Hey man, today is your birthday. My gift is my roast and this one’s for you.
Peter was a force of nature. When he graduated from Wharton in 1997, he moved to Hong Kong to work at JPMorgan investment banking division, suddenly came Asian financial crisis. When he left JPMorgan to join Microsoft in 2000, suddenly bursted dotcom bubble. When he left Microsoft to start Merus Capital in 2008, suddenly came global financial crisis. There is a saying that during a blizzard, not a single snow flake is innocent. Just saying. On the other hand, after he left JPMorgan, once a sleepy bank, it became the biggest bank in America, surpassing Wells Fargo and Bank of America; after he left Microsoft, once a sleepy tech company, it became the most valuable company in America, surpassing every single name on S&P 500. Now that he is no longer at Merus Capital, once a [fill in the blank] VC firm, his two partners are secretly thinking, oh sh!t, we are gonna be the next Sequoia.
Just like Peter, I am a venture capitalist. What we do is a lot like the TV show the Bachelor, where a jerk in a suit (in our case Patagonia vest) rejects unworthy women. Pretty much every woman cries if she doesn’t get the rose, but she gets even more upset if the bachelor is just some guy who works at a downtown T-Mobile store, coz he isn’t qualified to work for AT&T. She’ll be like, I didn’t pay for fake boobs and painful Brazilian wax just so I can be rejected by a future dead beat husband. As a VC who doesn’t work on Sand Hill Road, I am exactly the T-Mobile bachelor, which brings me so much satisfaction to see founders cry when I tell them “you didn’t get the rose, take a moment and say goodbye” and rant how he didn’t give up Google salary, moved in with 4 roommates, and ate ramen for 6 months to be rejected by a dumb woman investor. Peter never got adrenalin rush when he rejected people. He was so nice that it made me angry. He was not only helpful to his portfolio companies but also to companies he didn’t invest in. He made the rest of us look evil, though compared to PE guys we are like Mother Teresa. I said, why are you nice as a VC? Being nasty is the best part of this job. That’s like you sing like and look like Adam Levine and can sleep with anyone you want, but you choose to join a Christian rock band, WTF.
Speaking about Maroon 5, my favorite game to play with Peter was: do you know how I know you are gay. I was inspired by this one scene from the movie the 40-year-old virgin, where two guys were bantering do you know how I know you are gay while playing video games: do you know how I know you are gay, how, coz you like cold play; do you know how I know you are gay, coz you are gay so you can tell who other gay people are. Peter was the only person I played this game with coz it was so easy: you are gay coz you have the latest iPhone, you are gay coz you list your high school on LinkedIn, you are gay coz you run marathon so you can stare at hot guys’ asses, I can go on and on. But the most gay thing about him was that he wanted to get married. I am supportive of gay marriage from the start, coz marriage is gay anyway, and I believe everyone deserves equal right to live in misery. As a friend and fellow investor, I gave him candid advice on risk management (in finance it is called tail hedging, how appropriate): make sure whatever ring you buy for her, the merchant better have a generous return policy (btw Costco has a 90 days return policy and it applies to diamond rings, and you are welcome).
I have never met an Asian man as white as Peter. He was a bro of a frat house at Columbia where before him nobody with hair color darker than brown was ever admitted, he was promoted multiple times at Microsoft where before him only white people and Indians got promoted, and he even had white guy friends at his house parties and they didn’t come to his party to hit on Asian women, according to themselves. He bought his pink shorts and orange sweater at Anderson Cooper’s garage sale, he bought his deal flow with a tapping device in the bathroom of the Battery, and he bought his ex-girlfriend on a dating app called the League. I don’t get why any man would ever use a dating app associated with his LinkedIn account; how do you lie about your job then? Peter, you were so white that I think of you as cocaine — white and addictive, and bitches came out of the bathroom with you all over their face. (I originally wrote this joke for a bday roast of a good friend from business school years ago, and Peter loved it so much that he insisted that I write this joke in his bday roast one day.)
Peter’s friends shared that he abused his kids at dinner like circus animals to do math problems. As a wise auntie, I will tell the kids that life hacks are way more useful than math, and I will pass on my hard-learned life hacks so that they will end up being less lame than their dad. E.g. I will buy Brandon Coursera courses on how to properly pick on women so that he won’t ever get hashtag me too. The genesis of the course is that as long as you look good and dress well you will never be labeled with sexual harassment (case in point, Peter came out of this #me2 movement unscathed only because he looked good and dressed well), and money is a man’s best makeup. I will go to Costco with Nicole and buy her industrial-sized roofie testing kits. I will share with her the secret of not being sexually harassed at work is to eat dumplings with chives in them, but if that person has anosmia and insists on hitting on you non-stop, try kissing him on the mouth and that will scar him, for good. I will preach to her: your body is a temple, in the sense that no Jews are allowed inside. Just kidding. Your body is a temple — no graffiti is allowed. Your freckles and moles are your natural tattoos and we can easily use them as identification marks when you go missing, when the roofie kit fails to work. And your uncle Andy may tell you that tattoo inks contain metal therefore you will not be able to use certain high-powered CAT-MRI machines. Under no circumstances should you ever get a neck tattoo, because neck tattoo means, I hate my parents and I work for tips.
Peter, I will never treat your kids the way I treated you –I will not call them condescending nerds, I will not lie to them that their boyfriend/girlfriend is worth putting a ring on, but I will advise Nicole that please consider dating an Asian guy at one point, coz your father was a prime example that Asian men are so underrated in this country (thank you Ali Wong). Nicole will ask, then why didn’t you marry an Asian guy yourself. I’ll be like, why didn’t you go to Harvard, coz you rejected Harvard?
I met Debbie, Sal and Sharlene for dinner two weeks ago at Peter’s house. It was odd to be in the house without him, it was even more weird that out of the blue Debbie asked me if I were single would I consider dating Peter. I told her that nobody who has seen me and him together will ever ask this question coz they know that’ll be incest. Today I want to clarify this issue once and for all. Why would I ever want to be with a guy that much older than me; do you know how hard it is to manipulate a guy who’s seen it all and done it all? Also, how can I ever sleep with anyone I respect?
Dear Peter, I miss your smile, your laughter, your useless knowledge, your fake hair, and your fake face-slaps (feeling them now). Roast in peace, brother.
