I am sitting at the small lobby of Camino Inn and Suite (at 1984 El Camino Real in Mountain View). It is almost 12:00 PM. The 2-star hotel typically offer free in-room wifi, but for something, it does not work today. So I spent the last night of my Silicon Valley trip in this empty lobby. As Alan de Botton put it: “The beautiful loneliness of travel”.

Drawing of the hotel lobby by Jian Shuo Wang

In case you want to see more drawing of these days, here you are:

What I Did

The last week was very long. I was not able to find time to really sit down beside a desk and reply emails. Here is a brief idea about what I did.

• SEP27: As always, slept on the first day to fight against the jet lag. Since the Asiana Airlines OZ214 was so empty that we can slept on the 3 seats, the jet lag is not that bad.
• SEP28: Met my old friend from investment field, visited twitter (I have never been to the office), and Facebook (few meetings with some interesting guys, both business, and technical). Lunch at twitter, and dinner at Facebook. At the same time, took the time in the middle to participate in a panel rehearsal conference call for HYSTA Annual Conference.
• SEP29: Met my old Google and AdChina friend Yi Wang in Mount View, met with some old friend at Sand Hill Road, met Tri, a analyst friend who knows a lot about public stocks, had another conference call on HYSTA, visited one of my existing investors, and finally end up with a nice dinner with the speakers of the China 2.0 conference on Stanford.
• SEP30: This day is simple. Started the day with the China 2.0 Conference by SPRIE (Stanford Program on Regional Innovation and Entrepreneurship) on Stanford campus. That was a very good one – with keynote of Joe Chen from Renren.com, and closing with Jack Ma from Alibaba, in which session he expressed interest in buying Yahoo!, and which in turn caused the huge increase of Yahoo! stock. My panel was in the afternoon. I simply talked about focus and cost, and was happily surprised by the dropping by of Stanford president during the panel. Dinner? Another 14 gather of Chinese entrepreneur and engineer community.
• OCT1: This is the HYSTA (Hua Yuan Science and Technology Association) annual conference day, and at the same time, the SJTU (Shanghai Jiaotong University) North America Alumni Summit at close locations. I shuttled between the two conferences for many times. Happy with the few side meetings at HYSTA, and happy to be able to talk with President Zhang Jie of SJTU in a private meeting. Dinner? It was a hard choice. I finally chose the SJTU dinner although the food is much better at HYSTA.
• OCT2: I spent the day in Pebble Beach. Regretted a lot that I didn’t signup for the Golf at the top golf course of the world. But I spent some time at the sea side. The Gala dinner was great with many interesting guys – the people I know a lot from news papers, and weibo, but not in real persons.
• OCT3: The HYSTA CEO Summit is good – a conference almost match the quality of YLF Conference, my favorite. The topics of globalization and localization, social media, and mobile were very thought-provoking. I also love the intimacy environment with just 30 people, and no media. I spent the night with Vince, Yutong and Facebook friend.
• OCT4: Finally, this is the last day with activities for this trip. It is a simple day with brunch with Vince, lunch with Richard (Did I told you I had late brunch already?), a meeting with old friend at Sand Hill, and finally an info session at Stanford University (I love the room 200 of Old Union – beautiful architect), followed with a dinner of Chinese Entrepreneur Organization of Stanford.

Well. That is the chronological record of the days. Pretty busy, isn’t it?

Photos

Got some interesting photos along the way. Here are some of them.

The beautiful Pebble Beach.

and the 17-miles drive.

Photo with Prof. Zhang Jie, SJTU president

and Alibaba president, Jack Ma.