Author Archives: Jian Shuo Wang

Tough Questions for Some People

Posted on by
Reply

When I was filling out US Nonimmigrant Visa DS-160 form (my visa expires again), and I saw the following questions.

Have you, while serving as a government official, been responsible for or directly carried out, at any time, particularly severe violations of religious freedom?
Yes No

I know there are many government officials need to say Yes, but I believe they can just lie and choose No.

Another one:

Have you ever been directly involved in the establishment or enforcement of population controls forcing a woman to undergo an abortion against her free choice or a man or a woman to undergo sterilization against his or her free will?
Yes No

There are more people on this. There is a huge organization called Planned Birth Committee doing this, on daily basis. Will they answer Yes?

Have you ever renounced United States citizenship for the purposes of avoiding taxation?

Yes No

This one will be interesting. Re-consider to immigrant to USA. To get in is easy. Get out is troublesome.

Driver: A Life Worth 190 RMB

Posted on by
Reply

I was on a taxi, and there are pedestrian crossing the road without observing the red light. The driver was very angry, and claimed that if he wants, he just run over the guy, and that only cost him 190 RMB.

I was shocked and asked why? He explained that the insurance covered 80% of any accidents of the taxi driver, and they have a mutual fund of all taxi drivers to cover the rest 20%. So he is free of any payment. The only downside for him personally is, the insurance fee will increase 190 RMB the second year.

Heinz dilemma

Although it is not the reasoning process of every one, it is pretty consistent with the stage one, obedience, of the Heinz dilemma. It will be paraphrased as:

The driver should run over a man if he wants, because the cost is only 190 RMB.
– or –
The driver should NOT run over a man because it causes 190 RMB cost.

This is, according to a later Kohlberg’s stages of moral development model, like a 6 year old’s reasoning process.

Humanity

When I browse the catalog of Stanford University, I found out many courses of humanity. There was a Humanity Center there. There are more courses on the topic from Harvard. The topic is still pretty new in China universities, and even more unfamiliar for the general public. It is not hard to understand why the driver will claim this (and demonstrated the stage one of the Heinz Dilemma).

Early Wakeup Bankrupted

Posted on by
Reply

My early wakeup practice went bankrupt today, after 4 days.

I wrote Jet Lag Builds Early Raiser before:

Jet lag is good thing for me. Whenever in US, or back to Shanghai, jet lag drives me wake up earlier and then I became an early raiser for some days. Thus I have enough time to write more blogs (helping me to get clearer idea about my world, and comprehend the message I got). It is just like an effective “Raise Early” medicine. But the problem is, the effect gets less significant along the day, and I will fade into normal life.

Is there any way to simulate jet lag?

I also wrote other entries on this topic: Early Wake Up, Blogging and Early Wake-up, Trip Progress: Wake up Early in the Morning.

This is the fifth morning after I got back. 5:08 is too early for me (the sun rise time), and I felt sleepy in the afternoon. I waked up at 5:08, stand up, walked out of bed room, and felt asleep at the sofa in living room. When I wake up again, it was 8:00 AM.

What it Tells When Something is Hard to Do?

I started to wonder, if something is so hard to do, like waking up early, like losing weight, or get rid of procrastination, is there a reason behind it? Is it because it is not the nature way, or there is some hard boundary there (like you can not lose weight lower than a certain number, because that is what a living person’s boundary)? If we fail, is it because of we are fighting against a law?

Taking procrastination as example, Richard Hamming mentioned that don’t fight against all type of procrastination. Great scientist are those who procrastinate to shave, or to pay bills, because they put effort into more important things that requires a big chunk of time. That makes a lot of sense to me.

Analysis of Wake up Early

I believe the boundary is the daily sleeping time the body needs in long term (you can twist it by few days, like before an exam, but not long). Let’s say, it is 8 hours per day. There must be another boundary that pulled me back – the go to bed time.

