I'm off to Europe

I'm off to Europe for the holidays to spend some time with my family.

I heard that Switzerland is totally covered in snow. I heard my brother got snowed in the other day - quite unusual in a country with the level of road services that Switzerland has. I'm certainly looking forward to doing some snowboarding with the Alps!

"I Reject Your Rejection"

I'm reading Lucky or Smart, a book I mentioned here before, by Tripod founder Bo Peabody. It's no Pulitzer prize winner, but it sure has a couple of great anecdotes. Here's one about how confidence and determination go a long way:

I was determined to go to Williams College, one of the world's most selective institutions of higher learning. [...] I didn't have a prayer of getting accepted. I was, after all, a B-student.

And sure enough, I got the thin envelope: the one with no information about when the school starts, or what dorm you're in, or who your roommate will be. Instead, it just contains that nicely worded letter, the one that when you cut through all the flowery language simply says "no".

I needed a plan. The customer had said "no," and the sales process was just beginning. Figuring that the admissions committee of this elite school had probably seen and heard just about everything, I decided to take a bold, direct, and unorthodox approach. I got the telephone number of the assistant director of admissions, a man named Cornelius (Corny) Raiford. I called Corny up and told him:

"Hi, my name is Bo Peabody, and I reject your rejection."

There was a long silence. "Excuse me?" he said.

"I want to go to Williams College," I continued. "And with all due respect, I think the admissions committee has made a mistake. And I'd like to work with you to correct it. I am formally rejecting your rejection. I'm coming to Williams. Not next year perhaps, but at some point. I'm in no rush. I have all the time in the world, and I plan to send an application in to Williams every year until I'm accepted."

There was another long silence. At this point, I figure Corny is either going to play ball with me or transfer my call to the police. Corny cleared his throat and said, "I appreciate your desire to attend Williams. I'm not sure I've ever received a call like this, so let's see what we can do." For the next few months, I worked with Corny to build a yearlong program during which I'd remedy several of the deficiencies (read: B's) he saw in my application. That next year, I re-applied to Williams, and was granted early admission to the class of 1994.

My New Year's Resolution

Everyone's asking about my New Year's Resolutions. I really only have one, and it's only three words: "Make startup successful." People say that I can be intense in my focus, and that's where my focus will be in 2009.

But now that I think of it, I'd also like to get back into shape, which seems inversely correlated with my number of work hours, thus somewhat conflicting with the above.

I also want to blog more - my main barrier to that is thinking too much about something informative or entertaining to say, and then experiencing writer's block. This year, I will post more at the risk of sounding trivial and being criticized by people named "Anonymous".

Us vs. the Snow

I haven't written a blog entry in a while, and I wanted to write a post about Xobni stuff and how we're moving the company into 3rd gear. We're still working really hard on adding new cool stuff and fixing bugs, but that doesn't feel like news. Instead, here's a photo story about how we got snowed in two weekends ago.

We started driving to Tahoe pretty late on a Friday night, and thus got stuck in traffic and rain on the Bay Bridge. It rained so hard that on the lower floor of the bridge, rain was coming in sideways and traffic came slowed to a crawl. The car was a rented Zipcar Honda Element, packed full with snowboards, skis, Tyler, the L, the M, and myself.

By the time we got to Folsom, we were feeling pretty good about our progress and decided to stop by the local Applebee's for a hearty meal. Tyler and L are pictured with cheap Margaritas below.



It's always useful to chat up the locals at these places and I told a woman that we're driving to South Lake Tahoe. She screamed "You need to have snowchains! If you don't have them, they won't let you go past Placerville. If you don't have chains, you're gonna die!"

It was 10:45 pm. The Walmart in Folsom, we're told, closes at 11:00 pm. Ignoring every speed limit, we raced to the store, and arrived there with 5 minutes left to go. The sales associate found snowchains that would almost fit, and proposed we should also buy bungie cords to make sure they don't fall off. Sketchy, but our only option. We felt well prepared.



