It has been extremely dry in British Columbia this summer, I can’t even remember the last time it rained here. The downside is that there are a lot of water restrictions now (you can’t even water your garden or wash your car anymore) and there have been many forest fires because of the drought. Also animals are affected, because there is not enough food for them high up in the mountains, and so they come down to look for it.

And that’s what happened today at our house. Our neighbour was walking her dog when she suddenly saw a bear in front of our driveway! We do get a bit of wildlife in our area, such as cougars and coyotes, but bears are very rare. Since we moved here we had not seen any, and neighours later told us that the last time a bear was spotted in our street was in 2009. 

The black bear is hardly visible below the bushes

The bear was standing below some bushes when a car drove by, and because of that it walked up our driveway. Luckily the kids were not playing outside! Or more likely, if the kids would have been playing outside the bear might not have entered our garden.

Coincidentally our housekeeper just arrived in her car and she drove up to the bear to scare it away. That didn’t really work and the bear decided to sit next to our house before walking into our neighbour’s garden.

From there the bear managed to climb over a fence onto the golf course. A woman playing golf got a good scare when she suddenly saw a bear jump onto the fairway in front of her. The bear then ran away and we have not seen it since. 

Living in Vancouver’s suburbs is certainly interesting!

Many of my investments are in companies that make products or services that have the potential to change the world. It’s therefore a real pity that I never had the chance to invest in Soylent, a product that may redefine what food is. (Note: If shares should become available on secondary markets please let me know!)

Never heard of Soylent? It’s a powder that you mix with water to get a drink that has all the nutrition and vitamins you need to live healthy. It takes less than 5 minutes to make Soylent and it costs less than $10 per day! Soylent saves you time and money and makes it easy to get all the right nutrition elements that you need for a healthy life. 

I first heard about Soylent 2 years ago and found the idea intriguing. However, you could not buy the product yet at the time (it only started shipping in the US around April 2014), so I could not try it out and therefore sort of forgot about it. Every now and then I read an article (either very postive or very negative: disruptive technologies are always quite controversial and lead to lots of online discussions. Just like Bitcoin!) and I decided to order Soylent if it would become available in Canada. And indeed, a few weeks ago I read that Soylent was now for sale in my new home country, so I ordered a batch of the product.

My first shipment of Soylent arrived earlier this week and the past 3 days I lived mainly on this product. To be honest, I was a bit skeptical when I started this food experiment, mainly because I like to eat good food and I spend quite a lot of money on it. I could not imagine that a cheap powder-based drink would change the way I would eat for more than a day.

Preparing Soylent is very easy. With your first shipment comes a big jug in which you put half a bag of Soylent powder, then you fill half the jug with water and you shake the mix for 30 seconds. You then add the remaining powder, fill up the jug with water and shake again for 30 seconds. Done! It’s best to drink Soylent chilled, so I put it in the fridge and started my new ‘diet’ the next morning during breakfast. In October bottles of Soylent will go on sale as well, meaning that you don’t need to prepare it yourself anymore.

I live fairly healthy, with lots of exercise, not too much stress, and good food (plus several vitamins and mineral supplements, based on the results of my human genome sequencing). So I assumed Soylent would not make me more healthy, it would merely make eating faster and cheaper.

I got up a bit too late and had an early meeting in my office, so I did not have a lot of time for breakfast. Normally I would have a large glass of water (I start every day with a large glass of warm water), make some yoghurt with fruit and eat some bread with jam or cheese. Now I had my glass of water as usual and then I drank a smaller glass of Soylent. I finished breakfast in less than 2 minutes and jumped in my car to drive to downtown Vancouver.

Soylent tastes a bit like pancake batter or possibly a kind of oatmeal, not a bad taste actually. It was not something I needed to get used to, and over the past days I started to like it more and more. It was very easy to drink, it reminded me of having a milk shake, partly because it has the same texture and it came straight out of the fridge so it was very cold.

When I arrive in the office normally the first thing I do is to make myself a strong coffee. But now I did not really feel like drinking coffee, which is very strange for me. I normally drink at least 2 cups of coffee in the morning and on average about 4 cups of coffee per day. A workday does not really start until I finish my first coffee. But today I was a bit thirsty and decided to have a glass of water instead.

2 hours later I made my first coffee, and that was actually the only coffee I had that day. I wasn’t sure whether not drinking coffee was related to Soylent, but after 3 days I recognize the pattern: I only drink 1-2 cups of coffee per day now instead of 3-4, and I don’t miss it at all. I actually prefer an extra sip of Soylent instead of a coffee and the main reason I drink coffee is because I am so used to making one that I don’t really think about it.

After 2 meetings, around 11 AM, I normally get hungry and start looking for a cookie or a banana. But instead I decided to have half a glass of Soylent and my craving for other food was gone right away. And I started to really like the taste of Soylent!