The social activities and family, and eating time all affects that. For example, if we really can eat dinner at 5:00 PM instead of 7:00 PM, and there is a way we follow the society to really shutdown at 9:00 PM (by shutdown, I mean there is no Weibo activities, or no emails), we definitely can shift to the 9:00 PM to 5:00 PM schedule. This has been proved by travelers. When we were in Hangzhou, we really went to bed at 9:00 PM – actually we were bored at 7:00 PM already. Among all the social interactions, Wendy is the biggest portion that impact my schedule. I just cannot fell asleep everyday.

If the social environment does not change, especially if I cannot get agreement with Wendy to change together, I am actually running against head wind, and the effort accumulation is big enough for me to give up.

Other Things? Like Losing Weight?

How much is enough? Whether we should eat three meals or two? When to have meals? What to eat? All of this is actually much more influenced by our society than we can imagine. We don’t decide by ourself, the social environment does.

I never said we cannot change, or we should not fight, but to realize that we are heading against head wind makes us smarter to choose how to react.

One of the best way is to move. To find an environment that we feel suite our needs better, and shape ourselves, by the environment we choose. If not, choose a micro-environment, or build one.

So, the next step is not to fight harder – it is to change the social interaction.

 

We Design Our Life, at Least for Travel

Posted on by
Reply

I met with many people during the trip, and many of them were so interested in China, so that they even sent their kids to Chinese language school, but they never went to China. I asked why, and they said, they were thinking about it. I always encouraged them to come to China – anyway, it is just 12 hours of plane ride away.

The interesting story of Two Monks’s travel story suggested that well preparation, and a lot of money does not guarantee a monk to get to Nanhai from Sichuan. The one who take action made it.

Related to this, I found it interesting to see how visa effectively prevent people in China to travel. We need visas to almost everywhere in this planet. This is the excuse many people, including myself, use not to travel. But the counter argument is, people in the States don’t need visa to most of the places (Well, they need it to come to China), they don’t travel as we thought. Taiwan is a new travel destination for some provinces in China, including Shanghai, but we don’t travel much often to Taiwan (at least for me). To zoom in to closer places. Tibet does not require visa, but I have never set foot there.

There are so many places in the world that I want to travel, but I didn’t have a clear plan for it, and there is no action to it. Sometimes we need excuse to push us there. I am so lucky to use board meeting as a driving force to go to the Silicon Valley every half year, and that is so rewarding for me and for the company.

There are many other things, like running a company. There must be a lot of things to do to run a company well, and to allow more freedom for the people in it and be more creative, and taking bolder approach. The decision is also on our hand, not others.

We can design our lives, at least for travel, and at least for immediate relationship around us.

Technical Thinking is Not Necessarily Technical

Posted on by
Reply

During a meetup organized by my friend Amy, I met Chris. He is a technical guy – very technical. Besides his work at a high-tech company, he did a lot of things technical. This is what Amy told me.

His grass is greener than all his neighbors, because he really took the soil into the lab to analyze what’s in it, and what is lacking for grass to grow. He added a lot of ingredient and makes it better.

He has a lot of helicopters, and he is good at it. He remote control them and have a lot of gadget around this hobby. He wrote the firmware for its heli, using the 16K memory.

Once his friend put her iPhone into washing machine, and crashed afterward. He opened the iPhone, removed the broken part (which obviously show some burning damage) and finally recovered the data.

The story of Chris goes on and on.

The inspiration for me is, technical people are very different. They are the driver of the advancement of the society. They are not only good at what they are trained for. The thinking methodology, and learning pattern is what made them unique.

I thought of Hax in my company. Besides a Javascript guru, he was really good at renovating his house, when he was forced to start the project. Being good at almost everything, and dive deep into the details are the common pattern you can find out in technical people. One of my favorite questions I ask technical guy during interview was, what are you good at, and then explore how deep he/she goes.

Technical thinking is not necessarily just technical. It is an atitude of life.

 

Unbelievable Blue Sky

Posted on by
3

This is amazingly blue sky in Shanghai. Look at the cloud and the sky. Impressive! I would say that it is the bluest sky I saw in Shanghai in years.

Interestingly, the radio program started to notice this too (for sure), and comment about it. They forecast that the blue sky will last for one more day and rain is coming on Thursday.