One and a half hours later, we arrive in South Lake Tahoe. The road was barely even icy. No snowchains needed! What a waste, we think. We meet up with my Swiss friends from Google: Markus, Sandra, Robin, and Marius. We sleep.

The next day of snowboarding is awesome! Great weather and good views. Here's the lake and Tyler with his disintegrating parka (It was 10 years old and was continually shedding little pieces of itself during the entire trip):



And this is the rest of the team – unorganized:



And organized:



At the end of the day, Markus decides to jump in the lake! But at first we can't find the way there. Robin almost falls into the covered pool, though.



And here he is. Markus and the lake. Brrrr.



The next morning, we wake up and everything is covered in snow!



Little did we know that the snow wasn't kidding. By 2 pm that day, there's a snowstorm on the mountain, Heavenly is closing lifts, and we're stuck on the wrong side of the mountain where Tyler has to pick us up.





Suddenly, our Walmart adventure 2 days earlier doesn't seem that stupid after all. The snowchain mounting operation begins.



Instead of trying to climb up 50, we decide to drive up to I-80, where we have a better chance of getting home the same day. But a few miles outside of Kings Beach, the police shuts down 267, and we wait 2 hours for it to reopen. While we're waiting, the Honda's battery dies, but a friendly overprepared Russian gives us a jump. I-80 is closed as well due to zero visibility, so M books us a place at the Best Western. I negotiate the price down by $20 (I tried hard!).

The morning after: 3 more feet (1m) of snow! Here's M wiping the snow off the hood.



Four hours and more sliding later, we arrive in San Francisco, half a day of vacation poorer, but one adventure richer!

Car Commercial Hotspot

One of the fun things about Xobni having a downtown office is that almost every other week, I run into a scene of a car commercial being shot. While New York gets all the movies, San Francisco seems to be a hotspot for shooting those "car driving through a sea of highrises" scenes.

Today, on the way to work, i was rocking my iPod headphones on Kearny Street and was stopped by a big guy yelling at me to stop!!! right!!! there!!!. Turns out they were shooting a Toyota Corolla commercial.







The new Toyota Corolla, by the way, looks just like the old Toyota Corolla. I kind of wish they were shooting more sports cars commercials these days.

2007: The Year in Numbers

New Year's is the time to revisit and review. Let's do it in a quantitative fashion.



Travel:

• Countries visited: 6
• Miles flown: 63'901 (102241 km)

Email:

• My top 5 ranked contacts: Adam, Matt, Bryan, Skyler, Greg
• Average reply time to emails: 59 mins
• Time of day when I sent most emails: 3 pm to 5 pm

Career department:

• Number of jobs held: 2 (at Google and at Xobni)
• Value of equity that would have vested if I hadn't left Google: $22'474 (there's no upside at big companies)

PR:

• Number of mentions of Xobni in Wall Street Journal: 1
• Number of mentions of Xobni in Valleywag: 3

Work / life balance:

• Number of meals cooked for myself in 2006: ~80
• Number of meals I cooked for myself in 2007: ~5
• Nights at bars chatting up girls with Adam: ~5
• Nights at xobni cranking out code with Adam: ~50

Sports:

• Days snowboarding: 3
• Money spent on gym memberships, sports gear, and personal training: $2'954

Giving back:

• Number of letters I received from my school, ETH Zurich: 3
• Number of letters I received from ETH Zurich asking for money: 0 (I'd
  be happy to give, but you guys have to ask)

From these numbers, it would be easy to think that this year was all about work. It was. At an early stage startup, you spend your days and nights cranking on code. I think that next year will see a better work-life balance, but I will probably still be working harder than ever before.

This year was a year of upheaval; I left the established Google for a baby startup, and moved to a different country. Xobni is now at an exciting point where we're building out the userbase and getting ready to strip away both the "private" and the "beta" from "private beta". I expect that we'll see a lot of success: Email search and navigation is still in its infancy.

Let's review my 2007 New Year's Resolutions: I've tried to keep in shape throughout the year, with limited success in the early days of Xobni, but have since found a great gym and a trainer: Check. Another resolution for this past year is to have more focus and do only one thing at a time. A startup forces you to do that: Check. Launch stuff at Google? Didn't happen.

