BLAST FROM THE PAST... HELLOASIA

I had a busy weekend with my fiancee, and my good friend, Sandor, was visiting SF for a wedding. Caught up with him on Saturday evening and we were hoping to get together for Sunday brunch, but my fiancee and I had too much to do. We both had work to do and some errands to run and we decided the time crunch would be too much.

Anyway, I just Googled "Sandor" and decided to post up this old article of him from Time. Brings back some old memories. We were both out in Korea doing startups, hangingout at his apartment playing FIFA soccer, watching our buddy Mike working it all the time, and playing basketball on Sundays. Now he's back at Goldman and living in NYC:

Never mind computers, there weren't even a lot of telephones in Sandor Hau's hometown when he was a boy. Hau grew up in Pennsylvania's Lancaster County, home to the austere Amish farming community that famously shuns modern technology. "Mine isn't a classic Silicon Valley pedigree," jokes Hau, 28, who speaks Korean, English, Japanese and the conversational German of the Amish dialect. "I think my family were the only Koreans in the county. Believe me, I know what it's like to stand out."

Now in Seoul at the helm of one of Asia's hottest Internet start-up companies, Hau is standing out big time in the region's rush to cash in on the cyberboom. Last October, he and his partners, Hans Tung of Taiwan and Fuzhou-born New Yorker Chih Cheung, launched Helloasia.com, an e-commerce and community portal. That was after they had secured $20 million, one of the most generous injections of "first round" funding received by an Internet company in Asia. "We had an idea," says Singapore-based Tung, "we put it down in a business plan and we went and sold the hell out of it around the world." (full article)