Dinner with Peter and friends
December 11th, 2008, Posted in Dinners by Sandra
NOC Office, at Mountain View, California. 7pm, Tuesday 9 Dec 08.
The bus ride from Stanford University to the NOC office seemed to be a pretty long ride. Since morning, we had visited Nanogram and attended “The Mother of all Demos”. Going to meet Peter for dinner with his friends after an exhausting day was probably the last thing on our minds then. Dinner was simple and appetizing; we had pizzas delivered from Papa Jones to fill our stomachs before sitting in for the dialogue session between the 23 of us and Peter’s friends who are currently at the Valley. Among the respected guests who are Peter’s friends, we had Angela, Yassi, Laleh to share some of their life long journey experiences with us. Surprisingly, it was a really engaging session because I had expected some mundane monotone information about their start-up experiences. Chatting up with them during the break was really comfortable for me because they were extremely easy-going and approachable, and really forth-coming with whatever they could share with us.
Each and every one of them, though different, had achieved to inspire and motivate most of the iLeaders. It’s comforting and reassuring to know though, that no matter how successful one is, he or she was nonetheless like one of us right now. Like Laleh described in 6 words, “Future is not what I think”. Things might happen unexpectedly. Opportunities might just fall onto our laps, and things will just happen in a snap. To put it in her words, we just have to “be ready to jump and get exposed”. Despite changing courses a few times in her life, with the aim of seeking the specific area that she knew she would really want to do for the rest of her life, Laleh shared with us her life journey of how multi-faceted and multidisciplinary she was. This multi-aspect empowered her with knowledge and focus on what she really wanted to do, which was a marketing consultancy firm that she had started-up recently and allowed her to work with people from the various fields of her specialisation. From her life story, we saw passion, belief, courage, determination and vision that culminated in a promising individual, or entrepreneur, without any regrets. Of course, then again, we have to bear in mind of the subjective definition of “success” here.
Yassi, on the other hand, felt that being culturally exposed was a huge advantage because it gave her deeper perspectives of 2 worlds. I guess this sentiment is widely shared among the 23 of us. She also reassured us that it’s perfectly okay when life is not straight because that’s how people learn and pick themselves up, only to get stronger from the bruises. She led us to think of relationships, not transactions with people whom we meet. This was further reiterated by Angela who strongly believes in the magic of connections, of how people can be connected together which is extremely important in corporate structure (for early stage start-up, at least). Angela also stressed on personal marketing which was important in connecting people as personal marketing was a self-brand that linked the individual to the people around. It was pleasant on my part to hear from Angela being so passionate about successful female entrepreneurs and opportunities, just like what Laleh had also mentioned earlier on too. During our group discussion earlier, we discussed these topics and though it was a delicate relationship between opportunities and grabbing “it” hard, we ultimately felt that it was important to control our lives, and maximally utilize the knowledge we have learnt, be it in school, experiences or through dialogue exchanges.
Though the dialogue session did not last long as it was getting late, we were delighted that we were able to share such experiences which we knew were hard to come by without this session with Peter.
