Interview with Hoan Ton-That
Contents
Hoan Ton-That is the co-founder and CEO of Clearview AI.
Tim Tams…Australian for Chocolate
Max Raskin: Do you eat Vegemite?
Hoan Ton-That: I used to as a kid.
MR: How do you eat it?
HTT: You put a little bit on toast, a little bit of butter, and you eat it slowly.
MR: But Americans don’t like it.
HTT: Yeah, the funny thing is Americans think it's like Nutella. They take it and they spread it all over. They’re excited to eat it but are surprised because it's so sour.
MR: Are there any foods you miss from Australia?
HTT: Sure, there's a chocolate called Tim Tams. They’re really sweet chocolate biscuits covered in more chocolate. They only come in packs of 11, so the kids are fighting about who gets the last Tim Tam. It’s a clever marketing thing I think they did.
MR: How long is the flight there?
HTT: From the east coast, about 24 hours — then you have the travel to the airport. It’ll be something like 30 hours in total.
MR: What do you do on the plane?
HTT: I try to sleep. I find it hard to read a book.
MR: I know you’re really good at classical guitar — what kind of music will you listen to?
HTT: Whatever Spotify is recommending me at the time.
MR: What does Spotify mostly recommend to you?
HTT: Mostly really addictive electronic music right now. I’m completely inside a filter bubble.
MR: If you had to guess what song was your most played last year, what would it be?
HTT: I wouldn’t know exactly.
MR: But would it be classical?
HTT: No, it wouldn’t be classical. It’s funny, I grew up playing classical; I’ve listened to it a fair amount growing up. I just don’t listen to it that much anymore. I still love listening to Agustín Barrios Mangoré at times, because I love to play his music on guitar.
MR: Were you ever obsessed with a band?
HTT: Not really obsessed with. That’s what’s interesting – I grew up playing music, I really loved playing guitar, but I never really got into music history. I think if you get into the history of something, it makes you even more passionate about it, or makes you want to be great in that field. I never had that desire to be a musician, and my mom wanted me to be one for a while. I just didn't see myself like becoming a musician, although I was number two in Australia for classical guitar at the National Guitar Eisteddfod.
The Vienna Gambit
MR: What are some other histories you are obsessed about?
HTT: The history of mathematics and sciences – like John von Neumann. He was great – probably the best scientist of the last century.
MR: Did you know the math or were you just interested in the history?
HTT: I liked math for sure, but was also into the history of mathematics and science growing up. I read a biography of von Neumann when I was like 10, 11, or 12, and I was like, “Wow this guy’s smart.” He could multiply or divide six- or seven-digit numbers in his head when he was eight years old.
MR: Could you do that?
HTT: No.
MR: It surprises me you said you weren’t good at algebraic notation for chess.
HTT: Yes, but I’m getting better now.
MR: How are you getting better?
HTT: When you watch chess videos, people will say f4 and you just know it’s the bishop pawn, and hopefully that gets reinforced. What’s cool about chess today is there’s these online videos. I wish I had a chess teacher growing up.
MR: Is there any guy who you watch that you really like?
HTT: Gotham Chess. He had a video on the Vienna Gambit. They’re really great videos because they’re about 15-20 minutes and he explains it clearly and in a fun way.
MR: Are you a visual learner?
HTT: Good question. I guess with chess you kind of have to be. For music, for me, it was by ear. I would have the sheet music and I would look at it for reference, but I would listen to a song over and over again and I’d try and play along with it.
MR: Can you read music well?
HTT: I can’t sight read but I can read it. So if I want to learn a new piece and I get the sheet music, then I’m pretty slow reading it and it would take a while to play the correct notes slowly. I would try and memorize the notes afterwards and play it without sheet music as soon as I could. And it was funny – sometimes the teacher would come back and say, “You’ve learned this perfectly, but you learned all the mistakes perfectly too.”
MR: Are you trying to get better at chess?
HTT: Yeah, I just decided why not. I thought that I couldn't get better, but I never looked at video lessons.
MR: What are you doing right now? Exercises?
HTT: No, just opening videos.
