Olina Qian

Monday noon, I was eat lunching with Eghosa, a seasoned venture capitalist in the valley in a Japanese Restaurant called Sendai. He asked me, do you have time tonight? You might want to attend an event I co-organized with French Embassy. Lots of VCs and Entrepreneurs will show up there. I replied: Why not. So he sent me the link, I registered for it.

It is an event happens in Sand Hill, Menlo Park, the hub of the VC firms. The session starts on 5:00pm, and I arrived around 6:00pm. Upon the registration, I feel that a gentleman’s face seems familiar to me. He looks like Loic Le Meur, the CEO of Seesmic, who is a top guy in the technology industry. But I am not sure if it is him. So I went inside of the room.

There are four panelists there doing QAs. And Eghosa is one of them. Hehe, he didn’t tell me that. Beti Cung, Buz Development Manager of Microsoft and Austin Noronha, the general manager of Sony electronics are there too. They are discussing about some topics on how the business works in Sillion valley and what do they think regards to get funded and scale up the business.

The whole session is lots of fun. And when I read the flyer, I find out Loic was the speaker from 5:30pm to 6:00pm. So it is Loic. What a pleasant surprise! I stepped outside, find him, use my broken french introduced myself. Since We have a common friend, Yu-kai Chou, so the conversation went pretty  smooth. He told me he will have an interview on Skype tomorrow with Viralogy and I later realized that it might be the awesome viralogy interview hosted by Jun Loazya. I also invited him to join the Live Umbrella event we are going to cosponsoring in Aug. He seems a very friendly guy.

I later had a great conversation with Beti. Since I am actively seeking for mentors recently. I want to see how those successful women get there and I wish I can copy the path. And she is so kind enough to tell me that I can call her anytime to ask any questions. Such a generous lady. I like her!

Egosha introduced Mike from Guidewiregroup to me too. He is the one who sponsored those French Entrepreneurs to the valley. Mike is also working on measuring the performance of Startup on yearly basis, in order to find out a pattern. I am very interested in this topic. Since I was told there are only one out of ten startups can survive in the first five years. And 70% of them will run out of business for the 2nd five years too. I wonder if we can find a pattern, then it will help lots of startup to win.

I also talked to lots of interesting people there, and I find myself enlightened by the following individuals:

Ravit from Ustrategy. Ravit is a charming lady, I really like her style. So I went to talk to and and find out she is the founder and chief Stategist of Ustrategy LLC. Another role model for me. I decide learn Business strategies from her.

Peter from Howley management. Peter is a serial entrepreneur with unprecedented experience in building high growth disruptive service companies in Telecom Sector. He is also Chairman of The Howley Management Group he works closely with Entrepreneurs, CEO’s and Boards to turn great ideas in to great businesses. I might need to get some tips from him on how to monetize in Social media marketing later on.

Pierre Bureau from Arimaz.com, Arimaz SA is specialized in entertainment robotics and interactive toy applications. They develop and market communicating mobile Robots. I should connect Pierre to my friend Mike Tung, who is co-founder of diffbot and his passion is to create a different robort to help human being take care of lots of things too.

This event is great! Everyone has lots of story to tell. So I stayed almost at the end. And I feel I learned a lot from the conversation with those wisdom people. Eghosa, thanks for referring such a great event to me.