Reality bites wunderkind Justin Kan; racist message unsettles internet entrepreneur

Justin Kan's garage door before it was painted over by a neighbor trying to be helpful.

YOU WOULD THINK that in San Francisco, which touts it's rich diversity, takes pride for it's tolerance and spouts left-of-liberal politics - almost to a fault - would be the last place in the world where an Asian man would encounter the ugliness of bigotry. 

No matter how rich and famous you become, no matter how long you've lived in the United States, no matter that you speak English without an accent, when people look at you, they see the hair, the skin color, the eyes and see you as a foreigner, an interloper, a stranger, an outsider ... a gook - a derogatory term Filipinos were called by American soldiers fighting in the Philippines War of Independence and more recently, was popularized during the Vietnam War to refer to all southeast Asians.

Justin Kan learned that harsh lesson last weekend when someone scrawled an obscene, racist message on his garage door.

They might as well have burned a cross in front of the internet entrepreneur's house.

“It’s pretty messed up,” Kan told tech writer Thomas Lee of  SFGate.

“I haven’t had any racist experiences in America,” Kan told SFGate. “It was a huge surprise.”

Up to last weekend, life for Kan was almost too perfect to be true.

When justin.tv was on the air, Justin Kan became a mobile video studio recording every moment of his life.

Born and raised in Seattle, Kan graduated from Yale with degrees in physics and philosophy. He’s the cofounder of Exec, justin.tv, SocialCam, and Twitch.tv. Currently he’s a partner with Y Combinator.

He's perhaps best known as the creator and subject of justin.tv, a live broadcast of his life that ran on the web 24/7 from 2006 to 2014. It gave birth to the term "life casting." Kan gave up the live broadcast when he co-founded twitch.tv. Justin.tv was immensely popular - despite its slow moments when nothing was happening - spurring lots of imitators, who were more showboating and entertaining. 

The vandalism was caught by Kan's security cameras. It showed a white man with a beard bicycling up to his driveway in the predawn hours and scrawling his hateful message on Kan's garage door. No one recognized the man. 

Kan couldn't figure out why the unknown man did what he did.

Things like that aren't supposed to happen in San Francisco ... but it did. Ignorance and bigotry know no borders. The whole incident, says Kan, "is pretty unsettling." 

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