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The Great Gaia Journal - Part 6
It's been a while since I last updated the Gaia journal, it felt like I was having a writer's block, especially when it comes to talking about the tough times that followed. But here goes.
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Working on your own ideas, for your own company, in your own office and working alongside your own friends was probably the best thing that had happened to me. Since I was 14, I told myself that one day I would start my own company, but having started and failed multiple companies before Gaia, I never knew that it would be this much fun and exciting when things are running on all cylinders, alongside friends you call family.
Just as we were getting settled into our first office, I got this phone call from my sister. My father was in the hospital again, the cancer that originally started from his kidney had spread to his liver, and he doesn't have much time left.
The news hit me like a bomb. I grew up in a single parent family as my parents divorced when I was 3. Mother was someone I met during every other weekend, and as a kid I grew up with my father. But when I was 11, mother and her new husband had the opportunity to live in Canada, avoiding the eventual communist China take over of Hong Kong. My parents decided that it's best for me and my sister to live in Canada, and I had been living with my mother since, with my father living alone in Hong Kong. All my life I grew up thinking that I will need to work hard to eventually support my father and repay him for the time he spent alone, But before I could even show my father my company, our ideas or my friends, life had other plans for us.
I took the earliest flight available to see my father, and at the hospital I found my father to be barely responsive. His senses were dull but I could see him light up as soon as he locked eyes on me. He held my hand and tears were streaming down his eyes. He could no longer speak, but we didn't need words for each other. For the next few days I stayed in the hospital for my dad's final moments. Then there was a phone call from the office.
Gaia's servers had been hastily put together and were very prone to failures at the time as we didn't have an experienced operations engineer. Turns out the database for the Gaia Forums went down at the time, and while Darknrgy was trying to revive the server, he accidentally deleted the forum post database, permanently deleting all forum messages since Gaia's inception. I immediately took out my laptop and found a room with internet access (basically a phone line), frantically trying to restore any forum posts that might had been in the system and bring the forum back online. A couple hours into the repair, a nurse knocked on the door of my room, informing me that my father had taken his last breath just moments ago.
Words cannot describe the feeling of despair at that very moment. I never imagined this is how I would spent my time when my father passed. I absolutely did not planned for this. Supporting my father had been my life goal since I was 11, and suddenly I realized that I need to re-think what and why I am here doing what I do.
Lucky for me, the work at Gaia HQ is an endless frenzy, and it was very easy for me to slip back into the everyday frenzy of developing features and fixing bugs. It would have been years that I caught a breather and realized that my goals and priorities were pretty much the same, but the underlying reason of what drove me is now different.
At 2004, the excitement were only ramping up. Gaia outgrew its 14 people office in less than a year, and we soon moved to a larger office that can hold 40 people. We were still extremely energized and working all time time, signing off at midnight or later. Often I simply slept underneath my desk so that I don't have to drive home, and 72Squared who got in at 5am would wake me up. The work not only involved programming new features, but I also had to deal with server issues such as database upgrades, and helping managing a brand new moderator team, having spend weeks on the forum looking for mature members to form the foundation of a solid team of administrators. Meanwhile, at the end of each day would be dozens of private messages waiting to be answered. 24 hours were no where enough.
Gaia's user count was blowing away all expectations and we were trying everything to expand on Gaia's features, but that requires a lot more people in our work force. The world was still recovering from the dot com crash and talents were easy to find. Very soon we had over 2 dozen engineers in the new office, and every aspect of Gaia were being enhanced. New games, new UI design, profile system, new forums, guilds, marketplace, events, flash games, the amount of ideas were endless, and very soon things started getting chaotic. We started with some very smart engineers but the team did not have solid management experience, including myself. Some projects were running behind by months, and some programmers didn't play nice with our coding systems and ended up code that was impossible to maintain. Things were exciting, but also wild and chaotic.
More people also came all sorts of interesting stories. We had a programmer who loves to hang out at other people's desk to chat up a storm. We had an engineer who love making metal sculptures, attends Burning Man every year, and looks like he can snap you in half with his bare hands. Oh, then we had this Flash engineer who lived in his car, and soon found a storage room in the office and made that into a bedroom for him and his dog. He didn't last long as we found out that his portfolio consist mainly of copied code. I felt like we could have a book just talking about the colorful characters in the Gaia office.
During all the chaos, we got a call from a venture capital firm which invest in startup companies. As it turns out, one of the investment firms had a general partner who has a daughter that spends time on Gaia, and they ended up taking an interest in us. All this led to changes that made a huge impact in Gaia's future. I think that's a story for the next part of the journal.
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