Just as the starting and end of every trip to my favorite travel destination, say, Sanya, I am always telling myself that I should come here more often at the first day of landing, and at the last day. Silicon Valley is exactly giving me that feeling and even stronger.
I am sitting at my desk at Days Inn of Palo Alto, and thinking about packing up for flight UA857 back to Shanghai. Looking back, it was a great trip again. Here is a brief summary of it.
Trip Summary
The main propose of the trip is another board meeting that I am coming here every other quarter. Thanks for my insightful and smart investors, every meeting was always the highlight of the trip.
The theme of this trip is “Real Startups”. By real, I mean smaller startups around 20 people. Facebook is no longer considered a startup after visiting their campus for more than 10 times.
I visited NextDoor.com, the local community for neighbors, and met its inspiring CEO, Nirav Tolia. I learnt a lot about community building, and management. Spool’s founder Avichal is just amazing. We met four days after their company was acquired by Facebook. I also visited Zhou Ding, from Klout.com and Zhang Meng from Tango. All has very different perspective about how a technical company should run, and how technology can empower business. Dongyi from YourMechanic really helped me to understand the pace of new technology adoption and the culture behind is.
I am also adventurous enough to participated in a HAAAACKNIIIGHT on Node.js by looking at directory of meetup.com, and dropped by two unique co-work places that host one to few person startups, Hacker Dojo in Mountain View, and Sandbox Suites in San Francisco. Those started to inspire me to think about a technical capital built in our office for technical guys in Shanghai.
The ending big bang was the 15 people gather organized by my well-connected friend Amy at Stanford Graduate Community Center. It was great to catch up with bright people from many different companies, and Stanford. That reinforced my view that Silicon Valley is really a Florence in Action. The core is about ideas sharing, combined with practical building.
Besides that, I routinely visited Facebook to meet with my friend, wandering around at Stanford (including climbing up to Hoover Tower), and stroll in San Francisco area between two meetings.
Yes. I should bring more people to the valley.