My resolutions for 2008? Make Xobni a big success. Spend some time Asia (where I have never been before). Talk less about myself on my blog.

Snowboarding

I'm in Switzerland for the Holidays. To combat my jet lag, I decided to spend the day outside (9 hours of time difference == you want to wake up at 6 pm and go to bed at 9 am). What better way to spend the day outside than to go snowboarding with my bro?



We went on the Rinderberg in the Gstaad ski region. After 4 days of snowboarding (spread across 3 countries and 5 years), I seem to finally have gotten a hang of it.

Career Advice for High Achievers

Just before graduating from school with your freshly minted Computer Science degree, you need to find an answer to an intimidating question: What should you do with your life?

Before graduating from grad school, I was thinking about starting a startup with two classmates – but that never materialized. Later, I joined Google, and after half a year, quit, relocated to San Francisco, and joined Xobni.

While I am not the ultimate expert on career advice, I have thought through the options many times. I have flip-flopped on my decisions enough to have achieved wisdom through pain. Here’s what I learned.

As a high achiever, there are four things you might want to optimize for:

• financial rewards
• public credit for your achievements
• work-life balance
• leaving a lasting positive influence on the world

(If you don’t agree with at least two of these goals, this article is not for you.)

This article tries to answer the question: Should I

1. join an established company,
2. start my own company, or
3. join an existing startup?

I deliberately excluded the option of joining a mediocre large company. At a landlocked company, you’ll learn about upholding the status quo. If you join a company that isn’t number 1 or 2 in its field, and you’re in a junior position, you’ll see mediocrity, not strength. Mediocrity won’t let you to achieve the goals I outlined above.

Let’s go through your options, in the order given above.

1. Joining an Established Company

[+] Getting your resume stamped
[+] Best work-life balance
[+] Higher initial compensation
[-] Harder to get public credit for your achievements
[-] Politics, established organizational structure
[-] Lower long-term financial upside

This is by far the safest choice. Joining BigCo is an society’s template. Your grandma will be proud of you. Your friends will congratulate you when hearing about the job offer. But is it a good deal?

Working for BigCo has great advantages: The company is already set up for success. All the infrastructure is in place. You can start working quickly, training and documentation are available. If you’re working on BigCo’s distributed file system project, you will learn about building distributed file systems (valuable experience), instead of spending time installing Linux on your startup’s server (less valuable experience). If you get in trouble, there will be smart people working there to ask questions. At the startup, you’ll be on your own.

You will have time off, and will enough time and money to burn to go to Barcelona for the weekend. You’ll lead a more balanced life.

But there are downsides to BigCo. While you will receive some equity and bonus in your compensation package, you won’t be rewarded as much for exceptional achievements as if you owned the place yourself. You’ll deal with office politics: People might be incentivized to make themselves bottlenecks, not to help you achieve ambitious goals. The public face of the company will be the founders, the CEO, and exceptional people with good relationships to the PR department, not you.

Here are two tips for people who decide to go this route:

First, make it clear to your manager that you have high goals. Set specific, measurable, ambitious goals. This will drive you to work harder, set you apart from peers, while at the same time allowing for rapid advancement.

More importantly, find a good mentor. Find someone whose incentives are aligned with the company’s, not your manager’s. Don’t choose a fellow engineer who’s just been at the company longer. Find someone several levels up. Higher-ups have a broader view. They’ll be happy to mentor you if you appeal to their sense of ego. Don’t be shy about emailing that Engineering Director.

2. Starting a Startup

[+] Massive financial upside if it goes well
[+] Best if you’re an entrepreneurial type
[+] Best for getting public credit
[+] Best for positive world impact
[-] Hard to find co-founder
[-] Highest risk, potential public failure
[-] Need to build infrastructure that already exists elsewhere
[-] By far the most work

Paul Graham wrote the book on this topic. I’ll just give you my diffs.

If all goes well, starting your own thing will propel you into the stratosphere. You’ll be rich and famous. You might even have changed the world for the better.

