Greetings from the Wang Manor in Cary, NC!
What a big change it is after a month in New York! Owen’s parents live in a 5 BD, 4 ½ BA house on an acre of land in a neighborhood where you imagine what southern state suburbs look like. The views are quite nice while walking Kola.
This drastically contrasted our stay in New York where we stayed in a 2BD 1 BA apartment in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Kola had never lived in such a small space before, when we tossed him a toy, he could fetch it simply by turning around.
Luckily, there are many dog parks in New York, and we lived 2 blocks from one that was off-leash before 9 am and after 9 pm.
Every single day of the 5 weeks we spent in New York, the day started and ended with trying (and mostly failing) to find friends for Kola to play with.
What was living in New York like?
The Pace of the City
As many of you know, we like to slow-travel, live in a place for at least a month to experience life as if we actually lived there. We don’t really do the tourist attractions, we cook most of our meals, and we try to live as locals do. This was extremely easy in New York with so many of our friends living there.
Owen started off liking New York because of good food (duh) and being excited to go into the office to meet his coworkers in New York.
But as the weeks passed, we discovered a core cultural aspect of New York: people are never on time and often keep conflicting plans.
This clashed with Owen’s core values of “I must be reliable and on time”. It ate at his soul a little bit every time someone was 30 minutes late or canceled last minute.
It’s extremely common to have more than one plan a night in New York and tell both that you are coming. You can attend overlapping plans by leaving early for one and showing up late for another - or even hopping in between. If you plan on attending 2 events that night, you might say yes to 3 different plans, in case one falls through. And because everyone does this, you never want to show up on time even if you only had 1 plan because you’ll be the only one there!
The fluidity of New York takes some getting used to. For example, the average arrival time for our dinner parties was 7:45 PM when we told everyone to show up at 7 PM. And for the first four dinner parties we hosted, we consistently invited 7 people only to find out the day of just 5 were showing up. (But we still had fun!)
By the end we mastered it and on our final weekend, we had dinner with one group that started 30 min before a separate housewarming, went to the housewarming 2 hours late skipping the dinner group’s pre-drink, and then met up with the dinner group again at the club 2 hours after they got to the club.
A friend commented that New York is an ENFP on Myers Briggs. Ivy couldn’t agree more, with particular emphasis on extroversion and perception.
In order to enjoy this city you need to not have too much FOMO and just go with the flow, take things as they come, and be okay if plans change. It’s always extremely easy to make last-minute plans, there are tons to do by yourself or with friends.
The Feel of the City
Ivy started off really not liking New York. It felt dirty, crowded, and suffocating. There’s something about being by the coast or being on a hill that can overlook an open space that makes her feel free. New York was a concrete jungle with crammed narrow streets, piles of garbage on every street corner, and an outdated subway system that didn’t even have AC in the stations (who is comparing New York to China’s cities?!)
But she grew to like it more and more as we started to use the Citi bikes (for free with Lyft pink!) to commute through Manhattan, explored the Upper East Side (wow Park Ave!), and got into the flow of exploring New York as a dynamic city. These things made her forgive the shortcomings.
At first glance, New York looks industrial and old. And not Renaissance old where the buildings are beautiful like in Europe. This might be why Ivy didn’t like New York the last two times she went either.
But this time we went inside and saw beautifully renovated modern apartments in pre-war buildings, stayed far away from Times Square, and instead walked around West Village and Upper East Side (no garbage for 10 blocks?!) and spent time in a lot of the city’s carefully maintained parks.
It’s an old city blossoming from the inside with modern culture.
And modern culture means diversity
What we loved most about the city and the most popular answer we get from the old and new friends we met up with on why they chose New York as their home is for the diverse culture.
During our time we met lawyers, fashion designers, documentary makers, epidemiologists, pediatric researchers, and event planners - and of course our many friends in finance and tech.
Diverse people also mean diverse problems to solve and therefore diverse companies that are created in New York which then leads to more diverse products and services to consume.
The best part is that everyone has so much drive and ambition in different fields, yet they also care about all the joys of living in a city with so much culture. It’s all of SF’s hustle but engineers and tech are not on a pedestal.
