amazing

It’s funny the way these things go.

Today was an extraordinary day for me here at the WEF meeting in Dalian. I had a 1-1 half hour conversation with Tom Friedman (we talked about a bunch of stuff, including the fact that we’re all transparent humans now in the public eye, and that we need to learn again how to read — incidentally, watch for his next column, as it will be a bit about Dalian), spent an hour talking with Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia), talked with my friends Isaac Mao and Kaiser Kuo, preeminent bloggers in China, kidded around with the founders of probably a dozen incredibly awesome startups, met Rebecca McKinnon (formerly CNN Correspondent for northeast Asia including North Korea), and spent time with my new friend Chris, whose design firm is involved in this and this and especially this, not to mention probably two dozen other extraordinary people I met for the first time. Oh, right, and I had drinks at the reception with a friggin astronaut who’s now trying to save the earth’s water.

So all in, a good day. An amazing range of experiences and an amazing range of people to spend time with. As I mentioned, I feel very lucky.

But here’s the really amazing thing: as blown away as I am by all these folks, every single one of them knows Mozilla and Firefox and is rooting for us. Not everyone uses Firefox, although most do (1 Maxthon user, 1 Safari user, the rest use Firefox). But every single person I talked with thinks that what the Mozilla community has accomplished is incredible, and wants to see us do better and better.

So the funny bit for me is that sometimes you have to go 5,000 miles (literally & figuratively) to really be reminded how amazing the people around you are, and how lucky you are to get to work with them every single day. [This also applies to my family, of course — I can’t wait to get home to see Kathy & Sam.]

Everyone involved in any way with Mozilla should be proud of the impact we’re having on the world — an awful lot of awfully amazing people are noticing & cheering & helping.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 8th, 2007 at 5:47 am and is filed under China, Mozilla, Personal stuff. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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