I’m a 3x startup founder and occasional writer about technology startups and Asian America. I’m a Stanford, Y Combinator and StartX alum. Currently I’m building Flow Club, a virtual co-working service designed to help you fly through your tasks and feel great about your work. Learn more about me or Follow @rickyyean.
Popular Essays:
- Privilege and inequality in Silicon Valley (140k views on Medium, syndicated to Vox, Quartz,Business Insider, SF Chronicle, Observer, #1 on Hacker News, translated to Chinese)
- Asian-Americans are Cultural Orphans (aka I hope Crazy Rich Asians isn’t a flop) (18k views on Medium, syndicated to NextShark and mentioned by The New Yorker, KQED and the Associated Press)
- A San Franciscan tries the future of mobility (10.7k views on Medium)
- What startups get wrong about public relations (3k views on MarTech Series)
- The “Full-Stack Startup” and Jiro’s Dreams of Sushi (1.5k views on Medium)
- What Steve Jobs meant to me (1k views, syndicated on Stanford Daily and mentioned by USA Today)
Latest Essays:
- Why I use Spotify for podcasts (and you will too)
- All social media is now parasocial
- From Socialcam to TikTok: How we figured out video social in a decade
- Reflecting on my newsletter experiment (stats included)
- Single-serving friends
Startups:
- Crowdbooster (2010-2016): Crowdbooster was a venture-backed SaaS startup I started with David Tran and Mark Linsey. We created one of the most popular Twitter and Facebook analytics tools and popularized the idea of Social Media Optimization (SMO). We ended up discontinuing the service despite the product being used by over 2,000 of the world’s biggest brands and agencies and making $1M in ARR because we wanted to build something that with an even larger scale of impact. Below are some Tweets to reminisce about the wonderful experience we had.
https://twitter.com/mkfnch/status/209694685562802177
https://twitter.com/APACloud/status/266789310513168384
- Upbeat (2016-2018)
Upbeat was first known as “PRX.” Our goal was to create build a full-stack, software-enabled public relations agency. It was a very different challenged compared to Crowdbooster which was a SaaS tool. This didn’t end up working out, but we still helped a lot of people and learned a lot. I’ll write more about this soon…
- Flow Club (2021-present)
Media Appearances and Talks
Will fill this in.
Ricky Yean 