Serendipity?

If I had never written this public account, I would never have met haofei, who was then still on the other side of the ocean. After I left Beijing at the end of last year and arrived in the Bay Area, quite a few local readers invited me to dinner for some casual conversation, and haofei was one of them. When we met, we happened to talk about housing. At the time, there was a gap of several months between my temporary place and the new home I had set my heart on. It just so happened that he lived in the Bay Area and worked in San Francisco; his daily commute was unbearable, and he wanted to move, but breaking his lease early would cost him two months’ rent, with several months still left on it, so he was caught in a bind. We hit it off immediately: I sublet his apartment, and he moved, as he wished, to the suburbs of San Francisco.

One thing led to another, and we became close friends. He was lucky enough to win the H1b lottery and finally obtained status that allowed him to work steadily. I had no luck with this year’s H1b, but thanks to the care of my former boss before he left, I at least transferred to the San Francisco team. For one thing, I was finally far away from the palace intrigues I had been steeped in for most of the past year (although the battles among senior executives had nothing to do with me, reporting to two successive senior directors and being in the middle of it all, I did see a fair amount of ugliness); for another, I could work on cloud security, which I like much more than pure hardware products. So even though I had not managed to change to a more flexible status, my fighting spirit was high.

We talked a great deal about the joys and sorrows of work and life, and about technology too. The startup he was at, AdRise / Tubi TV, was a little immature on the engineering side, but its business was doing well and thriving. Meanwhile, as I came into deeper contact with Juniper’s San Francisco team, I increasingly felt a culture mismatch; the team had it too easy, which paradoxically left me at a loss.

If I had settled into a retirement mindset, such a team would have been fine: coast along, write a few articles, flatter the higher-ups, secure some benefits for myself, and live quite comfortably. But I had gone through great hardship to reside temporarily in America, and it was not for such a ‘lofty’ ideal. So I kept thinking about how to break the deadlock. Unfortunately, without H1 status, L1 was like the Buddha’s Five Finger Mountain, pressing me down firmly. I considered moving to another team within the company that worked on cloud platform, so as not to let my skills go to waste; I even seriously discussed with my wife whether I should do my own project and try for a Canadian startup visa, leaving Silicon Valley for a while.

One day haofei came to me excitedly and said they were hiring a VP Engineering and asked whether I was interested. Of course I was interested, but visa status was my Achilles’ heel. haofei had already recommended me and had roughly discussed my situation with a lawyer, who suggested O1 or J1. J1 carries the obligation to return home and work for three years after two years (though one can apply for a waiver, it is still a hassle), so O1 was the best choice for both sides.

So I first met Farhad, AdRise’s founder & CEO, and Tom, its cofounder. We all felt very good about each other. Startups move very efficiently: the next day Tom arranged for me to speak with the lawyer about the possibility of my background qualifying for O1. For more than an hour I stripped myself bare, even dredging up laughable ‘contributions’ such as winning a provincial prize in the high school physics competition to make up the numbers. Fortunately, I had four US patents already used in products, coverage in influential Chinese and foreign media, publications (books, articles in technical magazines, and papers in domestic core journals), and many contributions at Juniper. The lawyer said my case was ‘very strong’ and that my chances of getting O1 were very high.

Then came the painful preparation process. When I got home, I wrote down in detail everything I had discussed with the lawyer—every highlight and bright spot in my work history over the past ten-plus years. Every detail in the petition had to be supported with extensive citations; the sheer volume of references was comparable to a professional paper. For example, when I mentioned my forthcoming book ‘The Tuke Circle Startup Chronicle,’ I had to introduce the People’s Posts and Telecommunications Press, its website, its profile, its main publishing areas, its standing in China, its professionalism and authority, and so on. On top of that, collecting and scanning all kinds of original evidence took an enormous amount of effort. Fortunately, my wife and daughter happened to be back in China visiting family, so I was able to get all the materials ready as quickly as possible.

Because my publishing contract, publications, awards large and small, and most media coverage were in Chinese, translations were needed. My family and I were stakeholders and could not provide translations, while third-party translation companies were slow and found it hard to achieve both accuracy and elegance in the technical domain. At this point haofei stepped forward again, finding a friend of his doing a PhD; it was done in two days, and the quality was many times better than that of the so-called translation companies.

Next came the nerve-racking recommendation letters.

