It was a busy day, mixed with a little bit jet lag. But as always, very excited. I am continued to be amazed by how mature and high-quality of people’s thought here. There are 5 hour long meeting with the greatest people in the field in the afternoon, and then saw great guys like the Jeremy running Yelp, Mark running Second Life, Ron who invested in Google and PayPal as angel investor, guys in Facebook, eBay, Google and other great founders of many famous and nice sites. It is also great to see my friends here with lunch or dinner, or breakfast, or cafe. Besides the great meetings in the US Internet circles, to have the opportunity to connect with the Chinese entrepreneurs in this area is also my favorite. I am happy to be on a panel of GSR’s New Year party, will be at Tsinghua Alumni dinner, and another dinner for Stanford CEO group. The schedule is so full, that I cannot add another 1 hour meeting into it. That is me! An ENFP needing inspiration and tireless seeking for it.

Gathering

Obviously, there are so many meetings and gatherings happening everywhere on so different topics in this area. When there is big conferences like The Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference, there are private meetings. New Year is a great time for Chinese entrepreneur society to gather, and there are many gather hosted by different organizations, like alumni, club…

When I reflect this when I have some time, I just realized how important these gathering helped the whole group to be more competitive in the global scale. By connecting the most brilliant brains in the area so frequently, they get synced of what is going on, and react to the trends in a timely manner TOGETHER! That is a big thing behind the culture of Silicon Valley.

I am thinking of hosting more dinner and events like this when I am back to Shanghai. Stay connected with entrepreneurs, investors, media, and other guys can help to booster the development of the industry, and individual companies, persons.

Tip: Another thing is, the dinner/gather are always sponsored by an organization, which is very likely to be private held company, like a investor partnership, and these companies have the budget ready for these events. Although it is a very small portion of the total cost, they are very efficient. The venue of many of the gather is sponsored by private companies in their own office building, further making it feasible to happen frequently.

P.S. Just called Expedia to cancel my previous reservation. Took 41 minutes and 56 seconds… They need to improve their efficiency.