There are risks and difficulties: If you fail (and you probably will), you risk public humiliation. This is especially true in European and Asian cultures, where you’ll have a lot of ‘splainin to do.

Out of all the options, this one takes the most work, and will lead to the most grey hair: Founders need to be emotionally stable.

At the onset, finding the right cofounder is success factor number one. You don’t want someone who’s a clone of yourself. If you’re an engineer, get an engineer with business talent. You’ll need technically proficient people, but also the guy who can negotiate good deals with investors and business partners.

Any place likes big companies. But for a high-tech startup, you need to be in a place that is accepting of you. A place where you can surround yourself with people of similar aspirations. Zurich is not that place, and Wichita, Kansas isn’t either. If you’re in Europe, move to London. If you’re in the US, move to the Valley.

3. Joining a Startup

[+] More financial upside than BigCo
[+] Lower financial risk than starting your own company
[+] Stable income, especially when venture backed
[-] Less public credit than if you are a founder
[-] Less financial upside than starting startup

Doing your own startup is the adventuresome path to follow, but there’s a less risky middle way: Joining an existing one.

This is a hybrid model of 1 and 2: If the company does well, money will rain, not pour (early employees receive significant amounts of equity). You’ll have credit for being one of the people who made a future BigCo a success, but the cover of BusinessWeek will show the CEO, not you. If you join after significant funding, you’ll have a stable income to live from.

Before you decide about joining, make sure the startup is set up for success. Meet with the key people, and ask them all the hard questions about what product they will build, how it will make money, what the equity structure is like, who controls the company, what the relationship between the founders is like, and what their plans are if things go awry. Do the due diligence. Join if you’re convinced.

After a startup, you can always go back to BigCo (but with more battlefield experience), or start your own. That’s what makes this option a good launching pad.

--

Want to backtrack my agonizing about career options? Read these entries:

• Going to Google
• An Era Ends
• Joining Xobni

--

Update: Another take on this topic, but from a macro perspective: Marc Andreesen’s Pmarca guide to Career Planning.

The Controlling Variable

The other day, something occurred to me walking back home from work: I once again have a controlling variable in my life.

Basically, my future is in large part controlled by one variable: How Xobni’s product works out. If it’s a hit, I’ll be rich, happy, and can go own that jet I’ve always wanted(*). If it’s not, I have maybe one more startup to try before I have to settle for a 9-5. Consequently, I now spend my days and nights trying to make the product great. It’s pretty intense.

For a while, there wasn’t really a controlling variable. In grad school, there was always a bunch of things to juggle. Back at Google, the outcome for me was controlled by factors beyond my control: Maybe some other project was working on the same thing. Or Larry Page wouldn’t have liked what we did and could have shut it down days before launching. Even if the project had succeeded spectacularly, a Founder’s Award wasn’t exactly within reach and the selection criteria were intransparent at best. Somehow, it was expected that you’d have to work pretty hard, but it was unclear how you could achieve a clear win.

Instead, what this situation reminds me of is my first year exams at ETH Zurich. As one of the Europe’s premier technical universities, they won’t just hand out degrees to anyone. But instead of having a US-style selection process with SATs and essays, ETH admits people based on having a high school diploma and taking a test. Then, we kick out 50% after the first year. At the end of the first year, you have the whole summer to study, and take exams at the end.

That summer after first year of ETH, I studied like a madman, 3 months straight. The goal was clear, the stakes were high, and having never taken exams like that before, I had no idea how it would turn out. After I passed with flying colors, I thought that I would never work that hard again in my life. I was wrong.

(*) Yes, I'm obviously kidding here.

Tuning My Run

Three months ago, I picked up a pair of Nike+ shoes at the local Nike store. They’re yellow and they’re radical. I quickly proceeded to buy the iPod+Nike kit and a shiny new iPod nano. These Apple guys are such prom queens: They’re hot and they know it. They’ll make you jump through hoops: iPod+Nike on your perfectly fine old iPod? Exchangeable batteries for the insole accelerometer? Dream on, boy.