MR: What is the strongest part of your game?
HTT: I like the end game because you can sit there and calculate everything.
MR: Where do you mostly play?
HTT: Chess.com or Washington Square Park.
MR: What’s your favorite opening right now?
HTT: Vienna Gambit.
MR: You don’t like playing King’s Gambit anymore?
HTT: I used to, but it’s way too risky. I learned a bunch of the lines from the King’s Gambit – some people you can trick, and you can get into a much better position than them.
MR: What about defense?
HTT: I just play the standard Open Game, e4-e5. I used to play the Sicilian Defense, but I need to practice it and memorize it again.
MR: How much chess do you think you play a day?
HTT: Some days I play like 3 games, if I play.
MR: What’s your ranking on Chess.com?
HTT: 1500.
MR: Are you happy with it?
HTT: Yes, better than 1400. It’s good because it’s the highest rating I’ve ever gotten on there.
MR: One question about the park – do you go to the same people?
HTT: Yeah, because you find someone you find a fun rapport with. There’s this guy Surfi – he’s taken a sabbatical – he worked at the U.N. for a long time. He was a young champion of Bangladesh. He just showed me the Stonewall Defense and it’s pretty cool.
MR: Do you get frustrated when you lose?
HTT: Yeah, that's the one thing in life I just used to get upset about, but not as much anymore.
MR: We both have this – why do you think it’s so frustrating?
HTT: You touched on it before and I think it’s correct – in other things in life, even if you’re really good, it is not necessarily all up to you. If you’re a lawyer, the judge messed it up. If you’re an entrepreneur, the customer is wrong and needs to really buy your thing. If you’re in PR or media, the journalist messed up, not me. In chess, you just have yourself to blame. Computer programming is similar.
Vietnam, Australia, San Fransisco, and New York
MR: Did you play any other sports?
HTT: Yeah, when I was a kid, I wanted to be a cricket star – it’s like the Australian baseball, but way longer, and if you don't understand it, even more boring. A test match could be five days.
MR: Did you have a position?
HTT: Well, everyone is on the field, and everyone's a batter, but you can specialize. I was better at bowling. I changed cities from Melbourne to Canberra and realized I wasn’t as good as I thought I was.
MR: Were you born in Australia?
HTT: Yeah, Melbourne.
MR: What about your parents?
HTT: My mom is a nurse from Tasmania and my dad is originally from Vietnam. He came to Australia on a Colombo Plan scholarship when he was 18 — he’s now a professor at Australian National University (ANU).
I kind of did the same thing — when I was 19, I moved to San Francisco to make apps and games and that’s where I met Naval Ravikant who was my first investor.
MR: Did you ever think about doing anything else with your career?
HTT: No; I was approached by Ford Models to become a model, but I never really considered anything other than writing software and building companies.
A Snake Eating David Foster Wallace
MR: Do you code anymore?
HTT: I still code when I have the chance, or it makes sense, but not on a regular basis.
MR: Do you miss it?
HTT: Sometimes. It’s really hard work, you have to have a long block of time to get stuff done. Sometimes it takes a half hour to get in the zone. It’s hard to do something in an hour or two, especially as the team gets bigger and the codebase gets larger. But it’s the most satisfying thing to get the computer to do exactly what you want it to do. I still love helping engineers and managing them somewhat. I’m not managing directly, but some parts of the team – like the people who run the web crawlers I manage, I love that stuff.
And then I still have a really good memory for things. If someone's stuck on a bug, it might be my code from two years ago, and I'll still remember the code and help them fix it. Or if someone's trying to start a new project, I can tell them to look at some open-source project or research paper that I somehow remember, that could save them weeks of time.
MR: Do you have a favorite coding language?
HTT: When I was a kid, I was a total coding language snob. I learned Lisp because everyone was a snob about Lisp. The MIT Course “Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs” – those were the first videos they ever put online for programming – that was Scheme/Lisp. Then I would learn Erlang and Haskell and all these more functional programming languages that no one ever used. It’s like being a cheese snob but for nerds. Once I ended up doing startup companies, you never use those languages anymore, because they are so impractical. But it's fun because if you pick the right programming language, you can be like five or ten times faster than any competitor if you are picking the right programming language for what you want to do.