Lunch was simple as well. Just a big glass of Soylent followed by a glass of water. For some reason Soylent makes me more thirsty, despite the fact that a jug of Soylent contains 1.6 liters of water. I drank my lunch while doing emails, so I did not have to stop working, saving me at least 30-45 minutes (if I don’t have a biz lunch I normally I walk out to a restaurant, buy some take-away food and eat it in my office).

I had a bit more Soylent during the afternoon and had no craving for other food at all. And even better, I felt a lot more energetic. Normally I start to get a bit sleepy after lunch, but with Soylent there was no dip at all. The next day was exactly the same, so it seems Soylent is at least part of the reason for it.

When I came home I had a normal dinner. I decided not to go cold turkey and completely stop eating food, but to just replace breakfast and lunch with Soylent (except for business lunches). At home we try to have breakfast and dinner together every day, so I don’t want to change our daily schedule by suddenly just drinking Soylent. Dinner is more than just eating to me, it’s a good time to talk about the day with the family and to listen to Scott and Elaine’s stories. That ritual won’t be changed by Soylent.

I actually realized that because dinner is now the only ‘real food’ meal of the day, I tend to enjoy the food more than I would normally. It also feels like I eat more slowly. After not chewing for most of the day it feels good to eat some solid food.

I have now been drinking most of my meals for 3 days and I am very positive. There were no side effects for me because of Soylent. If you search the Internet lots of people say that their bodies and digestive systems have to get used to Soylent during the first days, but for me that was not the case. I felt at least as healthy as usual and slept very well. I suspect that not drinking as much coffee and not eating any sugary products are important reasons for this.

As a bonus I seem to be losing weight as well. Likely because I eat less calories, especially during lunch. Also there are no snacks in between, I totally lost my cravings for something sweet or some carbs in the late morning or mid-afternoon. When I want to eat something I just take a sip of soylent.

Based on my very limited observations and based on my personal taste, I do believe there could be a huge market for Soylent. The food seems to be healthy, at least more healthy than the food that most people in the (Western) world eat. It is also relatively cheap compared to buying fresh foods: for about $10 per day you can have the equivalent of 3 meals and some snacks per day, and this price may come down further if the soylent production scales up.

And not only that, the food can also save you at least 2 hours per day, assuming you only eat Soylent. No more grocery shopping for fresh food, no more cooking dinner (and cleaning up afterward) and not spending more than a few minutes on eating the food.

I have only tried Soylent for 3 days now, but I am convinced that I will keep eating it on a semi-regular basis. Not for all my meals, but possibly a few days per week for breakfast and/or lunch. Although many hardcore Soylent users have been eating just Soylent for weeks or even months, I won’t give up good ‘real’ food for Soylent. But I could imagine that when I should be alone at home for a few days that I would eat just Soylent to save time.

Soylent is certainly not for everyone, and most people will be very skeptical at first. But over time I think more people will try it out and will realize that it can be a good partial alternative for their normal diets. It saves time, is healthy and cheap. It may even help to solve the problem of hunger in the world. Soylent is disrupting the food industry, it could very well be the future of food!

This summer I’m too busy with work to go on a long holiday, so we’re just taking a few shorter trips. In early July we spent some days in Kelowna and Banff, and last week we did a trip to Southern California. I had accepted to speak at 2 conferences in Los Angeles so that was a good reason to bring the family along and plan some activities in between the conferences.

The first conference that I spoke at was the Silicon Dragon conference in Pasadena, a conference about tech and investing in China. We decided to stay in The Langham Huntington, where I stayed a couple of monts ago as well when I did 2 talks at Caltech and in Burbank. It’s a beautiful classic hotel with great service and nice views from the rooms (especially those on the backside of the hotel).

We did a bit of sightseeing in Pasadena, which is very nice place with some older buildings and nice shops. We also took the kids to the Caltech campus close to downtown Pasadena. We’re showing the kids all world-class universities when we are in the area: for example a couple of months ago when we were in the Bay area we went to Stanford and to UC Berkeley with them. Not sure if universities will still be around when they are ready to go there in 10-12 years (also education is being disrupted!), but it’s always good when they know what the campuses of these universities look like.

The Silicon Dragon conference was interesting and a good way to catch up with a lot of people (a lot of friends from my China days were there). The venture capital / dealmakers in China panel was fun to participate in and I even did an interview with CCTV (China’s main broadcaster) about investing in China and about online entertainment trends in Asia.

After the panel I picked up my family from the hotel and we drove 2 hours south to the Legoland Hotel in Carlsbad. We stayed there last year as well and it’s a good base when you plan to visit Legoland. However, the hotel is very much overpriced (almost $600 per night for a room without a balcony) and is super crowded in the summer months. The service is mediocre as well, it’s basically a 3-star hotel with 5-star prices. But the kids love it and that’s what count. But after last week’s experience we very likely won’t be back anymore, and certainly not in high season.

