| h a r r y l i n
about me
I was born in Oklahoma in 1966 to Taiwanese immigrant parents. I spent my childhood and adolescence in suburban Chicago, competing in speech tournaments and listening to rock radio stations. After high school, I attended Cornell University, graduating with a bachelor's in communication and minors in gender studies and social psychology. While at Cornell, I worked in the news department of WVBR-FM, a local radio station.
I went on to earn a master's in journalism from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. While at Madison, I wrote for a local newspaper, The Isthmus.
Between 1990-1996, I worked as a reporter and anchor at KQED-FM, northern California's NPR station in San Francisco.
For KQED and National Public Radio, I've covered hundreds of stories, including visits from presidents, Silicon Valley, and weird stuff that happens in Berkeley. My favorite reporting included sound-rich stories on new media and pop culture (back then they were two different things). I've also done voiceover work and some television.
The Society of Professional Journalists awarded me its "Outstanding Young Journalist of the Year" honor in the mid-'90s.
It was my interest in new media and the excitement of the Internet revolution happening in Silicon Valley that drove me to look beyond radio news and move to a career on the Internet.
In July 1996, I joined Channel A, an Internet start-up in Silicon Valley devoted to bringing the "modern Asian lifestyle" to a Western audience. We had a great idea and ran out of money.
In the spring of 1998, I joined Infoseek as a producer. Life at Infoseek was exhilirating and exhausting. To a person, my colleagues were fascinating, driven people.
Then in '99, The Walt Disney Company acquired Infoseek and also Starwave, a Paul Allen-backed startup in Seattle. The next year and a half was merger hell, as Disney combined Infoseek and Starwave and re-branded infoseek.com to go.com. Resignations, re-orgs, and retreats followed. Hilarity did not ensue.
Fast-forward to 2001 and I was promoted to Vice President of Entertainment at The Walt Disney Internet Group (WDIG). I managed teams at MrShowbiz.com, Movies.com, and WallofSound.com, which were sites owned and operated by WDIG out of the company's Seattle offices. Unfortunately, business models didn't shake out, and in the summer of 2001, we shut down Wall of Sound and Mr. Showbiz.
In 2001 I was promoted to Vice President of ABC.com at ABC headquarters in Burbank, California. So I left broadcast media for the Internet ... and ended up coming back to broadcast media!
I left ABC in 2006 to join Evite as its Senior Vice President & General Manager. Evite is owned by IAC, the same corporation that owns Ticketmaster, Match.com, Citysearch, and many other Internet properties. I enjoyed working on a service that millions of people (mostly women) love. But almost a decade's worth of code debt combined with IAC's fanatical focus on profit margin made running Evite extremely challenging. I grew Evite's revenue significantly but failed to reinvigorate the product. It was a major learning experience for me.
Near the end of 2007 I left Evite to return to Internet startups! I joined Zig.com as CEO in 2008. Zig was an incubator-backed startup based in Santa Monica California. We spent 2008 attempting to raise venture capital financing. We failed. I learned even more. And in 2009, I was back in the saddle...
Today I'm CEO of Lottay.com, a venture capital-backed startup based in Ventura California. We closed our Series A round of financing in October 2009 and are using the proceeds to sharpen the web site experience and grow usage. Lottay.com is an online gift-giving service that runs off of PayPal (so the gifts are money/cash).
To keep track of me professionally, visit my LinkedIn page.
When I'm not working, I enjoy watching movies (cinema and DVDs - my friend say I'm a walking IMDB), browsing bookstores (brick-and-mortar ones), listening to music (CDs and iPod), and talking with our friends (in person, over food preferably). On the more physical side, I enjoy hiking and bicycling and wished I did more snow skiing and yoga.
But by far the most important part of my life is raising my young son, Ryder LiuLin. Together with my wife, Cynthia Liu, we are striving to infuse his every moment with love, wonder, and happiness.
My family & I live in a century-old Craftsman house in the Los Angeles area.
Unblogging:
LinkedIn | Associative Bio | My Son's Site | Watch TV
Movie Reviews | Charlie's Angels | Moulin Rouge | Michael Mann
Eating in Hawaii | Driving in Los Angeles | Koreatown eats | Toyota vs. the World
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