MR: Do you remember when you first started programming?
HTT: I was always messing around with computers when I was young. When I was like 3, 4, or 5, we had a DOS computer. My first programming languages were BASIC, and then Visual Basic 2.0. I was obsessed with the electronics. I would ask my dad what everything was – “That’s a radio. That’s the transistor, that’s where the power comes in.”
I just had a lot of weird habits. I would play this one Vietnamese tape of music every morning.
MR: Do you remember it?
HTT: Khánh Ly – I can’t remember the cassette tape though. I would listen to that every single day in the morning religiously and then I would start my day. I was obsessed with electronics, like power cables, adaptors, and the like. I would just try and put them in certain configurations. I was allowed to play with them as long as I couldn’t plug them into the wall. I would plug the cable into itself and sit there and think about it for hours.
MR: Like the ouroboros. August Kekulé discovered the structure of the benzene ring after he had a dream of a snake eating its own tail. It’s in the beginning of Infinite Jest, which is just a terrible book.
HTT: Oh, that’s the book everyone had in San Francisco for a while, and they would carry it around.
MR: …and they never read it.
Vietnam Ware
MR: You care about clothes and fashion?
HTT: Yeah, it’s fun to collect good stuff. Vintage clothing is fun.
MR: Do you have a lot of clothes?
HTT: I think I have a lot of clothes.
MR: What’s the last piece of clothing you bought?
HTT: I had another suit made from Vietnam. In 2015 I went to Vietnam for fun and there’s a town called Hoi An – they have like 200 French tailors there. It’s along the river, super romantic. They have a French style of tailoring. You get measured and then you come back the next day and you get a suit that fits almost perfectly. You come back the next day, and the alterations are done, and it’s great.
MR: Do you have a store you like?
HTT: Yeah, Mr. Xe. They have my measurements on file, so I will text them on WhatsApp with new ideas, colors, patterns, and lining and they’ll make it and ship it!
MR: Is that the last thing you bought?
HTT: Yeah, I got a yellow suit recently.
It’s like $120 for a suit and they’re tailored. You can show them a photo of anything, and they might find a way to remake it. The suits are very good, and it’s always nice to have fitting shirts. Unfortunately, he doesn’t make T-shirts.
MR: Do you like glasses?
HTT: I didn’t know I had bad eyesight until I got a pair of glasses – I think at 26 or 27 – maybe too much time in front of the computer as a kid.
MR: You know my theory about glasses.
Do you care about the fashion of glasses?
HTT: Yeah, there’s a cool website called EyeBuyDirect.com, where they have all these styles and they’re pretty cheap – pairs for like $30, $80.
The Hacker New York Times
MR: Do you have any cool productivity or other apps you’d recommend to people?
HTT: I used to be an app developer so I should know a productivity app, but I like to keep it simple: pen and paper. I do like using Notion sometimes – when I actually remember to open the app.
MR: How do you keep track of your time?
HTT: I am one of those people who really never thought I’d have a calendar – now I have a calendar. It’s always full now.
MR: How do you read? Hardcopies? Kindle?
HTT: Hard copies are better. When you’re on the Kindle it’s so distracting. Once I sold all my books to get a Kindle and it was a terrible mistake.
MR: You sold all your books to get a Kindle?
HTT: Ages ago for some reason. Then I never used the Kindle.
MR: When you read do you write in the margins or anything like that?
HTT: Sometimes.
MR: Do you have a good memory for books?
HTT: I think so.
MR: What about news – where do you get your news in the morning?
HTT: I actually read the New York Times.
MR: Where else do you get news?
HTT: HackerNews – I’ve read it probably every day since it graced the Internet.
MR: Do you play video games?
HTT: I did play video games growing up. But when I was like 11 or 12, I decided I wanted to be a programmer. It would be way cooler to make software – I thought games were a big waste of time after that. I played strategy games, like Command & Conquer and Age of Empires. I was very afraid of first-person shooters. I also liked playing Jazz Jackrabbit.
