I was motivated to write this “self re-introduction” post, because Bill Bishop of Sinocism recently published a similar one. You’d think someone like Bill, one of the OGs of newsletter-ing and successful media executive, would be one of those people who need no introduction. Yet, he did it to keep his experience and story front-and-center for his ever-growing audience – a very humbling and inspiring act.
Now that the Interconnected newsletter has grown to more than 10,000 subscribers strong, including at least seven national governments, a sizable cohort of institutional investors, and many curious readers from all walks of life, I’m overdue for a re-introduction. (Also, who reads the About page, amirite?)
Tl;dr Who Am I?
I started out cutting my teeth on the brutal but exciting work of presidential campaigns, in states like North Carolina and New Hampshire (Kevin 1.0). That led me to Washington DC, where I worked as a political appointee in the Commerce Department and the White House during the Obama era. That’s why I still write about US political events and its wider implications, from presidential debates to election results. Once a political junkie, always a political junkie.
After DC and three years at a top-three law school, I made a hard switch (or fork?) into tech (Kevin 2.0). Not the politics-adjacent-tech, like public policy or trust and safety work, but as a business operator in the inner organs of companies. In particular, I was lucky enough to have worked at a senior level in the cloud infrastructure and DevOps space for fast-growing startups and category-leading companies, like GitHub. That’s why I write a lot about “the cloud”, open source technology, and now generative AI, which could not have happened or advanced as fast without the foundation of two-decades-plus of cloud computing.
During the early days of Covid, I made another hard switch into writing, and later on, investing (Kevin 3.0). More recently, I started my own investment partnership, Interconnected Capital. It is the best way I can think of to make good use of my life experiences so far, find the valuable nuggets (dare I say alpha?) in the venn diagrams of multiple disciplines, and take a long view on our dynamic world. That’s why there is a growing series of writing on investing and the market.
I’m a believer and practitioner of Steve Jobs’s wise observation that you can only connect the dots of life looking backwards. So all the stuff you just read was not the outcome of a grand plan; they all just sort of happened. I also believe that a person’s evolution is like software updates – 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, with minor versions in between. Self-evolution is a conscientious decision. You can choose to constantly upgrade, update, and refactor to clean up your own “tech debt”, or just let old code run on inertia. To some extent, both approaches work; it is just a life choice. (That’s why there are still job postings for Cobol programmers.)
Since I started my career in public service and still maintain a strong sense of idealism and duty (however naive that may sound), I some time take on “extracurricular activities”, like going to DC on my own dime to attend closed-door sessions to discuss national competitiveness or fly across the ocean to participate in people-to-people dialogue events, to be helpful however I can.
The Newsletter
I started this newsletter more than four years ago to write about the intersections (and interconnections) between technology, business, and geopolitics. That focus still holds true today. It also began as a bilingual newsletter, which I kept up for more than three years, writing every post in both English and Chinese, regardless of the content, and published on a standalone website with customized toggling between the two languages.
More recently, my bilingual effort has tapered off due to the workload, probably some laziness, and also how good the genAI translation capabilities have become. I will still write bilingually from time to time – my most recent one being a couple of months ago on the potential Ant IPO – but it won’t be every post.
To refactor the “tech debt” accumulated from four-plus years of writing, I re-organized my content into a few new categories to help you navigate and consume new and old posts alike. If you are into investing, my quarterly and annual letters are a great place to start. If you like tech, then the “cloud war” and "open source” categories are where the goodies are. If you are more of a business or history geek, then the “long-form profiles” section, where I write in-depth stories on interesting but less-discussed entrepreneurs or investments, should satisfy your curiosity.
I also hope you become a premium member of Interconnected, like hundreds of others, and support me on this ever-evolving project and labor of love. (To those who are already premium members, I'm so grateful for your support!) It is $100 per year; we don’t have a monthly plan. I decided to do annual only, because my hope is to build long-term relationships with our most supportive subscribers. And I hope I’ve earned your trust by writing consistently for the last four years and nine months (mostly for free), to show that we have staying power and can deliver long lasting value.
Premium benefits include:
💹 Quarterly investment portfolio deep dives
✍️ 1-2 posts per week on average of the kind of analysis and commentary you have been receiving (free subscribers will receive 1 post per week on average)
💻 A private Zoom scheduler link to have live 1-on-1 idea discussions (e.g. stock ideas, policy questions, new projects, general brainstorming)
😎 Early access to my new future projects, e.g. book, investment deals, etc.
I will be writing a series of upcoming premium member only posts on China’s unprecedented anti-monopoly investigation on Nvidia and multiple deepdives on the robotaxi industry. Stay tuned for more…
Thank you for reading. Thank you for your support!