It didn’t take long to get over that you’ve-just-been-ripped-off feeling. This stuff really works. Now that I can measure of my runs, I run more often and for longer distances. My favorite feature? Holding down the center button to jump straight to the Stanton Warriors. Runner-up? When you’ve just run your best mile so far, they have sound clips of famous athletes to congratulate your achievements.

Want to battle? Mail me.

Very much Alive

Worried blog readers have been sending about two or three emails every week. "Gabor, have you been abducted by aliens? Are you still alive?"

I’m quite alive indeed. I’ve been putting off writing that one big blog post that tells the story of the past months in all gory detail: Packing all my belonging into my Mom’s Renault Clio. The bureaucratic hurdles associated with moving. How things are going at the big X. Various thoughts about how to turn people and capital into fantastic products. And how being an entrepreneur feels like writing your own story instead of being an actor in someone else's play.

But then again, people don’t read long blog posts. Instead, I’ll repackage my thoughts into future, individual bite-sized blog entry pieces. Until then, here are some pictures of A Day at Xobni.

A Healthy Disregard for the Impossible

Two weeks ago, I quit my job at Google. Later this year, I will join Xobni ("inbox backwards") in San Francisco, California!

Why leave Google? It's a fantastic company: They have the smartest people, enlightened management, great projects and pamper employees to no end. But most importantly, they're one of the few companies that stick to their values: When they say "don’t be evil", they actually mean it. I can only recommend working there.

But what I really wanted to do after school is to do a startup.

When I visited Adam and Matt in August last year, I was impressed: They were also interested in email, they seemed wicked smart, and had all the right connections. But above all, they had a healthy disregard for the impossible. These guys are willing to do what it takes to succeed.

Back then, it was hard to lure me away from my Google offer, and they didn't succeed. Since then, the company, software, and goal have evolved and they've recently received significant VC funding (as the media found out today).

Matt and Adam don't take no for an answer. After another offer earlier this year, it took me quite a while to make up my mind and actually quit. Back at Google Zurich, I was working on an awesome project with great people. The office was growing fast. Google had just won another award for being the best place to work, ever. It didn’t seem like a smart, mainstream move at the time.

What pulled the trigger was reading Jessica Livingston's Founders at Work on a plane ride back from the States. If all of these guys had done it, so could I. Around the same time, I got an email from Paul Buchheit who wrote: "The great thing about a good startup is that even if it doesn't work out, you still end up learning a lot more and meeting more interesting people than you otherwise would." That's true: The learning curve will be much steeper at Xobni than at Google; my impact will be much larger. That's the kind of environment I enjoy.

As one of Xobni's earliest employees, I'll be heading up their engineering effort. We're looking for a few superstars. If you're one of them, let me know.

A Weekend in Munich

I spend the weekend visiting my friend Fabian in Munich, Germany.

We revisit some of the places that I'd frequented when I was interning at Yahoo, 6 years ago, working my ass off. The building where Yahoo used to be looks derelict, and now sports a for-rent sign with spelling errors in the window.

We drop by Munich's "Pinakothek der Moderne" in a modern, completely white building. We make fun of Dan Flavin's light installations.

Off to a coffee shop named "San Francisco Coffee Company" where we meet Timo plus Nadine and her mysterious boyfriend. I break The News. The crowd is mildly shocked.

I get the feeling that my life is in upheaval, while everything around me is completely constant.

We go out later that night, searching for my friend's future "temporary girlfriend" (as suggested in the coffee shop - he's too picky to settle on any permanent one), but we only meet 35-year olds in a weird bar-slash-coffee-place with awesome music.

The next morning we have brunch at News Bar and walk around in the park. We head home and play Age of Empires against each other for hours.

I return on the direct train to Zurich. In the seats next to mine, a bunch of kids from the prestigious Salem private school talk about their lives in high society. And their life plans after graduation.

The 3-Year Halbtax

In Switzerland, the fastest way to travel is by train. In an effort to segment customers, base fares are pretty expensive, but there is a card for heavy users which reduces ticket prices by 50%. In German, it's called "Halbtax". Typically, you get a one-year card for 150 CHF, but you can get a three-year one for 350 CHF. That's the one I bought.


