Email flys in; mobile rings; Weibo checking; Yifan calls…. More importantly, within my mind, thousands of things flying to different directions. I heard something  this morning: with the increase of age, especially after 35, there are too many distraction that few can stay calm and concentrated. It needs a lot meditation and understanding of what is important than the younger time. I believe I may entered another stage of life after 10 years of blogging. Look at the frequency, topic, and depth of the blog entries I wrote in the last three years, and I can clearly see the path of the declination in frequency, decrease in interestingness, and decrease in depth. I am full aware of it, and I know it is the competition of attention for me. The competition just get stronger when I am connected to more, and it is the time to cut something from my life.

Look at the simple life of Yifan, and I know days are long for him. There are a lot I can learn from Yifan – to keep focused and keep doing the important things.

That will be the word for my next 10 years of blogging.

 

IP Only

I created my first plugin when I created my CEO Blog. The problem is obvious: I am going to have a CEO blog where I can share my thoughts with the team frequently. I tried to write a different blog, and I found it is just impossible to maintain two. So I decided to put it on to my own personal blog.

Although most of the articles are public in nature, I do have something that I hope to disclose to the general public later. I don’t want to have complicated OAuth based verification. A simple IP based restriction is good enough. There is no simple solution so I wrote one myself.

Here is the ZIP of the plugin: https://home.wangjianshuo.com/wordpresscn/wp-content/plugins/iponly/iponly.zip

You can download it, modify it, and do whatever you want. There are many hard code in the system – I never blame developers for doing dirty hacks when the time is limited, but we do need to polish it from time to time.

I promise to add all the hard code to options, and create an admin panel for it, in the next version.

 

I Won’t Drive to Hangzhou Again

I am back from Hangzhou, and I would say, I will never drive to Hangzhou again.

Hangzhou is only 45 minutes away via high-speed rail, and the transportation to and back the railway station is so simple for me, and the only bottle neck is to get to hotel from the Hangzhou railway station. It takes for ever to build the metro in Hangzhou. Despite that, I should enjoy the relaxed time in Hangzhou via taxi, or local cars, not driving. I am very tired after the long trip.

 

Language Matters

For some reason, I enjoy learning languages, no matter it is the language of daily life sense, or computer sense.

I can read and write in:

  1. Chinese
  2. English
  3. C/C++
  4. Java (a little bit)
  5. JavaScript (Not to compare it with Hax)
  6. PHP
  7. ASP/VB/VBScript
  8. C#
  9. Propositional Logic
  10. Mathematics

I am looking forward to learn more. Some language I started a little bit (but I put some serious effort behind) are:

  1. Italian
  2. German
  3. Python
  4. Perl
  5. Lisp
  6. Objective C
  7. Japanese

I found how hard it is to maintain two blogs at the same time, one in English, and the other in Chinese. I found I tend to write in Chinese for long enough before switching to English, and vice versa. It is the same in programing languages. To switch from PHP to Python really took me some time these days.

Language is an expression of thoughts. But it cannot be separated from thoughts. I realized when I think of issues in startup, and technology world, I tend to use English in my mind, and when I think of feelings, mathematics, and local matters, of cause my preferred language is Chinese. When I write anything related with web, PHP is still by far the most natural choice for me, but for algorithm, I still prefer C (not even C++). I never liked Java. Never.

Because I swing between languages in daily life, I started to observe the impact of language on my thoughts. Some very long sentences can be easily constructed in English, but not in Chinese. But the spirit of many things can be so concise and precious in Chinese. I just like to use them interchangeably. I also use many English word in my Chinese, just like HTML inside PHP. Because there are many definition and history origins for certain word. For example, Hacker is a well defined world in startup world in English (I mean startup world, and the word hacker sounds scary for normal people who speaks English), but the 黑客 does not translate. I have to stick to that word, even in Chinese.

I hope I can continue to learn more language (Did I mention that I got 900 in the entrance exam for universities in 1995? The score range from 100 to 900). I learn

(sort (1, 4, 2, 3) #'<)

in LISP, and I feel I am a better CEO today when I talk with Joanna. I said:

A company is a sort function, and you have to decide what the second parameter is.

Maybe only LISP programmers can understand what I am talking about.

Aircraft Spotting at Hongqiao Airport

I am not a professional aircraft spotter, but I am also amazed by the scene of an aircraft roars and lands at airports.

The best place to do it I know is at G318 (at K16+). It is easy to find if you follow the 沪青平 highway and you will be guided by the big noise of the aircrafts.

There are lines of this, and flushing one after another, creating a guiding line toward the runway.

Below are some of the photos I took today. Enjoy the big flying machine!