Chris Sun

I’m headed to Beijing in 2 days!!!  This is my first vacation in more than a year.  And this is most exciting vacation for me in a long time.  I’m eager to lots sports events, great venues, and the cities of Beijing and Shanghai.

I haven’t updated this blog for a while.  And I noticed it got totally messed up.  The editor for creating new posts inserts some weird tags from time to time.  And this totally screws up the rendering of the page.  Really its ridiculous.  Frankly, I hate this editor.  I need to find a better one that allows me to type raw HTML.  My photos pages are also screwed up.  Bummer.

At the 2008 Startup School, one of the speakers shared the quote below.  Often referred to as the “Man in the Arena”, the quote was given by Theodore Roosevelt in 1910.  It’s a great reminder that trying [and failing] is always better than just observing.

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”

I’m learning Mandarin (simplified) right now.  And to help immerse myself with the language, I’ve seen three good Chinese movies recently.

• Together (He Ni Zai Yi Qi)
• Shower (Xizao)
• The King of Masks (Bian Lian)

Since Facebook launched its application platform almost a year ago, there have been over 20,000 applications created. Among the biggest winners from this platform are these two guys. RockYou, Slide, SGN, Zynga, and Watercooler are other companies whose business is based off social applications. I think the market for social apps is big enough for all of them to do well.

I attended Startup School 2008 at Stanford last Saturday.  The thing I’ll most remember is David Heinemeier Hansson’s talk.  It was hilarious, but more importantly his advice made sense to me.  When starting a company, you don’t have to shoot for the moon.  VCs are always dreaming about grandiose companies like Google or Cisco, but the chances of creating such companies are miniscule.
DHH talked about creating a smaller company that can still make millions.  His company, 37 Signals, uses the “Software as a Service” business model and is highly profitable.  If  you can provide a useful service, people will be willing to pay money for it.  And paying for a product/service has been a time tested business model.  Trying to get millions of users and generating revenue through advertising is much more difficult.