Oh the audacity of selling a 3-year subscription to anything! Only in Switzerland are biographies stable enough for anyone to think about travel three years in advance. Only here can the railway company sell these without having to worry about what may happen to their cost base over such a long period.

Even more shocking: The expiration date: 2010 – drum roll – "The Future!". Only three years away. Isn't that the date by which all our problems were supposed to be solved?

Hawaii

I'm in Honululu for the 2007 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces. It's been very interesting so far and I've seen some great presentations. Also, this conference sure is in a good location!



My talk tomorrow will be about the upcoming BuzzTrack, a system for topic-based email. You'll find more information on it here, and (hopefully soon) here. I'll also spend some time reviewing work on improving the email interface, which I've written about before.

Ramblings on a Plane

I’m on a half-empty Swiss flight home. We’ve just passed a town called Caribou, Maine and are now heading for the Atlantic ocean. Here are some random thoughts.

A Great, Instantenous Experience

"You can’t just put a technology out there and hope there will be a business in it. You have to put together a whole consumer offering, a great instantaneous experience. A simple service that fills an obvious need and can be offered for free," says Niklas Zennström in February’s Wired Magazine. I like this quote because the formula fits all recent web hits: Google, Skype, and YouTube provided instantaneous results, communication, and entertainment, for free.

Santa Barbara

Should I ever decide to go to grad school, I’ll apply to UCSB first. They have a beach! ETH Zurich doesn’t even have a pool. I drove down there with school buddy Moritz and couldn’t resist the urge to jump into the Pacific. Wicked cold. After some drying off, we headed to a student bar: While I have many times praised the greatness that is American girls, I have to note that the cutest girl we met on this trip was actually German.

San Francisco

I love San Francisco. The hills. The Victorian houses. The fact that there seem to be a gazillion little places where you can get great French toast on a lazy Saturday morning. People seem approachable and laid back. Unlike New Yorkers, they have big dogs, not tiny ones. My friend and former roommate Peter whom I was visiting for a day seems very happy.

Amoeba Music

Amoeba Music on Haight Street is, in my opinion, the best place worldwide to physically buy music. They have a huuuuge selection, and in line with US used-goods culture, lots of ‘pre-owned’ CDs. Plus, you can actually listen to the music before buying: A custom long abolished on the continent. By far the most interesting, though, is the mix of customers in the store.

The MIT of Europe

Last week, I chatted a bit with my favorite essayist Paul Graham about my favorite topic of startups in Europe vs. America. Apparently, a Google search for “Silicon Valley of Europe” doesn’t yield a clear winner: Many are claiming the title. But a search for "the MIT of Europe" does give a conclusion: the sister schools ETH Zurich and EPFL take the crown! Nice job.

So there’s something to go back to! I’m hoping for snow and sunshine. Distance to destination: 4615 km.

Mountain View

I'm in California for work stuff. Life is great.

Whenever I get to the US, there's always this jolt of enthusiasm just as I arrive. The land of the free, the home of the brave? Oh well. But everything does feel so much larger, the weather is great, people seem more open. I met with a couple of friends who are doing a startup and they radiate energy and optimism. People seem young and fresh and adorable.

I also found that I love being infantilized. SpaceShipOne models? Dinosaurs? Bathing in colored plastic balls? Great food that will keep me from learning how to cook? Oh, get it ON.

In America, the consumer rules. There's apparently a TV ad in Switzerland where Migros, one of the local supermarket chains, shows off their wide selection of cheeses or some other thing. That's great, I think, but some of their smaller stores would snugly fit into the cereal section of a Safeway.

I wonder how long this jolt of enthusiasm will continue. After a few days, it's usually the tiny things that start annoying me: The fact that prices don't include sales tax or the weirdness of houses that are built of wood, not brick and concrete. And the huge distances. Mountain View really is too far from "the city". I'll let you know if the enthusiasm degrades.

Resolutions

Dear reader, have a fantastic 2007!