20120724-204119.jpg

Early Morning at French Concession

Posted on by
4

I waked up early in the morning (5:30 AM), and drove to the french concession. The best time to visit Shanghai is very early in the morning. Here are two buildings. One is at around 140 Fuxing West Road, and the second is on the Wukang Road. Looking at the buildings, and you just feel beauty out of it.

 

Daylight Saving Time – My Way

Posted on by
3

During this west coast travel in the States, I started to think about daylight saving time (DST), in my own way.

The whole idea of daylight saving is, there are many more additional hours of daylight in summers than winters. Since we always define 12:00 as noon when the sun is at the highest position, there are two hours of more daylight in the morning, and in the evening.

The other fact is, people tend to extend activity to the evening, instead of morning. The evidence is, lighting (candles, or electronic) are most used at evening than in the morning. Most people just don’t wake up in the morning, lit the light, and do something. Modern activities, like movies, sports, entertainments, after work life, and even education tend to leverage the hours in the evening.

Based on the two facts that listed above, it makes sense to shift the clock and leverage the additional hours. There are two ways to do it. Either make morning longer by shifting the main time frame toward evening or make evening longer. Obvious the later is more promising.

So the way people do it is, adjust the clock clockwise by one hour.

To help me understand it easier, I would visualize it as “Follow Japan”. For example, today, the sun came out at around 5:06 AM. If we follow Japan, the new time would be 6:30 AM. The sunset for today is 6:57 PM, and it would be 7:57 PM – bingo! more time in the afternoon without affecting early raisers.

That sounds such a good idea, but it turned out that it does not help the energy saving that much as people thought. I am happy that China finally abandoned the confusing shifting. Why?

Actually, if you want, you can do it yourself. The basic idea is, in summer, the Sun is raising up earlier and earlier every day. When the sun started his work in the morning, you are still sleeping. If you just adjust the schedule and be up with the sun, you are running your own daylight saving time. Very few people realized that we can and should change our schedule according to the sun. Why always wake up at 8:00 AM? We can do it at 6:00 AM, which is identical to 8:00 AM in winters. I would take the chance of the early raiser habit jet lag gave me to try it out.

 

 

What We Can Learn from Travellers

Posted on by
1

Travel is a habit changer, and a mind changer. From time to time, I acknowledge the benefit of travel, and its positive impact on me.

Break the Boundary of Time

Travelers may have different sense of time than the residence. I waked up and wandered around the Bund at 5:30 am today, and saw many travelers – who else wake up so early to get to a tourism location? When I was in the valley, because we are running out of the daily schedule, 9:00 am is not that a sharp dividing line between pre-work to work. Sunday and Saturday are not that different, than work days.

Break the Boundary of Location

During travel, “far” places are much further than local people. A typical trip to China means Beijing/Shanghai/Xi’an/Guangzhou and maybe Chengdu for most foreigners, and for others, Tibet and Xinjiang are must visit for many American, which is still a dream for many people, including myself.

When you travel, since you have setup the orientation system for yourself, you may wake up and drive to places considered far-away. Driving down to Los Angelas does not sound too crazy to me, and driving across US is also attractive. In the area, a meeting in the City (San Francisco) can be arranged adjacent to a meeting in San Jose. That is just like arranging a meeting in Shanghai and Suzhou, and maybe another in Hangzhou. Totally crazy but I don’t feel anything wrong about it when I travel.

If you apply that to Shanghai, meeting in any of the district should sounds close, and you should do it.

Break the Reasons You Don’t See People

When I travel, I may just shoot an email to an old friend and tell him/her that I am in town and how about catch up? The only reason to catchup is because we haven’t seen each other for at least half year (my travel schedule). Visiting a place every half a week or a year is good interval since it is not too long that you barely accumulate any friend, or too short that you become a resident. The other party enjoy the same thing.

In Shanghai? That sounds a little bit awkward. You don’t see people just for the sake of seeing people (It IS a great reason), so people may stay away from each other without face to face time for many years. Sometimes I feel people in the city is further than people in the city.

Break the Balance Between Thinking and Doing

This is actually not just travel, it is vacation vs working time. In working time, most of the time, we are doing things. Doing is an important part of a company or person, but lack of thinking for too long can be a problem.