MR: I loved Jazz Jackrabbit!
HTT: Really? Best game as a kid.
MR: When I was young, my best friend’s mom walked in while we were playing once, and she asked what we were playing. We said, “Jazz Jackrabbit.” And she said, “Jazz Jackass?!” And I thought it was the funniest thing because she was this sarcastic, amazing woman, and it was my first experience with sarcastic humor and timing.
What was your civilization for Age of Empires?
HTT: Byzantine. Paladins were the cool thing you could make.
MR: Were you ever into MMORPGs?
HTT: No.
Now That’s Music
MR: You don’t like to drive?
HTT: I never learned how to drive.
MR: Do you like vacations?
HTT: Sometimes. Depends on where you go. But I like cities. I’m not really a middle-of-nowhere kind of person.
MR: What’s your favorite city?
HTT: New York City.
MR: Other than New York?
HTT: Brooklyn!
MR: Composers. Who do you like?
HTT: Well, as a kid, Agustín Barrios Mangoré.
MR: Is there a piece you’d recommend?
HTT: “Vals No. 3” and “Una Limosna por el Amor de Dios.”
“Prelude in C Minor” is good. They’re all good.
MR: What about symphonies?
HTT: I liked Rimsky-Korsakov growing up. He has a really good one – “Scheherazade.” which really feels like you’re being on an ocean voyage.
MR: Are you a beach person?
HTT: I should be, but I’m not as much as you’d think for an Australian.
The Codes Make the Man
MR: What mainstream shopping place do you like going the most?
HTT: I don’t like mainstream shopping.
MR: Where in New York do you think are cool place to go thrift shopping?
HTT: I like going to the vintage shows. Like the Manhattan Vintage Show. They have sellers from all around.
MR: What clothes are you most interested in – pants? Shirts?
HTT: For a while I liked paisley, so I got paisley shirts.
If you have good jeans, like black or white – I don’t wear blue – you can just change your jacket or your shirt and it’s easy to do.
MR: Do you have a lot of shoes?
HTT: No, that’s one thing I don’t have too much of.
MR: What shoes are you wearing right now?
HTT: Dr. Martens.
MR: You’re wearing all one color right now – do you like wearing all one color?
HTT: Recently it’s a thing – it’s nice. For a while I was just living out of a suitcase and put all of my stuff in storage, and I was wearing all cream and ivory because you could just bleach it and be done. New Yorkers wear all black all the time, so I do that occasionally.
MR: Where are your jeans from right now?
HTT: They’re Levi’s 501s.
MR: What do you drink during the day?
HTT: Orange juice.
MR: How do you like your orange juice?
HTT: Sometimes pulp. Sometimes I mix it with seltzer.
MR: My bubbie called that a schpritz!
Art
MR: Do you ever paint?
HTT: No, I never got into painting. A little bit I was into drawing.
MR: What would you draw?
HTT: I have one good drawing of a still life apple somewhere.
MR: Do you collect any kind of art?
HTT: Yeah. My dad would collect, and I have some of Lê Thành Nhơn, a Vietnamese artist.
MR: Is he still alive?
HTT: Unfortunately, he died. He was a family friend of ours. He could do everything. He could do sculpture, he made vases, he could do oil on canvas in all kinds of styles. He did a bust the size of a house in Vietnam. He has these great ornate vases he made as well.
MR: Is there a favorite piece?
HTT: I have this picture of a vase that my parents own, on my lock screen.
MR: Did you know him?
HTT: Yeah.
MR: What was he like?
HTT: Fun. His day job was a tram driver, which is crazy. My dad would try hard to get his art into places. I remember my dad was working on getting his sculpture into Monash University where my father was teaching when I was growing up, and it’s there now.
MR: What about his art speaks to you?
HTT: Well, it's very familiar because I grew up with it. But I like that his painting is colorful. He's got a lot of detail, but it’s not perfect replication – some of it is impressionistic.
MR: Is there a painting you like?
HTT: I like this one:
