Terry Shepherd
“The High-Speed Zen of Michael Yang”
March 1, 2026
Written By Terry Shepherd
Michael Yang reached the Silicon Valley summit early. As founder of MySimon, an online price comparison service born in the unruly optimism of the late nineteen-nineties tech boom, Michael helped shape how people shopped on the internet reaping a peak valuation when his company was acquired. It was, by any conventional standard, a victory lap. Yet in his memoir, Coming Alive on the Ride, Yang suggests that triumph, like altitude, can be strangely isolating. The view from the peak, he implies, rarely offers the transformation we expect. For that, one must keep moving.
Michael’s story begins far from venture capital boardrooms. He arrived in California from South Korea in the mid-seventies as a teenager who spoke almost no English, landing in a San Jose that felt as foreign as another planet. His first meaningful purchase in America was not academic or entrepreneurial but mechanical. A used green Yamaha Enduro motorcycle became his passport to belonging. On two wheels, language mattered less. Roads and landscapes offered their own vocabulary, and speed provided a form of fluency that classrooms could not.
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