Travel is dedicated thinking time. Even people who swipe the street gets to think when they are travel. You talk with people – think! You see the street view – think! You check-in hotels – think! You are forced to think and react to the more unfamiliar world, and you think more.

This is one thing we definitely need to learn from the travelers.

Others

Surely there are many other aspects of travel itself – the culture immersion, the new skills you learn, but at the end of the day, you are still yourself, and the impact in how you behave is more important than the real knowledge.

 

Large Wave of Factory Bankrupt in China

Posted on by
3

When I open newspaper, especially on Weibo, bad news are coming one after another. There are a large wave of factory bankrupt and shutdown starting from this year. The wave spread out from Pearl Delta, to Yangtze Delta, and quickly spread out to the whole China.

Labor Cost as the Last Straw

Most of the news attributed the bankrupt to a lot of factors, including the decline of export orders, and increase of material cost. But seldom can they ignore the fact that the labor cost has increased like crazy.

A report mentioned a typical first line worker’s salary was about 1000 RMB/month in 2006, and that number has raised to 5000-8000. Other industry shows the same trends with 3x increase in the last three years. The percentage of labor cost increased from 10% to about 40% for many factories.

Worker Shortage

Along with the sharp increase of salary was the worker shortage. Many factories have orders, and machines, but not enough workers. The worker shortage started to be a hot topic. Meanwhile, it is harder for the workers to find a job. The problem? Pretty simple, the salary issue.

There is no such a thing called worker shortage. If the factory wants to increase the salary by 10x, many developers and office workers will join the factories, but the salary was constrained by the revenue. The actual problem is, the labor cost of yesterday does not attract workers of today, and the labor cost of today is not supported by the orders from overseas.

In this case, there seems only one way – lay off all the workers and shutdown the factories. Thus the problem of worker shortage becomes more troublesome when there is less demand.

Why when the demand goes down, the worker salary still stay up? Because the worker salary is not just determined by demand, there is a hard support – the living cost. With CPI increasing 10% every year, the workers can no longer justify leaving their own hometown (where they don’t need to pay housing, and little on food), and move to big cities, where factories are.

Automatic Assembly Line

I wrote an article about a factories in Zhejiang that was just shutdown. The writer said they had the opportunity to buy automatic assembly line to replace the manually work in 2006, but they missed the opportunity, because the labor cost is so low that to spend money on automatic assembly line does not make sense.

Then 2012 came. When they cannot afford to hire workers, they are also lack of money to buy the automatic assembly line. So they went out of business.

That is the point I am going to talk about in this article.

Massive Shutdown of Labor Intensive Factories May Not Be Completely Bad

Why? Think of the Zhejiang factory story I just mentioned. In a society automatic assembly is not justified because of cheap labor, why people worry about technical innovation? Why use machines to increase the efficiency? Why doing scientific research? Why….?

In the current world, with the biggest challenge to China raises the biggest hope: Technical Innovation!

When hiring people are no longer the by default choice, people have to spend time to automatic stuff and increase efficiency. Having millions of people working in shoe factories does not make sense in the global landscape. It does not justify itself in USA, and now does not justify itself in China.

I would envision a China with a lot of technical innovation. The cost of building machines, and automatic systems are not lowered, but the alternative is much more expensive, just like eco-energy is more useful when oil price keep going up. I would see innovative technical companies emerging in China. People complain about lack of innovation from China for years. Now, we have a much stronger driver and reason to do so, besides weak criticism on newspapers.

I do see the hope out of the disaster.

 

Have You Been to Shanghai? Think Twice!

Posted on by
2

I have been in Shanghai for 17 years (I cannot believe it), but I suddenly realized that I haven’t really been to Shanghai. A visit to the Bund and Nanjing Road shocked me. I haven’t ever been there! Never!

Suffered (or enjoyed) from my jet lag pattern from the States, I waked up early in a very comfortable way (not tired, and not sleepy, and just waked up) at 4:00 AM. After writing some blog post, I packed my bag and grabbed a taxi and threw myself to the beginning of the Bund.

Maybe because of the nice weather/blue sky, which is rare, and definitely because I came here earlier in the morning (too early, at 5:00 AM), and I saw the city in a completely different perspective.

