Finding Your Purpose … On A Motorcycle at 64 Years Old
He was 47, and his second startup was sputtering.
But Michael Yang, 64, had already lived the great American success story by the time he hit that wall. In 1998, he co-founded mySimon.com, one of the first online price-comparison sites, an idea so ahead of the curve that virtually every major e-commerce platform now runs a version of the concept. CNET bought mySimon at the top of the dot-com boom in early 2000 for roughly $700 million. Yang was only 38 at the time.
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Yang’s life story is a truly inspirational immigrant path. He arrived in San Jose at 14 from Korea with his family, speaking no English. He taught himself the language by reading the Mercury News and using a Korean-English dictionary while working at his father’s 7-Eleven. He went on to study at Berkeley and Columbia. With that same immigrant grit, after mySimon.com was sold, Yang created Become.com, an e-commerce search engine, launched in 2004. But growth wasn’t as quick as it was with mySimon. He was stressed. He found himself with some extra time on his hands right at that critical vortex of life called midlife.
“I had the itch to ride a motorcycle,” he says with a wry smile. “I think it was my body telling me to do something fun for myself.”
So, he bought a bike.
That decision has carried him through roughly 40,000 miles across three continents. From his home in La Cañada Flintridge to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, on the Arctic Ocean. From Los Angeles to St. John’s, Newfoundland, a 12,300-mile round-trip in 40 days. This summer, at 64, Yang will fly to Heidelberg and ride solo for 40 days to Nordkapp, Norway, the northernmost motorable point in Europe.
In his book Coming Alive on the Ride: A Memoir of Motorcycle Travel, Self-Discovery, and Korean Heritage, Yang documents his rides and his transformation. The book was published by Greenleaf Book Group in March, and briefly hit No. 1 on Amazon in two categories — memoir/immigrant stories and solo travel.
On the bike, Yang says, the different versions of himself ride together. He feels connected to both the teenager who came to California from postwar Seoul and the Silicon Valley founder, the 64-year-old with a Tesla in the garage. Coming Alive on the Ride brings his life journey together vividly: a man who, approaching 50, turned a midlife plateau into what he now calls a midlife opportunity.
There is a Korean word he reaches for when he’s trying to explain what happens when he’s on a ride.
“Shin-na-geh,” he says. “A state of joyful immersion. Being in the zone. Excited, enthusiastic, kind of being in a blissful state.”
Chad Horton, an adventure rider and YouTuber who joined Yang on a recent shoot in Bishop, California, explained that the rides are as much about mental health as they are about physical health.
“Riding that long, in those conditions, takes the rare ability to be comfortable being uncomfortable — to embrace the type of misery most people try to avoid,” Horton added. “It’s the kind of trip a lot of riders talk about, but few actually commit to, especially solo. Michael operates at the far end of that spectrum.”
From Seoul to San Jose, with a dictionary
This spring marks 50 years since the Yang family arrived in the United States. They landed in San Jose on April 2, 1976, their belongings packed into imingabang (vinyl suitcases literally called “immigration bags”).
Before Michael and the rest of his family joined his father in California, Yang received a note from his dad. His father noticed something about American teenagers: they were bigger. He sent his son a postcard with instructions: stop regular school, focus on English, and earn a black belt in Taekwondo.
Michael is not one to turn down a challenge. He is now a fourth-degree black belt.
“He didn’t want his children to be pushed around just because we’re smaller,” Yang said.
The idea that became mySimon
Yang studied electrical engineering and computer science at UC Berkeley, earned an MBA there, and took a master’s in computer science at Columbia. In the early 1990s, he was working in tech. In 1994, when he first heard about the Mosaic web browser, something clicked.
Yang had a lifelong habit of comparing prices before buying anything. He would call stores, drive to multiple locations, find the lowest number. Online, he realized, you could do all of it at once.
“I felt that this could be possible by gathering all the pricing data from different stores, and then making it available on one website,” he says.
