Jan 6, 2010
Notes to self: 2009 in Review
Placeholder post for me to record my thoughts and reflections on 2009.
Some quick, stream of consciousness thoughts:
Q1
US economy continued to stagnate. The stock market hit a low in March. After the famous Sequoia Startup RIP presentation we put plans in place to shut down our Beijing R&D team. I took the lead on the overall plan for the company. It was the right thing to do but it was extremely unfun because the team was doing many great things and our Beijing R&D operations fed my interest in China-related activities.
Went to China February 22 – March 4 (or so). Took two half-days off to tour Chinese contemporary art galleries with RedBoxStudio and Maya Kovskaya. Still haven’t written about those 2 amazing half-days.
Q2
April. TravelCom in Atlanta. We announced that we hit 1 mm UV/month. I also picked a social media fight with TravelPost and Kayak. Fortunately, that ended well, with a little bit of media coverage we wouldn’t have had, and everyone ended up staying friends. Meanwhile we are making huge progress with our UpTake Blog Network and our idea to create Travel Insights 100.
On my China side projects, CNReviews was rebooted and reimagined by Kai Pan, my new lead editor and partner. We also start getting contributions from BloggerInsight, which are invaluable for providing some more business-related content.
Q3
UpTake continued to do extremely well, but in part because of seasonality of travel traffic. I took time off to attend a few conferences: Gnomedex, Conde Nast World Savers Congress and the Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting. Finally decided to move on to pursue my interests in China and social media. Yen and I started making plans quietly for my departure. Everyone on my staff is past the 2 year mark, and doing a great job, so no guilt over leaving.
Q4
Left UpTake in October. Announced my departure. Yen wrote a very nice farewell post as well. But then get pulled back into the PhoCusWright preparations.
In other matters, I spoke at AAMA Entrepreneurs workshop about lessons learned from my startup experience. Led a case study at Plug & Play University with Professor Tom Kosnik. Was on two panels at Rethink Hawaii: one on China and the Internet, the other on Fast Pitch. Coached a Stanford E145 team called “Midnight Love.”
In November, attended PhoCusWright Conference. Spoke at PhoCusWright at the “Blogger Town Hall” meeting. Blogged about travel innovation.
Bummed out that I couldn’t attend CNBloggerCon this year. Anyway, it was in a remote cave (in Lianzhou) somewhere in Guangdong Province near the Hunan border. Amazing they had Wifi, but the location was chosen because it was not likely that authorities would shut down the conference. In previous years, it was in Guangzhou (2008), Beijing (2007), Hangzhou (2006), and Shanghai (2005). CNReviews sponsored the conference and we sent Kai and Min Guo there to cover it. But Kai didn’t choose to write anything about it. Rebecca MacKinnon did.
China trip: Dec 1-11 (or so). Attended China Travel Distribution Summit and was quite honored to be sitting on the same panel as guys like Fritz Demopolous of Qunar.com, Ivan Zhang of Kuxun.cn, and Hao Wu of DaoDao.com. I’ve know Fritz for a while and am always impressed by what he has accomplished, and his humble but intellectually assertive demeanor. Someone said that they consider Fritz to be 70% Chinese. That’s something to aspire to.
Return to California. Spent the holidays at home, with Karen’s relatives coming to celebrate Christmas with us. Dress up as Santa Claus for the first time.