{"id":821,"date":"2018-07-30T13:49:05","date_gmt":"2018-07-30T05:49:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stephenwang.com\/b\/?p=821"},"modified":"2024-10-31T13:05:41","modified_gmt":"2024-10-31T05:05:41","slug":"crazy-rotten-tomatoes-halloween-parties","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stephenwang.com\/b\/crazy-rotten-tomatoes-halloween-parties\/821\/","title":{"rendered":"Crazy Rotten Tomatoes Halloween Parties"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is a fourth entry in my retrospective on stories from our early years founding Rotten Tomatoes<\/a><\/span> as part of my #RottenTomatoesTurns20<\/span><\/a> 20th anniversary series.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

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Most entrepreneur stories generally talk about the various steps of building a team, gaining customers, courting investors, blah blah blah. Certainly I have a lot of those stories, some of which I\u2019ve already written about. However, a lot of my fond nostalgia from Rotten Tomatoes was the sense of closeness we had as a team and many of my memories are those spent with team mates when doing stuff outside of work. Main amongst these would be the Annual Rotten Tomatoes Halloween Party.<\/p>\n

Prior to Rotten Tomatoes, Patrick<\/a> and I had started Design Reactor<\/a> in 1997, signing the lease for our first office in Berkeley<\/a> (right above The Luggage Center on Shattuck Avenue) the day after my graduation ceremony. Our initial hiring strategy was basically to ask all of our talented friends at Cal who signed up for more traditional jobs to spend their off-hours doing contract web development and design work for us, folks like Senh Duong<\/a>, John Joh<\/a>, Eric Yeh<\/a>, Walter Wu<\/a>, Rae Chang<\/a>, Susan Nakasora,\u00a0Steven Kam<\/a>, Derek Sakamoto<\/a>, Suzanne Wood<\/a>, Cynthia Sing<\/a>, and others. Later on, as our Disney work expanded, the company became better established, and we had exhausted our first-line of friends who consisted largely of former dormmates, and fellow nerdy members of the Cal Wushu Team<\/a>, we then extended further in to friends of friends and a second set of team members, but not too departed from our original networking. Brandon Sugiyama<\/a> came and joined us from the University of Oregon Wushu Team. Mark Moran<\/a> was originally from Washington and was practicing wushu in the Bay Area. Again, a lot of Wushu folks. Or friends of employees like Susan Nakasora. We did some rounds of hiring during Design Reactor for folks we didn\u2019t already know but, in the end, it was all Cal grads including Boon Khoo<\/a>, Michelle Lee<\/a>, and Emily Lew<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So the story of Rotten Tomatoes is as much about the story about a group of college friends (primarily from Cal, and most with some connection to the Cal Wushu Team and, for the most part, Asian-American) as it is about the struggle to make our place in the film and internet industries.\u00a0As such, our work environment was pretty atypical with our original office in Berkeley being a hangout spot for lots of our college mates.<\/p>\n

Our first taste of success was during 1998 and 1999 at Design Reactor<\/a> as our web development contracts with the movie studios like Disney and Warner Bros. grew and grew. We thought we\u2019d do something fun after all of the hard work so we threw our first company Halloween party in 1999. Our team weren\u2019t exactly the party experts \u2014 our prior experience running big events were for big Wushu-related performances or tournaments. We invited our friends to the party and allowed them to invite their friends but unofficially capped the invitations to just \u201cfirst and second degree friends\u201d. With our office in Berkeley, we held the party up at the Haas Clubhouse above the Cal campus, but as such it had to be an alcohol-free event. I don\u2019t think any of us were particularly the drinking types back then so this resulted in a pretty tame event that ended prior to midnight.<\/p>\n

1999 Design Reactor Halloween Party at Haas Clubhouse<\/h5>\n