New York business ponderings
Dog Camps
When Ivy was walking Kola one day, she chatted with another dog owner. The dog owner told her that he was sending his dog to “dog camp” for a month because he was really busy at work that month.
The camp for a month was about $1800 - MORE THAN BETA CAMP!
Camps are typically on a farm with acres of fenced land for the dog to play in, and a Barnhouse where dogs don’t have to sleep in kernels.
Add-ons include:
Bathing
Between $25 and $75, depending on the weight of your dog, and the type and length of fur.
Trails Walks
One hour trail walk to a freshwater swimming pond with no more than two other dogs can be added for $25
Videos by Text or Social Media Updates
Get sent two video clips/photos of your dog per day (15 to 30 seconds each) by text message or Instagram. Cost: $8 per day.
One-On-One Camp Counsellor Time
While camp is lots of fun, it’s also busy. Some dogs enjoy one on one time, away from the group, to play ball, go for a walk, or just sit and snuggle in a private room. Each session is 45 minutes long. Cost $25
Puzzle Time
Puzzles include yummy treats, but it takes some work and time to get to them. Puzzles are fun for dogs and help keep their minds sharp. Each puzzle session is 20 minutes long. Cost: $8 per session.
It’s not new that Millenials are treating their dogs like children. We humanize our pets and they are part of the family. We’ve been thinking about building a business in the pet space for a while. Afterall, look at this growth!
Ideas we’ve considered are:
Costumes for dogs for special occasions and holidays. Inspired by this UPS dog costume, we wanted to make a ring bearer costume for Kola for our wedding with the fake hands holding a ring box. We have previously spent over $40 on a superman costume for Halloween that Kola has worn once and hates wearing.
Selling dog food to restaurants so they can sell it to customers eating on the patio with their dogs. At the Andy Cafe and Dog Salon in Tokyo, you can order food for your pooch that is designed to look like what you are eating, be it a mini-hamburger, cheesecake, quiche, bento box, or cake.
Forget B2C…it’s VC2C
Another service we saw gaining popularity was 15-minute grocery delivery. This isn’t unique to New York, we also experienced it via Food Rocket in San Francisco. But New York had a huge supply of different such apps -- Fridge No More, 1520, Gorillas, Jokr, and more. All of them have no delivery fees or minimums, and some even offered full refunds if you didn’t get it within 15 minutes. We joked that this business model is VC2C, straight up VC money trickle economy-ing back down to the consumers.
Owen used to work in grocery delivery so he particularly found the guarantee outrageous. Even with micro-hubs in dense neighborhoods, low SKU counts, and customized and efficient pick/packing, they practically have to have drivers waiting on hand at all times to meet the guarantee. If they encourage larger basket sizes to make the economics more worthwhile, it also increases the pick/pack time which works against them. He couldn’t fathom how this wasn’t just bleeding money.
But there was something magical about the number 15. We decided that if it was a 30-minute delivery, we probably wouldn’t have used it as often as we did. 15 minutes just feels so immediate, it’d take us longer to walk downstairs and get groceries ourselves. We ordered popsicles and a watermelon frequently for a total order cost of $4.89…
Finance World
If San Francisco is full of Canadians who went to Waterloo for Engineering, then New York is full of Canadians who went to Queen’s or Western for business and ended up in finance.
Ivy got to reconnect with a lot of Queen’s alumni who have spent the 6 years out of school grinding out in investment banking and then ended up in hedge funds and PE firms or are going for Partner track in finance or consulting. Many friends are making half a million to millions in base + bonus compensation a year.
Yes, there are twinges of jealousy and maybe some moments of, “wow that could have been me.”
But every time we get jealous of people who took paths that we had the option to take (e.g. stayed at Google, joined a successful startup, went into finance), we look at our own lives and thankfully decide that we love where we are now. Even if we could go back, there was no choice we would have made differently.
What a gift it is to decide that we wouldn’t trade the life that we live for anything or anyone else’s.
And we hope that you design your life so that you feel that way as well!
That’s all from us for now. We are in Cary, NC for another week before heading back to Canada for 2 weeks in Toronto and 2 weeks in Ottawa. We’ll be in Spain and Portugal for October and November.
Hope to catch you somewhere in the world!
Onwards,
Ivy and Owen