Hello World
Hello world! It feels so refreshing to resurface after 20 months in stealth mode!
In 2020, a few colleagues/friends and I were tired of complaining and whining and finally decided to assemble a gang to do something by ourselves. "This is my last chance to do something great in my life; I could feel my youth gradually leaving me, so I am going to gamble on this." Several members of the gang shared this opinion, and I was one of them. The high tech circle is small and a startup can be fragile, so to avoid unwanted attention, we said farewell to old colleagues and disappeared one by one.
We had a group, but we had not decided what to do. We filtered out a short list of possible projects but were not certain enough to put the prosperity of the whole team on any one of them. There were different opinions, debate, and even squabbles. Some people left, and some people joined. Those were the most difficult days until finally, the moment came.
It was a summer afternoon in a sunny place. I was on the very last day of my "graduation trip," which I earned after 8 years of service in a single company. I was driving along the historic silk road in the desert, on the modern paved highway, of course. The sun was bright, the desert was bright, and the sky was more bright than blue. It was so bright that it felt like travelling in the void. And the road was so straight that you generally didn’t need to move the steering wheel. There could not be a better time and place to think about the future while driving carelessly in the void. It was more like a sudden enlightenment than a careful logical analysis. "Forget about Plan A, B and C; forget about all those market analyses. 3D printing was the move; the technology is difficult, and marketing could be easy. It was easy for us, a group of geeks, to sell things to other geeks, since we happened to know them, deeply." A meeting was held right after I arrived at our den, and surprisingly, everybody agreed on our destination.
Then, we rented an office in a moderate building, recruited a crew of old comrades, raised seed funding, and built a miserable prototype V1. Then things began to move faster with the less miserable V2, V3, and V4 rolling out, and it went on until V7.
We have always believed that the world is a dangerous place, and geeks are naive, so a startup of geeks could be very fragile. With this in mind, we kept our profile low and stayed in stealth mode. There were no road shows, no PR, even no name plate in front of the office until we finished the validation of V7, the last iteration before mass production. Finally, we released our product and can resurface after 22 months of hard work on this secret project.
Hello world; it feels so good to be back in the sunlight.
2022.05