Are You LinkedIn

Are you LinkedIn? Yesterday I sent out more than 60 invitations. Till now 20 of them accepted. One interesting thing I noticed, you can tell the personality of a person from how many connections she/he has, especially for those who are topping the list.

Maybe you don't bother to build up your network on LinkedIn as there're already too many social networking sites such as myspace, orkut, facebook and hi5. If the rest is more kind of networking in life, Linked in is close to pure business networking with trusted contacts only.

Oh Vista

The launch of Microsoft's Vista this week is a big event indeed, oh, is a big marketing compain at least! When I came out from resteraunt "Fresh Element" close to the bund of Shanghai, I found characters "Windows Vista" was on Jinmao building by shedding lights on the tallest building in China from bottom up to the top.

As the Vista is cheering up, the Shanghai A share stock index tumbled down more than 5% yestersday.

The Economist

Reading The Economist sometimes is so much fun that makes me fail to hold my giggling and writing this post. In its recent summary of this year's world economic forum, it makes fun of Goldman Sachs' party, Citi's corporate Jet and, above all, the WEF itself by quoting the comments from Martin Wolf of the Financial Times. (The Economist writes: Contrarian of the meeting: Martin Wolf, of the Financial Times, who said at a dinner hosted by Citigroup that whatever the consensus at Davos each year, the opposite ensues. Thus, he predicts, instead of business boom and unstable politics, next year will bring a structural recession and stable, deepening international political relationships. )

Interested readers can read the lone Wolf and the bulls on economist.com

Right Thing to Do

I get more and more convinced that going for a top MBA program is an absolutely right thing to do. The reason is simple: People there are the smartest person from all around the world.

Interacting with smart people is such an amazing thing in life. I learned a lot from my smart friends. They are smart, diversified, creative and passionate. Last friday night, we organized a dinner party with topic of finance & investment in Pasti, an Italian restaurant; this friday night, the topic will be....Start-ups! The venue will be at Hooters, the Amercian restaurant. Ha, business and gourmet are always hand in hand.

Rational or Irrantional

60000 person per day opened stock trading account last week. Even for those people who never buy or sell a single stock are rush to buy funds and stocks. People are discussing whether to sell their house so that they get the money to pour into the stock market. On the one hand, average P/E for the listed companies are higher than 30, one the other hand, stock prices are still climbing up. Is it rational? Or is it Irrantional?

This is mamia. This is China's way of investment, oh, perhaps this is China way of doing many things. If one thing is hot today, there's will be a thousand tomorrow. Previous years, every one was frenzy about the real estate, both the welthy and the poor. Now, the ball is in stock market. All money seems to be diverted to stock market. As we look at all these as a spectator, we could not believe all this would last even a single day. But it goes on, and on, and on so that specatators can not hold themselves and start to act. One day, it will crash. Hopefully China will be lucky enough, like its economy, to have a soft landing before the bubble busts.

Okay. How about myself? I never buy a stock but I may go ahead and buy some. Before doing so, I'm still studying the all the investment strategy and report from UBS, Goldman and CICC. It's recommended to get my feet wet in the pond but I have to make sure that I will not be drowned.

Invest in China

China A share index last year increased more than 100%. The average return of my friends on stock market is 40% . Before the soaring up of the stock market was then mania for real estate. The real estate price tripled in the last four years. Though Chinese government kept issuing tightening regulations such as enforce many kinds of real estate business transaction tax, the real estate price overall is still climbing up at a mild rate with the exception of Shanghai and some other big cities. I don't have much acumen in financial investing. As captial market is gaining much more weight in China's economy, I also need to lay out my personal finance plan instead of just saving the money in the bank.

Closing the Deal

It is my first venture; and today I'm closing the deal by transferring my shares to the managing director of the venture, one of our four original investors.

The venture is a manufacturing company targeting the metal processing demands of multinational companies. I did not glean the expected gains through the venture. Instead, the total assets of the investment depreciated by 33%. It is a big lesson learned.

No.1, Idea is good while the process of turning the idea into action and action into good results is very onerous and painful. It needs courage, edge, determination, skills and passion.

No.2, a right combination of talents of the founders is critical. Our combination has everything but a hands-on technical engineer. We thought about this and we took action to persuade a senior engineer to join us as the engineering manager. Our pay to him was quite decent but the performance of this engeering manager was dispointing.

No.3, personal involvement and tight control of the operation. Only one of four investors personally involved in the daily management of the company. The pace of the development of the company was to some extent contrained by his talents, although the other three will provide consultancy and strategical thoughts.

No.4, Do not be too optimistic and do not be too pessimistic either.

Back to 2006

2007 for me seems to be a replay of year 2006. I didn't make my journey last year to Ross Michigan because of the screwed delay of my Visa. So I re-applied to Ross, the only school I applied this year, and got admitted again in the first Round. For the past few months, by the invitation of chasedream.com, I became a volunteer mentor for their MBA application workshop members and provided suggestions and feedback on their essays. Two of the workshop members were also admitted to Ross 2009 in Round 1. Go Blue!

Auction

Last Saturday afternoon, I attended the annual volunteer new year's party of JA China. There's a lot of fun there and I got the opportunity to reunion with our volunteer team. Our team won the prize of excellent volunteer team as we must travel a long way to the Jiading Campus of Tongji University and we got as many as 14 volunteer consultants while a normal team size was only 5. Robin was awarded as a "star" consultant and TT was awarded as one of the most popular consultants.

Besides all these, another interesting thing was about on site fundraising through auction. A guy bid CNY 2000 to have a dinner with the Chairman of the board of directors of JA China (the First Auction Item); while the bidding price for having "something" (something could be a dinner, a coffee break or whatever that is To-Be-Determined) with the president of JA China (the second auction item), a lady, soared to CNY 6000 after several rounds. After the Chairman thanked the bidder, he promised to give mentor service to the bidder throughout the bidder's career life, and this was for sure more than a dinner. And I now regretted to have not bid a higher price to grab this opportunity. See, this is some rules of real life. 1. Game is there but Game rules might still being developed along the way. 2. Be the first needs courage and usually win big (or lose big).