Shanghai without PEOPLE!

The key characteristic of Shanghai is people! It is crowded, noisy, and sometimes chaotic, but not so in the early morning, especially in summer when it gets sunshine very early. Just FYI, the sun raised at 5:06 AM today.

When the taxi runs on the roads in Pudong, flying across the Nanpu bridge, and dived into the alleys of Puxi, there are nice buildings, many trees, but there was no PEOPLE! That created a magic view of the city, and reminds of the days in Silicon Valley (well, it was just yesterday). Imagine, if you put the density of people in the China Town of San Francisco into silicon valley, it would be completely different.

Shanghai that is CLEARER

One of the problems to have a lot of people is being dirty, especially in a city that throwing garbage along the way and spitting are national sports. In the morning, the streets are newly swiped, and the street cleaning cars just passed the alleys and streets. It is much beautiful to have blue sky and no garbage on the road.

Shanghai that is a GYM

There are at least three stages of morning in Shanghai. The first stage is empty stage with literally no one on the street. Before business people and office workers and tourists rush into the city, there is a unique stage: the exercise stage, when older people play all kinds of sports activities in the street, even on the famous Nanjing East Road.

Here are some of the photos I took randomly on the street. Below: dancing.

Below: Taichi.

Below: Fan dancing.

Below: Chi Gong.

Shanghai as a SMALL TOWN

Shanghai is a big city, but in the morning, Shanghai seems to be a small neighborhood. Look this photo and tell me where it is. It is the busiest part of Nanjing East Road, the world famous shopping street. There are phenix trees and there are wide pedestrian, and it is just nice.

Finally, I wrapped my short trip of about 2 hours from the Bund to the People’s Square. The Tomorrow Square (JW Marriott) is the stop sign for the trip. I updated the photos in a Starbucks – free WIFI, and re-think about the image of Shanghai.

Maybe, this is the impression for many tourist, because they get up early, and that is very different from my daily perspective. No one, even the person who lives here for their whole life, can claim that they really know a city. So always challenge ourselves, to see more and in a more different way.

 

 

Startups should be in Bad Areas – SOMA

Posted on by
2

I had some quick discussion with Matt during a meeting.

I realized that SOMA (South of Market) has been the new hot place for startups. There are many of the well-know startups there: Wired, Twitter, Dropbox, Justin.tv, BT, Yelp, Zynga, Rapleaf. Previously, Six Apart, and Rojo were there.

Recently, the government is putting a lot of effort there to turn it into a better place.

I said: Startup should always live in bad areas. Because by definition, startups should run very cheaply. Where is the cheapest place to rent? Bad areas.

Matt mentioned that bad in San Francisco area means a peson pointing a gun to your head when you leave office at night. I said: Yes. That is exactly bad area – some area that is so unattractive to others so startups come. If the area becomes too good that even established companies want to move in, it is no longer the place for startups.

The M50 is exactly the same story. The 50 Moganshan Road was traditionally an art district in Shanghai. The artist poor enough to even survive in Shanghai found the bad warehouses attractive so they can work on their art and sleep there. That is very cheap. I spent about 1500 RMB to rent the whole warehouse to hold my Personal Photograph Exhibition there. Now? Impossible. It has became the hotest site for visitors, and expensive bars are rushing in and pushing artist away.

Startups are really a different type of animal and that explains why most government sponsored tech park does not work.

Different View on New Technology Adoption

Posted on by
Reply

In Silicon Valley, obviously there are a lot different views on technology. Although generally they are on the same direction, the minor difference are huge enough. I had conversation with three different people, and their view comes from aggressive, neutral and conservative. Here is the story (without revealing the name, while sorry for not giving the credit).

New Technology! Always! As Fast As You Can!

I visited a startup, and they are not officially launching their product yet. They are using the latest technology. Here are some:

  • Meteor.com
  • Underscore.js
  • Backbone.js
  • MongoDB
  • Node.js
  • Python & Ruby
  • …

Although some of them are not that new, they claim PHP is dead many years ago, and don’t tell interviewer that you are using PHP. MySQL is dead…

They claim that most silicon valley startsup are not afraid of leveraging the latest technology. And they even doing their best to keep up with the latest builds of the technology. They update the servers every several days to patch it and upgrade it to the latest version, with the risk of something broken. If it does, fix it. They found out that consistent integration is easier to do than holding for a long time.

