Last night I attended my first meeting of a new group, the Silicon Valley Chinese Entrepreneurs.  For the first meeting, it gets very high marks and makes me think that this group will end up becoming one of these groups that gets a great deal of focus in Silicon Valley over the years. 

To start with, the event was well-advertised.  I found it on the FountainBlue email list, but I also saw it later at Meetup.com.  Next the meeting was held at Fenwick & West in Mountain View, a very classy place to meet.  Next the speaker for this group was Michael Yang Founder, President & CEO of Become.com, a vertical search web app that focuses on helping on-line buyers find the products that they are looking for.  If you are thinking, “Not another shopping search engine.  What can this guy do differently?” than you don’t recognize Yang’s name.  He co-founded mySimon.com and sold it for $700 million just before the crash.  As Bo Peabody, author of Lucky or Smart would say, better lucky than smart.  (BTW, Lucky or Smart is a great business book written by someone who has been there and realizes that he does not have all of the answers.  Best yet for busy business people, it is less than 70 pages!)

Showing the features of the new Become.com site, the one that interested me most was its ability to sort through clothing results based on colors.  Not just broad colors like red or green, but down to a shade of red using a color wheel.  For you Photoshop and Flash people, we are talking about clicking on R(255) B(20) G(25).  I wanted to ask him some more details about how this was done.  How specific can the colors really be?  What is the variation around the selected color?  How do his retail partners provide him with this color data?  But his talk was filled with way too much good info and there were dozens of questions from the audience. 

What else can you expect when you put a successful serial entrepreneur in a room full of startup and wanna-be startup people?  

The next time that I run into Mr. Yang, I hope to get some of my questions on his site’s operation answered.

Technorati tags: SVCEF, Silicon Valley Chinese Entrepreneur, Become.com, Michael Yang, Bo Peabody, Lucky or Smart  

Tags: Become.com, Bo Peabody, Lucky or Smart, Michael Yang, Silicon Valley Chinese Entrepreneur, SVCEF

This entry was posted on Friday, February 9th, 2007 at 1:18 am and is filed under Business Lessons. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.