This About Me is an brief autobiography. If you are specifically interested in my professional experience, please see my linkedin profile. Thanks!
Hi, I’m Allan and this is a blog about technology, entrepreneurship, and lessons learned. I started this blog because I’m transitioning from software development into business, and wanted to share my experiences with everyone else considering the same switch.
I’ve always been a geek. By the time I graduated elementary school, I was already writing code in two different programming languages. I still remember programming my first text adventure game and how fun it was to write code to handle “walk north”, despite that the game itself sucked. My middle school years were a blur, mostly because I spent over 8 hours every day for 3 years playing Starcraft. I’m a serious gamer, and have seriously considered pursuing a professional gaming career several times. High school was a real geek-fest, and I was in the math team, chess team, world youth science and engineering team, science olympiad team, speech and debate team, and probably a few other nerdy teams that I have forgotten about. Our chess team placed second in nationals, though, so it was worth it.
I went to school at UC Berkeley as a pre-med, and made my own major in Cross Cultural Medicine. Again I was a part of many nerdy activities, and founded the chess club, was a university sponsored peer health advisor, helped to start an integrative medicine (holistic health) major, and more. After learning in great detail about the history, anthropology, and sociology of medicine, I began to realize that becoming a doctor was not the right career path for me.
Suddenly realizing that my last three years of education would not be beneficial for my career path, I drew upon my programming experience and landed a job at a web startup as a software developer. Not long after, I was poached to build the technical foundation for a marketing firm, and became the lead developer and chief technical architect. I’m now beginning to realize that while I greatly enjoy software engineering and technical strategy, it’s more of a hobby for me. For my long term career, I would like to build businesses.
Thus, my goal for the next few years is to learn how to build businesses. I hope to start and run a few successful companies, learning how to make better decisions, trust others, and take prudent risks along the way. As I see it, building business is the most valuable skill because businesses are the mediums which enable systematic change. A perfect doctor or a perfect software engineer is limited to the work of their own hands, whereas a great business owner creates systematic change affecting countless people for any industry.
I hope that this provides context for this blog, which will be about technology, entrepreneurship, and the lessons that I learn along the way. Feel free to comment, question, or critique my thoughts. I’m keeping an open mind and learning as I go.
