It’s been a while since I posted any of my artwork here. Here are some of my latest drawings.

A pretty boy. He turned out rather angular.

Kate Bosworth. The proportions are a bit off but I managed to finish this one very quickly.

She was supposed to have freckles, but I chickened out at the last minute and decided not to draw them for fear of messing up her skin.

This was an exercise in drawing hair. I HATE drawing hair.

The assignment was to draw a mechanical bird. I attempted to do a steampunk hummingbird. I’m not sure I’ll ever finish this piece, because I prefer drawing people.

Halloween ghouls. My second (ever!) attempt at color pencil. I chose a limited color palette so I could focus on blending technique.

I was curious to see if there was any election commentary on 4chan (the darkest corner of the internet) after the presidential debates. Here’s what I found in /b/ in one of the Photoshop threads.

If the candidates were search engines…

If the candidates were phones…

If the candidates were Star Wars characters…

If the candidates were video game consoles…

If the candidates were characters from Heroes…

If the candidates were 4chan memes…

If you recognize any of these obscure memes (I did not), you are a true /b/tard. The answers are IMMA CHARGIN MAH LAZER, Cockmongler, The Bayeux Tapestry, Epic Fail Guy.

Attending weddings is fun. Planning weddings does not seem fun. If / when I get married, my wedding will be held online in IRC, so as to minimize planning. This is the conclusion I’ve arrived at after attending a ton of ceremonies this year, all of which were beautiful but seemed hellish to plan. Best wishes to the happy couples and I applaud you for orchestrating such beautiful ceremonies!

Irene and Shaw (thanks for letting me be in the bridal party even though I didn’t help organize anything :-)

Jonathan and Atsuko

Sheena and Eli

Daisy and Leon (for some reason I don’t have any pics of Leon…)

Robby & Jeanne (the wedding proposal rap)

Wow, it’s been six months since I last updated this thing. Polyvore has been keeping me super busy! Thankfully, the startup life has turned out to be everything I hoped it would be and more (I’ll write more about that in a future post).

Polyvore is now at 8 full-time employees — 5 engineers, 1 bizdev person, 1 PR/marketing/community/office manager, and 1 PM (that’s me, although I spend most of my time writing code nowadays). Here’s a picture of us crowding around Jianing’s computer, celebrating the dropping of a table that reduced our overall db size and made the site much faster.

The other big update is that after almost a year of squatting with FriendFeed (thank you guys so much!), we finally got our own office on Castro St in Mountain View. It’s a huge retail space with floor-to-ceiling windows and lots of light. It’s definitely unique and the rent’s cheap, but the downside is that it lacks a kitchen and random people keep walking in because they think it’s a store.

Here are some shots of our new office. Keep in mind that we’re not done with decorating yet, so it looks kind of empty.

Last week I quit my job at Google to join a small startup called Polyvore. A lot of people have asked me how I discovered Polyvore and why I decided to join.

My friend Thai showed me Polyvore back in October. “Check out this site my friend Pasha is building,” he said. I instantly fell in love. It was like a combination of online Photoshop and Flickr, but for art instead of photos. I was fascinated by all the cool things people were creating using Polvore — fashion, interior design, artistic self-expression, caricatures, logos, postcards, etc. I started making my own sets and was surprised by how quickly they got comments and “Likes” from the user community. I ended up winning Polyvore’s Halloween contest.

I got so excited about Polyvore that I sent a long email full of comments, suggestions, and complaints to Pasha, even though I had never met him before. After a few email exchanges, he asked me if I wanted to join Polyvore. I’ve always wanted to work at a startup and felt like Polyvore was a good fit — great team, great product, just the right size (3 people at the time), healthy growth, etc. It also happened to fall at the intersection of many of my personal interests (tech, art, shopping, fashion, user-generated content). Although I was pretty happy working on Google Maps, I felt like I wasn’t learning as much new stuff anymore, and I knew that a startup would have a really steep learning curve.

Some of my friends thought I was crazy to leave Google, but I thought back to the advice my former boss Marissa had given me to always take the more challenging, more risky path (this was the advice that made me choose a job at Google over a job at Intuit), and decided to follow that advice once again. So I decided to take the leap.

Yesterday was my last day at Google.

It’s hard to believe that when I graduated from Stanford 4 years ago, I had been planning to take a job as a tax software engineer. During my Google interview, Marissa convinced me that this was a bad idea and I decided to join Google’s Associate Product Manager program instead. That turned out to be one of the best decisions of my life! Working at Google has been an amazing, life-changing experience. It’s an incredible company with a unique, quirky culture and tons of passionate, talented people. I feel very lucky to have been able to work with so many brilliant engineers on such fascinating products used by millions of people.

Leaving Google was a tough decision for me. I was very happy working on Google Maps and oftentimes felt like I had the best job in the world. I became the Maps PM at age 22 and was blown away by how much responsibility they were willing to give someone so young. The work was fun, challenging, and very rewarding. I wasn’t looking for a new job, but a great opportunity fell in my lap that I felt I had to take. More on that in a future post.

On my last day at Google, I decided to bake cookies for the Maps team one last time. Since it was Pi Day (3/14), I made Rolo pie cookies and passed them out at 1:59pm. Get it? 3/14 1:59 = 3.14159 = pi.

I also took some photos on my last day, but I wish I had taken more.

A lot of people have been part of my life at Google, but I’d really like to thank John Hanke, Brian McClendon, Prakash Janakiraman, Elizabeth Hamon Reid, Elizabeth Windram and Evan Parker for building and leading a kickass organization that was awesome to work in; the My Maps team for being the best project/team I ever worked on at Google; the whole Maps team for all the launches and lunches; Thai Tran, Chikai Ohazama and Bret Taylor for teaching me how to be a PM; Jonathan Goldman and Kenson Yee for the yogurt and the floaty balls; Nina Kang, Jim Muller, Dan Egnor and the folks in the geo-team chatroom for the daily snark and chitchat; Matthias Ruhl for the 4am craziness of the Movies Onebox launch; the Froogle team for toughening me up; and the APM Class of ‘04.

Thanks for a great 4 years, Google!