I had only met Kai-Fu Lee a few times. Among the teams in Innovation Works’ second batch of the accelerator program, he was most optimistic about our Tuke Circle and often cheered us on. Unfortunately, such a good direction and opportunity was screwed up by me, and I have always felt guilty about it. Nervous as I was, I sent him an email, and to my surprise he immediately and gladly agreed. After he signed, I said to him, ‘I hope that the next time we meet, I will not have let down your trust and will be worthy of the word outstanding.’ He joked back, ‘I meant that you were standing outside.’

Zhang Pinghe, founder of Shijiebang, was more of a nodding acquaintance. We had met only a few times and once had a small unpleasantness, but he signed a recommendation letter for me without a second word, magnanimously.

Both of them were people who had seen big scenes and understood well how important a freer status is to a young man with an uncertain future, so they signed without any hesitation. I am immensely grateful.

There was one more recommendation letter. The lawyer wanted a heavyweight former Juniper executive to prove my contributions in network security. I thought of my old superiors, Mr. F and Mr. P, with Mr. A or Mr. G as alternates. The lawyer wanted more diversity, so Mr. P—a foreigner and former VP of Engineering at Juniper—became the first choice. Mr. P also gladly agreed, saying he was away on vacation and would sign as soon as he returned; he kindly asked when my deadline was and whether signing after his vacation would delay me. I waited more than a week, and when I reached him again after his vacation, he said he was tied up. I waited two days and nudged him again, and he said the same thing. When I nudged him once more, he became resolute:

Tyr, I’m sorry but I am really tied up. Please go ahead and file without my reference. Good luck.

At that moment I felt as if a basin of ice water had been poured over my head, and I could not catch my breath. I did not know what had made a man who had just left VMware and was idle at home so tied up. He would not tell me the reason, and he never replied to my earnest follow-up messages. To put a charitable interpretation on it, perhaps something major had happened in his family and left him with no heart for any chores, or perhaps there was some other reason he no longer wanted to recommend me—after all, in his mind I carried no weight at all.

The letter I had assumed would be easiest to secure became the hottest potato. After an emergency call with the lawyer, we quickly settled on Mr. A, another American VP of Engineering. When I returned to Juniper in 2013, he happened to be in charge of the Beijing R&D center and had always appreciated me. But this meant the recommendation letter had to be revised substantially. I called Mr. A directly and, after getting his consent, felt a little relieved. On Friday night the lawyer finished revising the letter, and I forwarded it to Mr. A. I had intended to follow up with him on Monday, but he signed it and sent it back to me on Sunday.

It was a godsend—help exactly when I needed it. Relationships between people are so subtle: three or four years of working with Mr. P could not compare with seven or eight months of working with Mr. A, and most of the contributions I made at Juniper were completed during that period. How ironic! Fortunately, much of what I did then had original evidence (such as patents); whether it was weighty enough could be proven by itself, and there was no need to inflate it too much through others’ words.

All the materials were finally complete, and more than a hundred and twenty pages were submitted.

While waiting anxiously, I visited a friend at Airbnb. He had come directly from China on O1, so I learned some details about the O1 application. Next, another friend, an entrepreneur from Seattle, happened to come to the Bay Area to have tea with investors. We met. He did not have a PhD, but he had DIYed his own EB1A application and, after receiving an RFE (Request for Evidence), eventually got it approved after twists and turns. EB1A is the hardest category among first-preference employment-based green cards and can be applied for without any sponsor, but its requirements are almost the same as O1A: you have to prove you are an internationally top-tier talent, and in practice it is much harder than O1 (analogous to a hukou versus a work residence permit). As he sorted things out for me, I broke out in cold sweats, because my O1 application had committed quite a few of the major taboos summarized on mitbbs’s Settling Down board. For example, patents are relatively easy to trigger an RFE, because the value of an ordinary patent—whether in influence or revenue—is hard to quantify. In addition, O1 requires satisfying about three of roughly ten criteria; if you do not concentrate on nailing three of them so that they are impregnable, claiming too many makes it easy for weaknesses to be found and then for an RFE to follow (I may write separately about the details later). Yet my lawyer seemed to have claimed five for me.

I went back and studied mitbbs with a troubled heart. I thought about which criterion of mine would be easy to trigger an RFE and what my countermeasures would be, feeling uneasy. Unexpectedly, after several days of anxious waiting, I received the good news directly: O-1A petition approved. It seems the threshold for O1 is indeed much lower than for EB1A.

After letting out a long breath, I shared the good news with the Tuke Circle crew. Still shaken, I told them: more than three months of effort had gathered the contributions of nearly the past ten years, and finally bought a temporary freedom.