For me, 2006 was a good year. I finished school and got a huge amount of stuff done.

My resolutions for 2007: I need to exercise more – when skipping on the gym, yoga, and other sports for weeks, happiness significantly degrades. Also, I need to focus: Instead of trying to a gazillion things at once, I should put the emphasis on work and maybe one other side project at a time. At Google, I'd like to get stuff launched.

See you next year!

Music Tastes

My taste in music is a bit odd. Back before I switched to buying all my music on iTunes, I bought a large share of my CDs in the US, which gave me a heavy dose of Americana. Here in Europe, radio stations are either stuck in either in the mid-90s, play classical music all day, or focus on techno tracks. The result is that the music I listen to seems too avant-garde for fellow Europeans, and evokes only contempt in North America. That won't stop me from handing out recommendations, though.

I've been listening to a lot of electronic pop at work. Most probably know Postal Service from their music's plentiful appearances in TV commercials. Similar in style, but less well-known: Electric President. Their music is beautifully crafted, with lots of attention to detail, and slightly melancholic. Electric President is much like the Canadian band Broken Social Scene: You listen to the album once and feel a bit uncomfortable. By the third listen, you'll notice all the tiny details and nooks and fall in love with them.

I discovered Nizlopi at a Jamie Cullum concert in Freiburg, Germany, where they were the support act. In some ways, they were better than the main show: It's just two guys, a bass, and a guitar, singing sad songs about girls. The band itself is named after a Hungarian girl whom the vocalist had a crush on in school. Meeting a Hungarian girl and falling in love with her, only to be disappointed soon after seems to be a common mantrap: I've heard this story too many times. In this case, it at least resulted in good music.

Europeans will yawn at this, but I quite like Jan Delay, the German hip-hop superstar of the year. Energetic, funny, German hip-hop from Hamburg. He seems to be much-loved in his hometown: When I visited Hamburg earlier in the year, this album seemed to playing everywhere.

Attentive readers will have noticed the Amazon links I planted in this post, but rest assured that this is just an experiment. I'd guess that most readers have switched to iTunes anyways: Apparently, after just 5 years, Apple has already captured more than 3% of the US music market: Quite a feat.

Hardcore Yoga

I first started going to yoga classes at Google in Mountain View. The classes were perfect: There was soft music in the background. The beautiful and charming yoga teacher – she had, if I remember correctly, a Berkeley Ph.D. in physics – always told cute little stories at the beginning of each class.

Far away from California sunshine, I have faced harsh Swiss yoga reality for the last 2.5 years. The classes at ETH seem very disciplined. No soft background music. A focus on energy-sapping positions. An instructor who thinks that the "Yoga + Meditation" class I've been going means 80 minutes of downward-facing dog and 10 minutes of breathing exercises. My wicked mind turns these classes into a competition: "Oh, I'll show her!", which contradicts the original purpose of going there to relax.

I'll need to find a better class or good gym. From a quick search, the yoga places in Zurich seem either sketchy or ridiculously expensive. Any suggestions?

Toys

Zurich is so much more fun when you're earning money. It's an expensive city. So far, food and entertainment have been my largest budget items. With food taken care of – courtesy Larry and Sergey – my disposable income seems comfortable. Modern life constantly reminds us of all the niceties out there: Plasma TVs, whirlpools, designer furniture, luxury weekend trips, and fancy restaurants all seem within reach.

One thing to keep in mind, though, is that every Swiss Franc I spend will impact my future choices: Once you get used to a certain standard of living, it's hard to go back. Being a poor grad student already seems unappealing, and going back to the ascetic experience of startup is hard to endure with the monthly insurance payments on that fancy sports car. That's why I had my future flatmate and fellow Googler Markus promise to watch over my lifestyle spending.

Joining the Workforce

Tomorrow is my first day at Google. My dad always said that being a student is the best time of your life, but is it? You have neither time nor money. It seems like when you're not studying, you're agonizing about exams.

