Lots of fun and interesting things happened over the past days, but I didn’t find the time yet to write blog posts about it. Because I likely won’t have much time over the next days either I decided to just put some pictures with short descriptions online. A picture says more than a thousand words, right?

Elaine had her 1st birthday last Friday and we had a nice dinner (Beijing Duck) at home for her birthday. Because my wife and I both had to work we decided to postpone the real celebrations to Saturday. This is Elaine with Grace on Friday night.

Saturday morning I had to get up very early because we were invited for a tour around the US pavilion with Hillary Clinton. To make a long story short, we could hardly see Clinton and we certainly had no meet and greet with her. The next day, however, Hillary made it up to us by allowing some of our Geeks on a Plane group to meet with her in her hotel.

Even though the Hillary Clinton visit was a bit different than expected, I still had a good time talking to among others VCs Mark Suster and Alexander Lloyd and recruiter Jeff Hu. Here we are in the VIP area of the US pavilion to take some pictures with the flags of the US & China.

After the US pavilion visit I rushed home for Elaine’s one year birthday brunch at the Marriott in Hongqiao. She especially loved the ice cream!

At home Elaine got to wear her beautiful birthday dress. She is quickly turning from a baby into a pretty toddler girl!

Elaine’s 1-year birthday cake, an ice cream cake.

Elaine doing her 1-year pick (zhua zhou), to find out what kind of things she will do in later life.

On Sunday night I had dinner with the Geeks on a Plane at The Waterhouse. A nice boutique hotel and excellent restaurant right on the Huangpu River, next to the Cool Docks. In the picture organizers Dave McClure and Christine Lu.

Monday night was the Startup2Startup dinner at Shanghai Tang cafe with (again) the Geeks on a Plane. Met tons of people and had a great evening – and an excellent dinner. I was supposed to be on the FastPitch panel where start-ups would pitch to investors, but too bad this part of the event got canceled because of time constraints. In the picture Mark Suster giving a keynote to the audience during dinner.

And today, Tuesday, I gave a speech at the Dutch Expo Pavilion for the Dutch Gaming Days. The title of the talk was Parallel Universes, differences between the game industry in China and Holland. I talked about this based on my experiences of setting up Spil Games Asia over the past years. The audience was a mix of Chinese game developers and game companies and some Western companies looking to do business in China, and I got some interesting leads for Spil Games. My colleagues Leo Liu and Richard Yu (see picture below at the Dutch Expo Pavilion) also joined the presentations.

And in between all these pictures? Mainly work I am afraid, so not interesting enough to take or post photos.