Olina Qian

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I was invited to Hysta’s Mixer event today in Stanford. Met lots of great Entrepreneurs and VCs there. Yang Cao is one of them. After I got home, we GTalked a little bit. During our conversation, he mentioned about his company, tokbox, which is funded by Sequoia and Bain. I am amazed that he can got funded by such two great VCs. He told me that he will definitely bootstrap long eough for his next company. Since sometimes too much money is not good thing, he said.

Too much money is a not a good thing? I’ve been bootstratpping for a while, so I didn’t get it at very beginning. So he explained me further: stay hungry is not a bad thing.

I always see money as water help you to cross the desert for a startup. Water is not your destination, cause money won’t buy your happiness. But enough water will keep you alive and help you stay tuned in the desert. Just like we need to survive before strive. But today, he told me, Stay Hungry!

I did a little background search for TokBox today. TokBox offers a great product that allows for multi-user video chat from the browser(their competitors are Skype, Seesmic, Yugma, ooVoo, Userplane, Zorap), but it hasn’t really managed to take off, much to the chagrin of the company’s investors who include Sequoia and Bain Capital (TokBox has raised $14 million to date). That’s a lot of money for a video and chat startup, especially when there are a number of similar sites that have begun offering some of the same functionality.(From TechCrunch)

After TokBox raised money, there are lots of major changes going on. It recently got a new CEO–the third in the company’s brief history. And it just fired six of it’s 12 engineers, or around 30% of it’s 12 engineers. All of the company’s founders are all gone now. No wonder Yang said, too many money is not a good thing.

After our talk I kept on thinking about ‘Stay Hungry’ the whole night. I can’t sleep again. Later I recall a great video I watched before by Steve Jobs. The title is: Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish. In this video, Steve told us three stories about his life:

1. How he connected dots in his life. How he dropped his colleged to learn things he like. How he followed his passion to build up Apple Empire and change the PC history — You have to trust your destination to follow your heart and make the difference.

2. How he viewed what he love and how he handle his lost by starting over a new business after being fired by Apple. He said, don’t lose your faith! Do what you belive and Do what you like. Keep looking, don’t settle.

3. How he lives everyday as if the last day of his life. Live only what is truely important. Death is the destination we all share, it will clear out the old to become new. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it to live some others life. So do what you truely want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Very inspiration! Ok, maybe Yang is right, let’s live like Steve said: Stay hungry, stay foolish!