One Conversation Can Change Your Life

I graduated from UC Berkeley in the winter of 1997. Technically, I was a little late. I had spent the year before in Japan, which was one of those decisions that made perfect sense emotionally and not much sense administratively. When I came back, Berkeley did not give me enough credits for the year overseas, so I had to stay one more semester. That made college 4.5 years instead of four. I do not regret it. Not even a little. But that last semester was strange. A lot of my friends had already moved on. The energy was different. I was still there, finishing up, but the movie had kind of ended for everyone else. Then I came home. I was supposed to be interviewing for jobs, figuring out my next move, doing whatever freshly graduated 22-year-olds are supposed to do when they enter the real world. Instead, I walked back into my parents' house right as their marriage was falling apart. There was a lot of turmoil. A lot of uncertainty. I was living with my mom and dad while they were in the middle of splitting up, and I was trying to figure out what my own life was supposed to become. So naturally, I started an Internet business out of a garage. My friend Jim Hwang and I had this idea called Beverly Hills Online. This was the early Internet, when everything felt wide open. Google was just emerging. The web still had that weird feeling where you knew something big was happening, but nobody quite knew what shape it would take. Our idea was a Beverly Hills directory. Local businesses, online listings, maybe commerce, maybe advertising. Honestly, it was not a bad idea. We just did not know enough. We did not have the technical background. We did not really know how to build the thing in a way that could scale. We had enthusiasm, a garage, and a sense that the Internet was going to matter. That was not quite enough. One day, Jim's older brother saw us working. Or pretending to work. Or doing whatever you call sitting in a garage trying to will a business into existence. He and his father had gone into partnership on a furniture factory, and he mentioned something almost casually: if we had a warehouse, we could sell their return goods and consignment pieces. We would not need to buy a bunch of inventory upfront. We would just need a space. That was it. One conversation. Before long, Jim and I rented a warehouse in Culver City and started a furniture warehouse outlet. We were 22 or 23 years old. We had no idea what we were doing. And somehow that business lasted until 2019. It became a 20-year journey. Five stores. A factory. Real estate. Employees. Deliveries. Inventory. Accounting. Marketing. Sales. Merchandising. Signs. Imports. Customer complaints. Payroll. Leases. Everything. I learned business by being trapped inside one. That sounds negative, but I do not mean it that way. There is no MBA that could have taught me what that business taught me. Every day was a new problem. Sometimes a money problem. Sometimes a people problem. Sometimes a truck problem. Sometimes a "why is this sofa the wrong color and why is the customer yelling at me?" problem. You learn a lot that way. And now, when I talk to small business owners through Pixelocity, I recognize the look in their eyes. They are not just talking about marketing. They are talking about the thing they built. The thing they risked something for. The thing that keeps them up at night and occasionally makes them feel alive. I connect with that because I lived it. What still gets me is how random the whole thing was. If Jim's brother does not walk into the garage that day, maybe we keep trying to build Beverly Hills Online. Maybe we quit and get jobs. Maybe I end up on a completely different path. Instead, one offhand comment turned into the next two decades of my life. That is the part I think about now. Careers do not always begin with some grand plan. Sometimes they begin because you are young, your life is messy, your parents are getting divorced, your Internet startup is not working, and someone says, "Hey, if you had a warehouse, you could sell some furniture." And for whatever reason, you say yes. I am grateful I was young enough not to overthink it. Because if I had known how hard it would be, I probably would have talked myself out of it. If I had understood leases and payroll and inventory and recessions and partnerships and employees and all the rest of it, I might have chosen the safer path. But I did not know. So we rented the warehouse. And that became my business education. My career. My financial foundation. My scar tissue. My confidence. My story. You never really know where things will lead. One conversation. One meeting. One weird opportunity that does not look like your future yet. Sometimes that is the whole thing.