At the end of 2004 (or early 2005), at the Digital China annual meeting, I received the Golden Horse Award—Top Ten Technologists—from Li Qin (I think he presented it). This trophy, which I earned with a year’s effort, meant more to me as a free trip to Europe (and it was that Europe trip that inspired me to travel again with my wife and planted the seed of Tuke Circle in my heart).

In 2005, I jumped to Juniper. I switched to Juniper to get a raise and to enjoy the favor of a foreign company, but I did not expect that from then on the culture of NetScreen (Juniper had already acquired NetScreen, the leader in the firewall market, and the China R&D center had been established by NetScreen) and the NetScreen startup history written by ‘Southwest Associated University’ (the pen name of my colleague Mike Ji) would deeply influence me.

In 2006, taking advantage of a business trip to the US for training at Juniper, I pored over code and asked everyone I met, producing two hefty documents summarizing the core of NetScreen Firewall; Mr. P, then a VP, singled me out for praise (and that is precisely why I later asked Mr. P to write a recommendation letter). My colleagues jokingly called it the Sunflower Manual for ScreenOS (NetScreen’s operating system). I wrote it partly because of my boss Mr. M’s soft request, and partly simply because I did not want the knowledge I had gained during that intensive training to vanish in an instant.

From 2007 or 2008 onward, I wrote my first US Patent draft: Hot patch for embedded systems. I happened to have worked on exactly this at work, and at the same time, as the China lead for a program on engineers’ personal development and innovation led by our BU’s CTO, I had to lead by example (and of course there was plenty of US dollars to be made from writing patents). Thus, half-pushed and half-willing, after writing my first patent, I went on to write six more, four of which were eventually granted.

In 2011, I founded Tuke Circle. At an iWeekend event, I got to know Jason in casual conversation, an American-born Chinese who was then a reporter for an obscure online media outlet. A few months later, Tuke Circle entered Innovation Works’ accelerator program, and Jason came to interview me. Because of that one meeting, I chatted with him, and unexpectedly the report was published on PCWorld. That report was a bright spot among my few overseas media mentions—after all, the name PCWorld would greatly increase the weight, in the mind of USCIS officials, of the media coverage section of my application.

Also in April 2011, I paid my own way to attend QConn. At an evening event, I met Hailing, then an editor at Turing. I said I was starting a company and might later write a book about the startup journey—would she be interested in publishing it? Perhaps out of a kind desire not to pour cold water on me, Hailing answered a nobody like me that she was interested.

Between 2011 and 2014, the successes and failures of Tuke Circle brought me into passing contact with big names like Kai-Fu Lee and Pinghe, which is how the recommendation letters above came about.

In 2013, after leaving Tuke Circle and spending each day reviewing things at the National Library in a desolate mood, I began writing ‘The Tuke Circle Startup Chronicle’ on and off. Later, while sorting through business cards, I remembered Hailing and contacted her, by then at PT Press, starting our collaboration on a paper book.

During the writing process, the book began serializing on Baidu Reading. Somehow it caught the eye of Lisa, an editor at China Machine Press, who wanted to work with me, and thus came the forthcoming book ‘Building Secure Systems,’ expected to be finished by June 2016 (ashamedly, at the agreed word count I have written less than 3 percent; I must work harder). Although this book had only a contract, it also became a piece of evidence for my professional expertise in the O1 application.

In 2014, I started writing this public account. More than a year later came the story at the beginning of this article with my friend haofei.

All of these were scattered events. I had no foresight; more than ten years ago, when I did each thing, I did not anticipate its importance. I was simply lucky that, when I encountered them, I chose to give. My dad often quotes Pasteur to me: ‘Chance favors only the prepared mind.’ Sometimes you really cannot tell whether it is the capable who end up doing more, or the doing of more that makes one capable.

Steve Jobs said:

You cannot connect dots looking forward, but you can connect dots looking backwards.

I like this saying very much. O1 was like an invisible thread connecting these dots of mine. The friend who DIYed his EB1A introduced me, when we met, to the awkward and hard-to-translate word serendipity; it is also the title of the film ‘Serendipity.’ If life is always unchanging—meeting the same people, saying the same things, doing the same things, giving as little as possible—it is very hard to have serendipity, and then there is no way to create various dots, let alone connect them.

I do not know what I will face next. The greatest certainty of a startup is uncertainty. But whether I succeed or fail, I enjoy it.

I dedicate this article to those who, like me, are running on the road in pursuit of freedom and happiness.