I’m from beautiful Manhattan Beach, CA, where my Asian parents forced me to play the violin every day.

I’m the founder of Five9 and DoctorBase, co-founder of 6connect, and an advisor to Halloo.
I try to stay a busy boy.

Every day in startups seems like a challenging puzzle, but I couldn’t imagine doing anything else. I find humor helps the process, so please don’t be offended if I offend you.

BP hires a PR firm called “Purple Strategies”

Hopefully Purple Strategies PR doesn’t allow any more “We care about the small people” fiascos. Interestingly for a PR firm, they have given zero thought to their search engine optimization,

Purple Strategies PR Firm Washington M Street BP Oil

their meta description still has the joomla default tag and their homepage is all Flash… which begs the question -

Are government and big oil contracts so “insiders only” of an environment that they are completely immune to any desired web marketing? It’s almost like they don’t want to be found…hmmm.

One of their principal partners, Alex Castellanos, has done a lot of work for Bush/Cheney and has been called “the new media mastermind of the Republican party.” I’m not saying Bush or Republicans are good or bad, just pointing out how odd it is for a frequent guest on CNN and long-time political insider to have a website that doesn’t seem to want to be found… or maybe they just don’t care about the Google.

Purple Strategies PR website

A frequent guest on CNN

One comment should not define one’s career..

Obama says, “Wow – Asian kids are good at math!”

OK, President Obama didn’t say that (in exact words verbatim) but in what is to be yet another surefire advancement towards the stereotype of Asian guys loving math, this year’s “Mathletes” from the 2010 national math competition (MathCounts) were uhm… you guessed it (even if you were too politically correct to say it out loud) a bunch of Asians. Have mixed feelings about this one…

this pic is from the White House website:

Obama meets 2010 math counts winners at white house

1 Asian guy, 2 Asian guys, 3....