With the new technology, every is fast. Most of the frameworks claim to do what people are doing at fraction of the time. They does!

Technology is the Layer in the Stack that does not Matter That Mach

I had another conversation with a technical CEO who just sold out his company at great valuation. He mentioned that 5-10 years ago, the core of a technical startup is technology. There is a clear line about what can be done, and what can’t. For example, the variety of drivers of Microsoft Windows system, and the file system Google built. They have to build their own servers, their own storage, and their own almost everything to handle the challenges of the huge volume of traffic and data. The 5 mil-second counts.

Currently, however, shift to a new model. The technology on Internet has developed that storage, and coding is not the hard part. Technology is more hybrided with art. Just as Apple demonstrated, a lot of new startup CEOs are not technical background but can control the messaging, the vision, the valuation proposition so well. Instagram and Foursquare are those type of company.

Technical company is so strong in technical and they can build everything so fast, and they don’t need to think that carefully before what to built. The not-so-technical company has the constrain that they have to think more carefully and decide what to give their users. This value is higher in the value stack than technical value, just like the lightness of an electronic bulb is not that important to the massive audience as the Addison time.

Be Careful of Engineers who uses New Technology

Another senior technology guy suggested this. He said that most of the startups failed because of leveraging new technology to quickly, the most recent example being Digg, by jumping into Cassandra too quickly to kill the company.

He claimed that every framework is promising to look at surface, but it needs a lot time to validate the feasibility. There are HIVE, and PIG camp before, and Facebook and Yahoo! were at the back. Now, PIG is gone, and a whole batch of companies, and engineers were left there with a lot of codes that does not work.

Their philosophy is to choose a technology that is at least used by a bigger company for at least one year to adapt to it. There is a consistent technology framework in the company that everyone use, and not many. Any new technology adapted at production server needs to be reviewed by himself.

Me?

I believe it is completely another Horse Crossing River problem. The three point of view are all valid. They are just the pro and con of new technologies. I would say, the companies in China needs more mentality in the first bucket, not the third at the current stage. After technology is over-used, we need to remind us for the third one.

 

How Many Times I Visited the Bay Area

Posted on by
Reply

I am asking myself the question:

How many times I visited the bay area?

I asked because I was asked, many times.

The first clue come from the United Airlines frequent flyer program. Although I don’t always fly United, it is a good place to get started. Then the blog posting is another very powerful way to trace back. Finally, combined with the US customer stamps on my passport, I basically have some idea.

The short answer is, 16 times in the silicon valley, plus few other trips to Seattle, Chicago, and New York. That is a lot in the last few years.

Nov 11, 2002

Dec 06, 2004

Apr 18 2005

Dec 05, 2005

Jun 05, 2006

Nov 09 2006

Dec 03 2006

Sept 06 2007

Sep 13, 2008

Jul 02, 2009

Feb 20, 2010

Jul 05, 2010

Oct 13, 2010

  • Timber Cove, Sonoma October 20, 2010
    Why I barely wrote anything during this trip? It is because it is a very simple trip just to attend one meeting (YLF). From airport to meeting to airport type of trip.

Feb 08, 2011

Jun 25, 2011

Sep 27, 2011

Jan 13, 2012

Jul 14, 2012

Wrapping up My Trip to Silicon Valley

Posted on by
1

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.

 

Silicon Valley is the Florence in Action

Posted on by
1

I was born too late – 450 years late, and I don’t know what it looks like in Florence at Renaissance. I heard at that time, in every coffee shop, and in every room, there are people talking about painting, sculpture, music, etc, and there are some greatest artist, like Michael-angel, emerging in those days in Florence.

