Yan
I ride bikes and take photographs, and I’ve done both in about seventy countries so far. Based in Brooklyn.
Marin Headlands, California
I ride bikes and take photographs, and I’ve done both in about seventy countries so far. Based in Brooklyn.
Usually with Rachmaninoff’s Second in my headphones. The rest of the time I’m in the water, or walking around a city working out how it fits together.
Long rides and long walks. I’ll take the detour for a ridge road with a view.
Sailing and swimming. Any coast will do.
Urbanism, transit, how a place is put together. I like finding new ways of seeing a city I already know.
About seventy countries so far, and I’ve had a camera in most of them.
The ride I keep coming back to. An hour of climbing through grey, and then the fog is below you.
One year I rode all twenty-one peaks in San Francisco, in a day, to send off the Tour de France.
Another time I rode Potrero Hill, up and down, until the map drew a waffle.
Consumer companies, mostly growing faster than they were built for. Operations and supply chain in all four.
Back when selling glasses direct to people still felt like an experiment. I led the teams behind Home Try-On and automated an operation that had grown by hand, then worked on the supply chain side of opening new stores as retail expanded.
A venture studio, and a sleep company built inside it. I put together the operations, customer experience and finance teams and we launched in six months. That meant learning FDA-regulated supplements manufacturing from scratch.
We ran a double-blind, placebo-controlled sleep study with a professor at Harvard Medical School. The idea was to work on whatever was actually keeping someone up, which was usually stress or a routine that had slipped.
Online grocery for Asian and Hispanic households, right through the pandemic. I owned the P&L and built out the teams. A lot of that job was spent inside fulfillment centers.
My teams launched restaurant delivery, alcohol and e-commerce, and built the planning process we used to balance supply and demand.
We help consumer brands with packaging, shipping and 3PL fulfillment. It’s where a lot of margin sits, and most brands don’t have anyone looking at it.
Every photograph here is mine.
Films, documentaries, newsletters, and one calligraphy script. Things that have stuck with me.
I love getting to know new people, ideas, music, podcasts and films.
yan@yansim.comIt’s in Brooklyn.