Grace and I just got back from a 3-day trip to Las Vegas. It’s an easy destination to get to from Vancouver, both Air Canada and Westjet have direct flights that bring you to Sin City in less than 3 hours.

Leaving dark & rainy Vancouver

The past weeks had been extremely busy so about 10 days ago we booked a flight and a hotel for the days before Christmas. Unfortunately work and private issues messed up our schedules a bit, so in the end we almost decided not to go. Because of that we both had to do phone calls and many emails while on vacation. Not the best way to relax, but we couldn’t change it and the only alternative would have been to stay home.

Because I’m not a big fan of casino’s (I hate gambling and have trouble understanding how people can sit at slot machines or casino tables for hours) we booked one of the few hotels that does not have its own casino or slot machines, the Mandarin Oriental. I love the chain, it’s one of the hotels that I prefer to stay at in Asia as well. Their Las Vegas hotel was excellent with very friendly staff, a great room and good services. Almost comparable to 5-star hotels in Asia, which is something special in North America.

We had decided to go to Las Vegas because we wanted to be away from the dark and rainy Vancouver winter days, and Vegas normally has dry and sunny weather (it’s in the middle of the desert). We were lucky because we had temperatures up to 23 Celcius while there (which is much warmer than usual), so I could walk around in a t-shirt during the day.

View from the Mandarin Oriental Las Vegas

Grace’ main activity was to go shopping, while I was sitting in the hotel room behind my laptop, although I joined her a few times as well. A bit of a sacrifice, because I’m not a fan of physical shopping, I prefer to buy my things online.

What I like about Las Vegas is of course the nightlife, although we did not go out a lot. I was so tired from work that I slept 9-10 hours per night during the trip, just to recover. We did have some excellent dinners though. The first night we went to Picasso in the Bellagio, a French restaurant with a classical feel to it. I was glad I wore a jacket, otherwise I would have felt underdressed. We decided to go for the Menu Degustation, a multicourse tasting meal that featured the best creations of the chef. A great choice, but quite a large meal if you also take the wine pairings.

Filet Mignon at Jean Georges Steakhouse in Las Vegas

We found out that Jean Georges also has an establishment in Las Vegas, in the Aria Resort. We had dinner there quite late on the second night, after we first had a foot massage in a Chinese spa on the outskirts of the city. Jean Georges did not disappoint, but it was not as high end as the one in Shanghai. Many of the other top restaurants that were on my shortlist (e.g. Hakkassan and Twist by Pierre Gagnaire) turned out to be closed during the week before Christmas, so that’s something to check out in advance before a future trip.

On the last night we had dinner with friends from Vancouver that were coincidentally also in Las Vegas (the husband is actually a successful entrepreneur who lives mainly in Beijing, his wife and kids live full-time in Canada). Good for me to practice my Chinese a bit. We went to the Cirque du Soleil show Michael Jackson ONE with them in the Mandalay. There are always so many shows in Vegas that it’s hard to decide which one to go to, but after some research this seemed the best one. It was indeed a good choice, it was a combination of acrobatics, performance and dancing on the music of all famous Michael Jackson hits. Micheal himself also played a role with his 3D hologram dancing on stage, pretty cool!

View from Mix Lounge at Delano over Las Vegas’ skyline

We’re now back in Vancouver where I’ll work one more day on Wednesday before trying to take a few days off. It was a fun trip to end the year but next time I’ll try to plan it during a time when we are less busy.

Do you like to read detective books or watch detective movies? Do you enjoy a reality show? Then how about a combination of the 2 in the form of an audio podcast?

About 2 weeks ago I wrote a post about the Startup podcast that I liked a lot, and after that I decided to give the Serial podcast a try. I had heard about it a few weeks before already but did not think it would be interesting to listen to. Well, I was completely wrong. When more and more friends wrote about it on Facebook and Twitter, when even the mainstream press started to write about the podcast, and especially when the podcast hit #1 in iTunes I knew I was missing out on something.

It took me less than one episode of this weekly program to become addicted to the podcast. I ‘binge listened’ the first 7 shows in just 2 days (episodes are 30-50 min each). I lost sleep over it, listening to “just one more” episode at 2 AM and I drove home slowly from work so I could listen to a few minutes extra of the podcast. The experience reminded me of some of the top TV series that I binge watched, such as the early seasons of Lost and more recently Downton Abbey, where I could not wait to finish my work late at night so I could watch an episode.

Serial is the story about the 1999 murder of Hae Min Lee, a Baltimore high school senior. Her ex-boyfriend Adnan Syed was arrested a few weeks after the murder and was later convicted. He is still in prison. The thing is, he says he is innocent. Of course many criminals say they are innocent, but the longer you listen to Serial the more you realize that some strange things have happened in the investigation.

Did Adnan do it? I don’t know yet. One moment I am totally convinced that he is not innocent, but 10 minutes later I feel certain that he was framed and someone else was the murderer. I change my mind continously while listening to the podcast and when thinking about the facts afterward.

One reason why the show is so successful is because it slowly releases new evidence. The storytelling is amazing, with an important role for Adnan who is interviewed by phone in almost every episode. You hear him speak to you about the crime and what happened on the day of the murder (was she really murdered that day?) on your headphones or over he speakers of your car. That is so powerful, especially because his story is mixed with insightful comments by host Sarah Koenig.

Interestingly, nobody knows how the podcast will end. There will likely be another 3 episodes, but even Sarah says she does not know what her final verdict will be. The Internet is full of theories about Adnan and what might have happened on January 13, 1999. There are tens of thousands of comments on Reddit, people write blogs about it and there are even podcasts about this podcast. Many (or likely most) of the major newspapers have written about Serial and keep writing about it. I have never seen this before for a podcast. Serial is taking the medium to a completely different level.

One takeaway from Serial is how sloppy murder cases are investigated in the US. The police wants to find and convict someone and seems to just put aside evidence in favor of the accused. Adnan’s lawyer may not have had the best for her client in mind (unfortunately she died a few years ago, so she could not be interviewed) and it’s clear she made some major mistakes during the trial. Racial profiling is a big issue, my impression is that had Adnan been a white guy he may not have been convicted. And the scariest thing is that a former police detective who was paid by the program to look at the evidence, said that this case was actually investigated better than average…

If you want to give Serial a try you can listen here to the podcast on iTunes and here on Soundcloud (embedded below). Or just go the website of the Serial podcast where you can read about and stream all episodes. And if you like it as much as I do, make sure to send a donation to the production team so they can keep on doing the world’s best storytelling. I can’t wait until Thursday when the next episode comes out at 6 AM EST!

One of the companies that will be threatened most if Bitcoin becomes a success is Western Union. So when a parody on one of their ads appeared on Reddit and Facebook, they were not amused. The company sent a DMCA notice to Facebook forcing them to take the picture down.

Not a smart move for anybody who understands social media. Not only is a parody generally considered fair use of an image, so there is no legal basis for the notice, but normaly a take down notice leads to a lot of additional reporting, so many people who would not have seen the ad now see it.

The original ad makes me feel sad for people that don’t have normal bank accounts and need to use Western Union to transfer money. Sending up to $50 for ‘only’ $5 is crazy expensive, this is a fee of 10%. And this is only within the US, not even to overseas locations.

I wonder if there are other hidden fees, because in the add it only states ‘transfer fee’. I tried to figure this out on their website, where I noticed the small print messages “Card issuer cash advance fee and associated interest charges may apply” and “Western Union also makes money from currency exchange”.  Of course there will be no currency exchange when sending dollars inside the US, but that could add up for international transfers. Also “fees for agent locations may differ from online fees”… Plus there is a maximum amount of $999 that you can send per 30 days.

Generally I don’t think the US will be an easy market for Bitcoin to take off, because it’s too well developed to solve a real need. But this kind of transfer fees remind me that even in North America there are some serious business opportunities. I hope the ad will lead a lot more people to consider using Bitcoin. The technology is still too difficult to understand for most people (especially that part of the population that uses Western Union in the first place), but easy-to-use services such as Circle.com are now available to anyone and could save people a lot of money.

This weekend Scott and Elaine had their first public piano performance during a recital for the Canada Music Week. Scott, who is 6 years old, started playing piano just over a year ago, in October 2013. Elaine (5 years old) tried piano for a few weeks last year but she was too young and started again this summer, so she now has about 4-5 months of piano experience.

They have lessons once a week (next to all their other extracurricular classes and their daily homework), but practice at least 30 minutes at home every day, with Grace as their substitute teacher.

The kids liked to dress up for the event and were not nervous at all. The only one who seemed to be nervous was Grace!

After their performance they got some flowers from us and they were really proud of that. On Saturday Scott and Elaine will have their next piano recital, so they are studying hard on another piece this week.

Links to their performance on YouTube: Elaine’s piano recital and Scott’s piano recital

Embedded videos of their performance:

My Silvercar at the Opus One winery in Napa Valley

About a year ago I wrote about my very positive experience with car rental company Silvercar. Last week I used them again in San Francisco and I still love their cars and their disruptive business model. I am just surprised that not more people know about them and use them, therefore another blog post to spread the word. And no, I am not getting paid for this of course!

Silvercar is a US based rental car company that only has Audi A4 Quattro cars in its fleet (although that will change soon, I heard they will add Audi Q5s as well). All cars are exactly the same and are silver colored, hence the name. Pricing is competitive, at $89 per day during weekdays and $69 per day during weekends (in SFO, other airports may have different prices). But what really sets them apart from the competition is the experience and the extras that are all for free.

At San Francisco airport lines are generally quite long at the traditional car rental companies. For Silvercar there are no lines, after you made a reservation you just open the Silvercar mobile app when you arrive at the airport and click on the button to indicate that you have arrived. A Silvercar representative then picks you up from the rental car terminal and drives you to the Silvercar location (a 5 minute drive). There you can choose a car, you open the door by scanning the car’s QR code with your phone and off you go. No waiting in line, no filling out of forms and no upselling of insurance or other unnecessary add-ons.

But that’s not all, because the Silvercars are all extremely well equipped. Every car has a great navigation system built in (honestly, it’s much better than the system in my Porsche or Mercedes-Benz), which is free. So no $25 per day for an old-fashioned GPS that some car companies are trying to sell you. Each car has a toll tracking device, meaning that you can take the Fastrack lane at toll gates (very handy around San Francisco), and they will bill you automatically for this. All cars are also equipped with Sirius XM satellite radio, so you are not forced to listen to FM radio stations full of advertising and dumb presenters. Of course you can also play your phone’s music or podcasts through bluetooth. And the cars have built-in wifi, so you don’t have to use expensive data plans if you use a non-US phone or want to check your mails on your laptop. No other car rental company offers this and certainly not for free.

When you get back after your trip you just park the Audi at Silvercar and they automatically detect how full the tank is (with a sensor), so no need to fill it up when you are in a hurry to get to the airport. They will charge you regular gas prices, no huge mark-up like many car rental companies do (Silvercar just adds a $5 fee to fill it up). Unfortunately they do not bring you back to the airport in your own car anymore, you now need to take a shuttle bus (that left straight away after I got on, so no waiting for other passengers). At SFO they charge you an additional $20 for that, but it’s a mandatory airport transportation fee so it seems they can’t get around that.

My experience with Silvercar is excellent and I would advise everybody to use them when they are in San Francisco or at one of the other airports out of which they operate (currently Los Angeles, Dallas, Austin, Miami, Denver and Phoenix, with more locations being added over the next months). Silvercar just closed its $14 million Series B round (in total they raised $31.5 million), so I think you’ll hear a lot more from them in the future!

Even though there is hardly any snow yet on the North shore mountains, today both Cypress and Grouse Mountain opened their new ski seasons. Because I have a season ticket for Cypress Mountain I decided to drive the 20 minutes from our home to the ski area to check it out.

The weather has been fantastic over the past days. Since I came back from San Francisco on Tuesday I have only seen blue skies, but it has been quite cold. On Friday morning it was -5 Celsius in Vancouver, with maximum temperatures around +5 Celsius during the day. That means that it was freezing the whole day in the ski areas (Cypress base station is at 3000 ft, about 900 meters), which is perfect for artificial snow making.

When I arrived at Cypress I saw that only 2 chair lifts were open, and a total of just 3 downhill ski runs. Not a lot, but good enough for an hour of skiing.

One advantage of skiing at Cypress Mountain is that it’s normally very quiet and there are hardly any lines at the lifts. Even today it was not very busy, the longest I had to wait was less than 5 minutes. Most Vancouver locals wait until there is a lot more snow before they start waxing their skis, and today the majority of the people on the slopes actually seemed to be Chinese (I heard a lot of Mandarin around me while in line for the lift).

It seems that there will be some rain by the end of this week, which likely means snow on the mountains, and I look forward to that. I am planning to ski at least 1-2 times a week over the next 5 months, so the more snow the better!

Every day I spend about 25 minutes driving to and from work, which is a great time to listen to podcasts. There are so many good podcasts available nowadays and it’s so easy to play them on car audio systems through your phone, that it’s surprising that not more people do this. For me podcasts are a way to relax (especially after work) and to learn new things. I don’t like to waste time during the day, so I prefer podcasts that are entertaining but also give me new ideas or teach me stuff.

This week I listened to episode 7 of StartUp, a fantastic new podcast series that follows a the first couple of months of a new start-up. Alex Blumberg (of among others ‘This American Life’ and ‘Planet Money’ fame, podcasts I also listen to regularly) decided to set up a podcasting company and record most of his conversations and thoughts during the start-up phase of the company. The result is one of the best podcast series I have ever listened to, so good that I decided to blog about it.

I have been involved with a large number of start-ups over the years, either as a (co-)founder, CEO, board member, advisor or investor. One thing I learned is that the first few months are always remarkably similar. You have the best business idea in the world (you think – but most start-ups eventually change their business model because it doesn’t work), you are super motivated to get it off the ground, you try to find a good name, you look for co-founders and early employees, you start raising funds and finally you release your first product.

This is what Alex captured on digital tape and put together in this 25-30 min/episode podcast. It’s great to hear how he grows from a super naive first-time entrepreneur to someone who starts to understand a little bit how the start-up world works in the later episodes. The podcast covers topics such as raising money and he even records the conversations he has with VCs (even some well-known ones), and how they react to his pitch.

Other topics he covers are how he finds his co-founder including the hilarious decision making process on who gets how many shares. I am glad they eventually solved that, because if I had been in the shoes of his eventual co-founder I would have probably walked off after Alex’ lowball offer. To be fair, Alex really had no clue about what it means to be a co-founder instead of an employee, and he mainly listened to friends who had no clue either.

Another interesting episode is the search for a name. The original name of American Podcasting Corporation is not good enough and the process they go through to find a name that everybody is happy with is very recognizable. It also shows that Alex is not a real business person but more of a creative: in the end he finally likes the name they come up with but after sleeping on it for a night he is not happy with the process they used to get the name. He wanted to change it because of that… That would drive me nuts as a co-founder, you often need creative people in your business but it’s not always easy to work with them.

When I started listening to the podcast I was 100% sure I would never consider investing in Alex’ venture, but after 5 episodes he almost convinced me to call him up and ask to join in the round. I started to like him and the way he talks about his business plans. I believe he could build an interesting business with his podcasts and I would have been willing to bet some private money on that. That is, until I heard his valuation. $10 million for a start-up that is just starting out seems very high to me, but they still managed to raise $1.5 million on it (incl. $200K from listeners in a crowdfunding episode!). Good for them, but I hope they will be able to raise subsequent rounds at such a hefty seed round valuation.

The company is certainly off to a good start, because this podcast is quickly becoming one of the more famous ones on iTunes and Soundcloud. If you are thinking about doing your own start-up this is a “must-listen-to” podcast. The same if you are a start-up investor who has never built a business from scratch him (or her)self.  If you just want to learn how a start-up works and about the problems entrepreneurs face in the early stage of their business venture, you should check this out. It’s well produced, very entertaining (even the ads are so good that you don’t want to skip them) and you’ll certainly learn a thing or two. The series is not finished yet, I hope Alex will keep on producing new StartUp episodes for a while.

A zombie attacking my car at Park Royal

This weekend it was Halloween again, and with 2 young kids that means lots of celebrations. The kids started the day with a Halloween Parade at school. In the late afternoon we went to the Park Royal shopping mall where many shops were handing out Trick-or-Treat candy. Scott and Elaine met many of their school friends and teachers there.

After a quick dinner at a Taiwanese restaurant we went on to King’s Avenue for trick-or-treating. We ended the evening in our street where the kids got a lot of candy from our neighbours as well. Scott and Elaine had a great time during Halloween and are now already talking about how they want to dress up next year. Below some pictures of the day.

Scott dressed up as an emperor, but he lost his crown sometime during the day

Elaine dressed up as her favorite Disney character Rapunzel, of course with a long hair braid

At school the kids started the day with a Halloween parade in which they had to tell the audience what costume they were wearing

Of course also our house was decorated for Halloween, both on the inside and the outside

Halloween decorations at home

Family picture with some friends in Park Royal. I went as King Tut and several people took pictures of me!

Trick-or-Treat on King’s Avenue

Trick-or-Treat on King’s Avenue, with amazing decorations at some of the houses

Despite the fact that it was pitch dark on the street, Scott and Elaine met several friends during the Trick-or-Treat

The partial result of trick-or-treating: a big bag of candy and other treats.