Silicon Valley Notes (2014–2017): Journey West and Building the Stage
The walk of the Great Way does not shifts blame onto others; the journey of a person of integrity always chooses its direction with care. — Huainanzi
Leafing through hundreds of short notes jotted down between 2014 and 2017 feels like watching a documentary shot on handheld film: slightly jump-cut in frame rate, yet warm with the immediate texture of lived days.
Formal technical essays often resemble a finished building after the scaffolding has been dismantled and the concrete polished smooth. Brief notes written in parking lots after evening meetups, at airport gates, or at 3 AM after an on-call page preserve the gravel, noise, and honest awkwardness of the construction site. Across these four years, I returned to a multinational networking giant, relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area, left the comfort of legacy enterprise infrastructure to join an early-stage streaming startup called Tubi TV, and flew back to Wangjing in Beijing to build our China engineering center from a handful of shared desks.
1. Evening Meetups in Mountain View
When I first settled into the Bay Area in the spring of 2014, the strongest impression came not from Silicon Valley’s mythology, but from driving up and down Highway 101 every evening to attend engineering meetups in Mountain View and Sunnyvale.
One week in May captured that density perfectly: on Thursday evening I sat on Microsoft’s campus listening to LinkedIn engineers dissect distributed search; on Friday evening I drove to LinkedIn’s headquarters to hear Twitter engineers explain high-throughput message fan-out. Even more memorable was an August meetup hosted at Ericsson. Striking up a conversation with the engineers sitting on either side of me, I realized I was surrounded by people at the end of an era: the engineer to my left was at Motorola, and tomorrow was his last day; the two engineers to my right worked at HP, counting down to their division’s shutdown at the end of the month.
That is Silicon Valley at its most ruthless and most magnetic: the sunset of an old empire and the dawn of a new species are often separated by a single street, or a single folding chair. Two days later I walked ten minutes to Yahoo’s headquarters on First Avenue for lunch with a friend. Despite the vibrant purple banners of Marissa Mayer’s turnaround effort, the weight of legacy infrastructure was unmistakable.
2. The Visa Gauntlet and Legacy Dependencies
Beneath the intellectual energy of evening meetups, daytime engineering and immigration bureaucracy tested one’s patience in equal measure.
One November night in 2014, all I wanted was an ab (Apache Benchmark) binary with HTTPS support on an air-gapped legacy CentOS server. Without internet access or a package manager, compiling that single binary turned into a dependency nightmare of manually building Apache, APR, APR-util, PCRE, and OpenSSL from source—an experience that permanently cemented my appreciation for Go and Rust’s static single-binary toolchains.
Meanwhile, navigating H1/L1 and later O1 visa petitions meant assembling hundreds of pages of open-source contributions, books, and articles while waiting on lawyers on vacation and refreshing embassy appointment slots at midnight. No matter how opaque external bureaucracy becomes, an engineer’s true passport across borders is ultimately the body of code and craft built line by line over the years.
3. Early Streaming Days by the San Francisco Bay
In late 2015, armed with my O1 visa, I rode the Caltrain north to San Francisco to join Tubi TV when the company was still a scrappy team of barely a dozen people.
On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving—his very last day at the company before starting his own venture—our brilliant Android engineer Benoit stayed at his desk until 5:30 PM to ship and verify one final production release before saying goodbye. Watching the late-autumn sunset filter through the blinds, I knew I had joined a team that cared deeply about the dignity of engineering craft.
Startup life had plenty of unglamorous comedy too: after attending a lavish tech reception in San Francisco in October 2016, I booked an Uber Pool back to the South Bay to save the company a few dollars, only to get violently carsick on San Francisco’s steep hills as the driver detoured through East Palo Alto. And on Caltrain, a full electrical shutdown once left a trainload of Silicon Valley engineers stranded in the dark listening to the conductor announce, “We are troubleshooting.”
4. Twilight of Legacy Networking
As we scaled Tubi TV on AWS with Elixir and Scala, I watched traditional networking vendors struggle as hyperscalers bypassed proprietary ASICs in favor of custom-built white-box switches and software-defined networking. Technical moats rarely collapse because you failed to polish your existing craft; they collapse when a higher-level abstraction pulls the ground out from beneath the entire category.
5. Building the Wangjing Team and Trans-Pacific On-Call
In June 2016, the day my Advance Parole arrived, I flew to Beijing to establish Tubi’s China engineering center (Bitu Tech) from a few desks in Wangjing. By May 2017, the Wall Street Journal and 36Kr covered our $20M Series B.
Cross-border leadership came with physical tolls: during a December 2017 trip to Beijing, Opsgenie kept paging me on Pacific Time in the middle of the Beijing night, followed by an acute gastroenteritis attack right before a thirteen-hour flight back to San Jose. Along the way, we learned never to compromise the hiring bar for short-term headcount urgency, redesigning our interviews around reading and evolving real miniature codebases. A cross-border team spanning ten thousand kilometers and twelve time zones succeeds not through surveillance, but by hiring engineers who respect code quality when no one is watching.
6. Noon Runs Beneath the Bay Bridge
In August 2017, a fellow runner in Beijing gave me a piece of advice I never forgot: with our San Francisco office right on the waterfront, not running at noon was a waste of a gift. Back in San Francisco, I kept running shoes under my desk and began running along the Embarcadero from the Bay Bridge toward Fisherman’s Wharf at midday. Between the salt wind off the bay and the steady rhythm of footsteps, visa anxieties and architectural knots always found their resolution.
Those who travel far do not rely on tailwinds; those who build high first secure the foundation.
References & Sources
- Wall Street Journal: Tubi TV Raises $20 Million for Ad-Supported Streaming Service (2017-05-09): https://www.wsj.com/articles/tubi-tv-raises-20-million-for-ad-supported-streaming-service-1494331201
- 36Kr: Tubi TV $20M Series B Coverage (2017-05-10): https://36kr.com/p/1721469362177
- QiaoPang Archive: Author’s original 2014–2017 Silicon Valley dispatches and field notes