I really started taking things seriously in the summer 2002, just before the first big preliminary tests: three months of continuous cramming under the pressure of not knowing whether you're cut out for ETH. Soon after, an early-morning text message received in a Motel 6 just outside Portland, OR, where I was visiting my brother. In retrospect, I should probably have worried less: I never flunked even a single class, and the results were usually pretty good.

Sure, the month-long studying in winter and summer weren't that great. But when we skipped class to go hang out on the shores of Lake Zurich, it was quite enjoyable. Ah, the fun stuff: Hanging out at the local student bar. Late-night hunting trips in Zurich's bars with my macho roommate. Debriefing the other roommate after her many dates with what seemed to be Zurich's least eligible bachelors. The girlfriends. Cooking for friends at home. Exchanging ridiculous startup ideas over Asian and Mexican food. Nursing expensive lattes at Starbucks for hours and hours while writing theses, papers, and blog entries. Traveling Europe. The little chocolates you get from Swiss airlines just before landing at far-away destinations. Giving the canned tour of Zurich to friends visiting from all over. Jogging in ice-cold Swiss winter. Sailing classes.

Seems like all the fun things we did in university don't actually require the presence of a university. You can enjoy them even afterwards, when you're all grown up.

An Era Ends

Earlier this week, I handed in my Master's thesis. The realization that my student years are over hasn't hit yet, partially helped by the fact that the final presentation isn't until next week. The title is "Organizing Email" and it will be online sometime in next month.

As always after bursts of immense productivity, the last couple of days have been a mixture of sleeping and running around town to take care of errands. I also participated in what seems to be a twice-yearly ritual at ETH: Saying goodbye to other students leaving for internships, work, or years abroad. Vanja left for Frankfurt and Chicago to join Accenture. Peter is off to Hamburg to work at Lufthansa Technik, and Moritz is leaving for Mountain View to intern at Google. The economy seems to be doing very well: Former students who just started working are now paying dinner with Amex Gold cards.

BarCampZurich is on track: We now have 47 signups and have found our first sponsor. I met with Corsin yesterday to discuss our plans. I hope to see y'all there!

As promised, there will be more blogging in the next weeks.

Going to Google

I've accepted an offer from Google and will start working at the Zurich office in November. As a big fan of Google, I have fond memories from my internship there 2 years ago. As an alternative, I had thought about joining a number of startups, which could have been far more lucrative, but potentially less enlightening.

Decisions

Rest assured that this decision was made in an Excel sheet with pros and cons and expected net values with estimated probabilities.

My great fear with Google is that it may have become a corporate behemoth, along with all the stupid rules, book-sized guidelines, and people who merely serve as bottlenecks. If they are, Freedom Fighter Gabor will be in deep, deep, trouble. If they still have the friendly attitude from 2 years ago, things will be great.

Performance

This is the first point in my life where I had to decide between becoming an entrepreneur and becoming an employee. The great thing about being an entrepreneur is that you escape the gravity of average performance: There are huge variations in the output of recent university graduates. But big companies, even those claim to be a meritocracy, cannot pay these kids by actual output.

The reasons: First, performance may be hard or impossible to measure – what's the value of a new algorithm? Second, having huge differences in pay between employees may lead to social unrest. And third, some of the highest-performance kids do not actually know that they're worth much, so why pay them more?

Startups

The only way to get paid according to your market value is to directly address the market. That's exactly what startups do. But there is a huge amount of luck factored in. Personally, I'm fine with risk. The problem of being an early employee at a startup, however, is that you get substantially lower stakes than the founders, but put in comparable amounts of work and carry a similar risk.

So why not start a startup myself? Well, you need to have the people, the idea, and the money. I had been thinking about this intensely, but at all times, at least one component was missing. And with one of my potential cofounders joining me at Google and the other one going to a startup, that idea disintegrated. Maybe another time.

Self-Censorship

Marcus Foster has a good point: Once employed at a high-profile company, you have to self-censor. I'm not sure what the policy at Google is these days, but getting fired for blogging about company secrets is not one of my ambitions.

I still have plenty of topics for essays and thoughts I want write about. Once I've handed in my thesis on October 3, I will try milk every last bit of thought from my brain and commit it to a blog entry.