That idea became mySimon.com, which Yang co-founded in 1998 with Yeogirl Yun. The site was the most sophisticated of the first generation of comparison shopping tools of the time, using Virtual Learning Agent technology to crawl thousands of sites.
Yang rode this time stealthily. It was a roller coaster time in Silicon Valley. There was a dot-com boom and bust. Yang weathered a few failed startup attempts before launching Become.com. He was also building a family. He and his wife, Sunny, had four children, all born when he was in his 40s — David, then Emily, then Joseph, then Timothy. When he turned 47, Become had stopped growing.
That was when the open road called for him.
The road was calling his name
He first took shorter road trips to San Diego, San Francisco, Utah. By his late 50s, he was riding to Alaska and to Newfoundland. In 2023, at 61, he rode solo to the top of Alaska — 10,454 miles round-trip, 37 days, the last 300 of them on a gravel road north of the Arctic Circle. The photograph on the cover of his memoir shows him at the end of it, at Prudhoe Bay, standing beside a wall plastered with thousands of stickers left by riders who’ve made it there from all over the world.
“I felt a tremendous sense of accomplishment,” Yang said. “For a motorcycle rider, making it up to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, is a mark of distinction. Like a mountain climber making the summit of Mount Everest.”
Henry Oh, a Los Angeles attorney who has known Yang since they were undergraduates at Berkeley, was floored when his old college friend started doing this.
“I knew Mike as a person who is willing to take calculated risks, but not to the extent described in his book,” he said.
Riding, Yang explains, is a whole-body sensory event. “You see with your eyes. You coordinate your body to ride. You hear the noise around you. You smell the trees. You feel the hot or cold air.”
In his book, Yang describes the ride as one of extreme presence of mind.
“Most people ride to unplug and unwind — that’s not Michael,” Horton said. “Nothing about him felt automatic. Whether on or off the bike, he was always switched on, observing, analyzing, and moving with real intention. On or off the bike, he’s always processing, always thinking a few steps ahead.”
His longtime best friend and riding partner, Karl Park, whom he met in a Taekwondo class as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, reintroduced him to multi-day motorcycle touring in their late 50s. Karl has since died doing what he loved, riding a motorcycle. Coming Alive on the Ride is, in part, a love letter to Karl. Yang’s friend liked a pace of 150 to 200 miles a day, with stops. Yang wanted 300 to 400 miles a day. Karl used to tell Yang to dial back his ambitions. Life is a journey, not a race to the next milestone, his friend would remind him. Their friendship is a thread in the book. It’s a touching and gripping look at modern male friendship.
Karl described Yang’s riding style as that of a Spanish conquistador on a mission. “The Conquistador is at it again … no mercy on these roads!”
There is a Korean word he reaches for when he’s trying to explain what happens when he’s on a ride. “Shin-na-geh,” he says. “A state of joyful immersion. Being in the zone. Excited, enthusiastic, kind of being in a blissful state.”
Michael Yang
Looking ahead
Yang is eyeing future rides across Central Asia, Africa, and eventually Siberia.
“Earth is so big, and there are so many places to see,” he says.
Yang also wants to keep telling the story. The book was his first attempt. YouTube is his second. His channel is called Alive on the Ride.
“I’m learning how to be a YouTuber now, at 64 years old,” he says. “It’s not easy. But I’m trying.”
Asked what the 14-year-old Michael — the one reading the Mercury News with a dictionary at the 7-Eleven counter — would make of the 64-year-old version, Yang laughed. He recently bought a Tesla Model S with Full Self-Driving.
“I would never have thought I’d be driven by a robot in a car,” he says. “And I would never have imagined I’d be traveling on my motorcycle all across North America, South America, all around the world.”
He paused.
“It’s beyond my wildest imagination that I’m able to do these things.”
“You’re Too Old For That” is a regular series that explores inspiring activities being pursued by those over 50 years old who feel you’re never too old to do what lights you up. Are you doing something inspiring? Do you know someone who is pursuing a passion in their older years? If you or someone you know is 50 years old or older and should have their inspiring story told, please email the editors at Nifty 50+