Legoland on the other hand was great and the kids had a fantastic time. As usual in theme parks we got VIP passes, but the park had changed the system. Last year when we visited Legoland we just got special tickets so that you did not have to wait in line at any of the attractions, but this year they changed to electronic devices. For an additional $25 per person you would have a 25% shorter waiting time, for $50 a 50% shorter waiting time and for $100 per person your waiting time was 5% of that of normal ticket buyers.

Pretty decent pricing (esp. compared to the price of the Legoland Hotel), because the waiting time at the most popular attractions was between 60-90 minutes. With the devices we had to wait max. 5 minutes at each attraction, and if you input the next ride while walking there you have almost no waiting time. We saved many hours of waiting because of the devices, so it was totally worth it for us.

Scott and Elaine both had their first rollercoaster experience in Legoland. They both liked it, but Scott felt one rollercoaster ride was sufficient for a day while Elaine was really excited and afterwards wanted to try every scary ride that we saw. Interesting to observe how different siblings can be.

After a couple of hours we left the park and drove down to San Diego, where we had booked a suite at the Hyatt next to Sea World. The place was quite nice, with a balcony overlooking the Mission Bay marina and a (bit crowded) pool with slides for the kids.

The next morning we took a water taxi from the marina to Sea World, the quickest and easiest way to get to the park. The boat captain made a little detour to show us some seals and then dropped us off at the back entrance of Sea World. So no waiting lines to enter the park. The only problem was that we had to pick up our VIP passes at the entrance of the park, so we first had to take a walk.

Sea World still had the old system where you could bypass all the lines, but because of all the negative publicity after the release of Blackfish (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OEjYquyjcg) there were not that many lines anymore. Even at the top attractions waiting times in the middle of peak season were just 15 minutes! But the tickets were still quite useful for the shows: most of them are fully booked if you don’t come at least 15-30 minutes in advance, but with these tickets you get the best seats even if the show is full already and you can show up any time.

After Legoland Scott and Elaine were not too impressed by Sea World’s rides, but they liked the shows a lot. The orca and dolphin shows were both quite impressive, and the one with the sea lions was a big hit with the kids as well. We left around 4 pm and took a water taxi to the hotel from the back entrance.

In the hotel we went for a swim and then we drove along the coast to downtown San Diego. The city is very nice (I had only been there once before) and has a very relaxed feel. I especially like all the marinas, it seems like everybody has a boat in San Diego.

After dinner we put the kids to bed and then I worked a couple of hours in the living room. Although I try to keep up with important emails during the daytime I get so many mails that there is no way I can answer all of them on my phone. Even on my laptop I can’t answer all of them anymore and these days chances are you don’t get a reply anymore if you mail me. For a long time I tried to answer all my mails but I have given up on that. So if you ever try to get in touch and don’t get an answer, just send a follow-up mail (they do get priority!).

The next day we visited friends from Hong Kong in their holiday home in Newport Beach. They are both in the traditional finance industry, so we talked a bit about the latest developments in blockchain land (still one of my favorite topics) and the p2p lending world. I also took Scott to the beach, just a 2 minute stroll down the lane from their house. Many of the beaches in Southern California are wide and sandy, and the one in Newport beach was no exception. Great places to hang out and spend a lazy afternoon!

Late in the afternoon we drove to the Fairmont Hotel in Santa Monica, a very nice hotel overlooking the Pacific. I went for a run on the beach while the kids went swimming in the ocean, and after that we had a quick dinner in downtown Santa Monica. After dinner the kids were tired and went to bed straight away, while I worked for a couple of hours.

The next morning I got up early to drive to downtown Los Angeles for Keynote 2015, a distributed ledger conference, where I was invited to speak on investing in blockchain tech. The conference was held in the main ballroom of the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, an amazing location! In the 1920s the first Oscar award ceremonies were actually held right in this place, and the hotel had several pictures from events in those days on its walls.

The blockchain conference was very interesting and gave me some new insights on what’s happening with bitcoin, and I enjoyed discussing the investment opportunities in blockchain technologies. The crowd was very different from the ‘old’ bitcoin conferences, where most people were very familiar with bitcoin already. At this conference I met several people from banks and other multinationals who were still new to the bitcoin world. Also a couple of speakers were pretty much anti-bitcoin, which made for some lively discussions. Thanks for organizing this Moe, it was great to be part of one of your events again.

The next morning I made a walk around Santa Monica before packing our suitcases and driving to the airport. I handed in my Silvercar and one of the Silvercar employees drove us to departures (great service!). We had a quick lunch in the lounge and then boarded our flight back to Vancouver. I had a fun and productive couple of days in SoCal, and the family enjoyed it as well!