But I am born at the right time, and be able to visit Silicon Valley often. I would dare to claim that Silicon Valley is the Florence of today. Look around. You see every coffee shop, University Cafe, Coupa Cafe, or anyone, you name it, there are conversation about startups, technology, and funding of the ideas. In the thousands of office buildings in the area, in every single room, and before every whiteboard, there are people dreaming, talking, writing, and sharing, and building something. There are some of the greatest companies like Apple, Google, Facebook of all ages, and there are some greatest entrepreneurs emerging in this area, one after the other. The technology, especially in software, and Internet, was advanced in amazing speed, and that impact the whole world. Think about it. It is just amazing.
Imagine after 450 years. I am sure Silicon Valley will change, and the center will move to other places. Silicon Valley will become another Florence of today – there are still buildings, and churches, and some of the drawings or sculptures, but the people are all gone. People are naot passionate about art, and the only people who are related with art are either the museum keepers who don’t draw at all, or some street vendors who draw portrait of tourists, and the drawing is no better than those in Zhouzhuang. Thinking about 450 years later, we will understand how we appreciate the current activities going on in the valley.
I am born 450 late to miss Florence, but I am born at the right time to witness Silicon Valley.

CEO’s Responsibility Framework

Posted on by
Reply

I meat with a great CEO in his office. Very impressive. He summarized the duty of a CEO and that is very true. The framework is strategy, priority, and people.

Strategy is where to go, and how to get there. It has to be very clear. To get rid of ambiguity is the key. People may or may not agree with the strategy, and we can talk, but at any given moment, and you ask people: “What is the most important thing for the company”, and they should all tell you growth, and if you ask “how you make money”, and the answer should be the same – not now, but these are the options. He believes in meritocratic, not democratic. Being in the company does not entitle everyone to be weighted the same. You have to work hard to gain that credit.
Priority: Are we working on the right thing? Clearly define what is more important. There are limited resources, and you have to balance.
People: Has everyone reached his/her fully potential. To remove barrier to that potential is the job of CEO. “You look tired, and you need to take a vacation”. That type of personnel questions.

The Art of Elimination of Decisions

Posted on by
Reply

I had great time with AG yesterday (I let not to disclose the name before checking) at Red Rock in Mountain View. It was such an inspiring talk. Among them, there is a story about decision making.

He said once, a successful entrepreneur Ben told him about how he made a decision. At that time, he was running a company and are going to raise another round of financing. They turned out to raise 40 million USD at 160 million valuation. Actually, based on the 5 people team, they would have only need to raise 5 million. Why so much!? The answer was quite wise and insightful:
<blockquote>I know psychology. I know down the road, there is a possibility that Google or others may give me an offer to acquire the company for 50 million USD. I would come to a point to make a decision whether to sell it and get 25M USD and do whatever I want to do, or keep doing what I am doing. I know it will be a hard decision, and I believe it is possible to sell when the check is on the table. To say “build it no matter how big the temptation is” is easy, but I know I won’t be able to resist. So my solution is to get rid of the possibility to make that decision. With 40M raise, there is no way to sell it at 50M.</blockquote>
That is the founding principle. Many times, it is easy to say something that sounds correct, but when the decision is there, it is hard to balance. But to make sure there is no such a chance to make the decision is one clever way to enforce basic value system.
In the US constitution, there are some strong worded principles. They cannot foresee the future, but they already eliminate the decision whether black and the white should be equal or not. That is another example to get rid of the gray area at the very beginning.
I went to sleep at 2:30 AM last night, and wake up at 6:00 AM. “Eliminate the decision making point” was the first sentence come to me. I want to wake up but I know myself than anyone else, and I know if I defer the decision to 5 minutes later, my decision will be sleep for another one hour. So I used what I learnt. I get off bed immediately, and had a bath. After that, the decision to wake up or not after 5 minutes is gone. Well. That is the reason I am so sleepy now.
What is your way to eliminate the future decision?

Will Bay Area Become Firenze

Posted on by
Reply

I am in the silicon valley. There is no big monuments, no churches, and not even something big enough to see. The whole valley is about interaction between people. When that fade out, Silicon Valley may be another Firenze (Florence, Italy). I visited Firenze few weeks ago, and realized that the city where everyone is painting, sculpturing, and talking is gone. I went there 450 years late. Will Silicon Valley become another Firenze after 400 years, with just the buildings, and the legendary stories of the information revolution?