I don’t remember exactly when I joined CH, definitely years before the sale. As someone who was paid to be a Wall Street technology futurist, it was obvious to me that the CH tech platform, operations, and business model, or lack thereof, weren’t sustainable, so I started backing up portions of the site I found useful. When the sale was announced and users began dropping off, I considered backing up the entire site but, after some thought, figured I might end up getting sued by the new owner.
I did find the site useful for international travel, but I was far too busy with career and fam to participate regularly. At some point the tech industry added a tremendous amount of Asian talent, and I realized I could just have lunch or dinner with colleagues to discover great food, most of it never written up on CH.
I think I recall some interaction with @JenKalb about sushi restaurants when I was consulting for a Japanese bank? Maybe @SteveR posted in the epic Lan Sheng thread?
I never cared for Leff’s online presence and, in the end, it’s a crime against the food community he helped create, that the site wasn’t preserved in a read-only form.
It wasn’t a tech challenge, in about a day I had a subset of the website on my laptop. I’m sure there were legal and corporate politics issues but someone with a little more forethought, would have bargained for read only rights if the site went dark.
When we sold our company, we had no real idea what we were doing but the advice we paid for was worth at least 10x the cost at the negotiating table.
Maybe I’m wrong but leff seems to be the type of person to think he didn’t need much advice. Or maybe the sale price was such that he didn’t want to spend the $.
I dunno, he seems to think he can beat the market trading Apple stock, so there’s that
That rabbit hole is just too deep. However, Lan Sheng was the site of many dinners for us, the most recent of which was a mere 9 years ago. Several of those dinners were groups from CH & then MF.
Our office was less than a five minute walk, I cross referenced the thread with their long list of lunch specials and ate well. Same deal for Szechuan gourmet.
I think there was some conversation about which restaurant was better, I thought SG used better ingredients but LS was more authentic.
Interesting that on the UES, where people actually live, hard to find Szechuan food as good as the restaurants clustered around 39th and broadway. I suppose it has to do with the proximity to Penn station and port authority.
I.e., correctly predict the future, now our awful present? If not, what did you get wrong? An intellectual question only, not meant to incriminate you.
i got a lot of things right and somehow, seem to have forgotten the things I got wrong
I was paid to opine on the future of wall st tech. Is that an awful present? I dunno, I retired 12 years ago but from my perspective, the future was bright. I suppose I did pretty well, I still hear from senior executives asking for my time saying “name your price”.
more generally, if what you mean by “our awful present” is ai, I made a bet with a well-known technologist that AI would replace half the programming jobs in the US in a decade. He wrote about the bet in one of his books. Turns out, I got it right but was off by a decade. I suppose my differentiator was that I actually used and understood the technologies rather than attending marketing presentations.
what did I miss? Not a professional prediction, but I thought the internet would be a great unifying force for society. sigh.
I think that might be more the nature of this forum than the internet in general. Food is something everybody needs, legions of people love, and some (like us) downright obsess over.
With so many things dividing us, I would hope that, if anything, what we eat & our love for various foods should bring us together.
Not Boston related per se, but probably of interest to many here since I would hazard a guess that most Onions used Chowhound extensively back in the day
