Metablox Co-Founders first visit to San Francisco with UCLA buddies

This is the first time Metablox Co-Founders Jun Loayza and Yu-kai Chou (me) visited San Francisco. At the time we were still students at UCLA, but we were already running our first joint startup together (FD World).

There was a Virtual Goods Summit in San Francisco, and since it was highly relevant to Virtual Worlds, we thought we had to travel there. We drove up overnight alongside my Kansas high school Bulgarian friend Todor Gogov, and stayed at another friend Alex Adam's place.

I managed to dig up an email I wrote at the time pinging a Creative Director I respected (Daniel Mckmillan) about my trip and offered to meet up live for the first time. I met him online when he joined my first ever web project FD Network in 2005, so it was exciting to meet him too for the first time. 

In the email you could also see my early thoughts about FD World, which has many parallels to the current Metablox platform (using virtual technolgy to make this world better). Both my English skills and maturity feels a bit fresh in that email, far from the public speaker/author I am today in 2022.

But the most memorable part of the trip was our stop at Ghirardelli Square, owned by Ghirardelli Chocolate Company, which is the 3rd oldest chocolate company in the United States (founded in 1893).

While we were here, we hit up a few friends from UCLA: Jacqueline Laird (from Bruin Consulting that Jun and I Co-founded), Betty Yu (who lived in the same UCLA dorm suite as Jun), as well as Odelia To and Karen Or (from our Business Fraternity Delta Sigma Pi).

I only have these photos on FB, so some of the resolution are extremely low. But they still remain some of the best memories I've ever had with friends so thought it would be meaningful to put on the Blockchain. 

These photos are proof that we were once young, full of optimisim, and passionate about life (some of us still are!). 

A couple years later, Jun and I relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area to start new ventures together, which we might also document here on Metablox one day.