Came across of these paragraphs when reading IMDB's (International Movie Database www.imdb.com) corporate history (you may know why I research them during office time). It took them 8 years to grew up and be acquired by Amazon in 1998, without funding from any VCs. It is impressive how they balanced professionalism, dream and commercial interests during the past 18 years, and it is the very attitude that makes me feel complex, and have to share it with the visitors who can be patient enough to finish reading the following words:

(From http://www.imdb.com/help/show_leaf?history)

......

Rather than go to a bunch of venture capitalists for millions and open up a big, glossy office in Silicon Valley, the shareholders of the Internet Movie Database were the people who helped create it and the database would have to survive on its income from advertising, licensing, and partnership deals. The team continued to work from their homes, with most continuing to hold their "day jobs" while working on the IMDb evenings and weekends, and a couple taking on full-time responsibility for the day to day management and operations.

......

In 1998, the database usage and the amount of data being submitted continued to grow. In 1997, the amount of data submitted that year alone was 100 times bigger than the first implementation of the database in October 1990, nearly a two-fold increase from 1995. Though income from advertising, licensing, and partnerships were able to keep the database afloat, it was still just scraping by without enough resources to add the staff it desperately needed to help lessen the burden on its overworked shareholders who saw so little income from their efforts, they might as well have still been volunteers.

Over time, they had been courted by bigger companies wanting to purchase the IMDb, but each time they shied away for fear that the companies would cannibalize it for the current data, put a price on it, and make it impossible for the IMDb to continue to fulfill its mission of serving the internet community without charging its visitors.

Then along came Jeff Bezos.

In Jeff Bezos, the people at the IMDb saw a kindred spirit, someone who understood the internet and its community, not just its potential as a marketplace, and thus when Jeff's people at amazon.com contacted them, they were willing to listen. What they heard was amazing, essentially "we want you to keep doing what you're doing."

Of course, amazon.com wasn't coming in as a white knight, throwing money at the IMDb in an altruistic gesture. Amazon had a plan to expand into selling video tapes and DVD's, and they saw the IMDb as a resource. There was an amazing amount of raw data in our files, great expertise and talent in our staff/shareholders, and millions of potential customers in our visitor traffic. A deal was struck for the IMDb to be purchased and become an amazon.com company, finally giving the people who had worked so hard on the database a real return on all the time they had invested.

A significant core of the IMDb's shareholders stayed on after the purchase. Now that the IMDb had the financial ability to pay salaries, a few of them who had been giving evenings and weekends to the project left their day jobs and came to work on the project full-time. Others who kept their Mon-Fri jobs were put on the payroll as part-timers. More staff was hired, though at a slow pace, bringing on additional people to assist with managing the data and free up some of the staff with strong programming skills to spend more time on site improvements.

10月4日在成都的婚礼，伴娘、新娘、新郎和伴郎在鲜花拱门下合影。

倪欢JJ终于找到幸福的归宿，新郎是剑桥的博士，传说中的清华自动化系20年才能出一个的天才级人物。祝福他们！

在二郎山山道上远眺贡嘎雪山

 新都桥草原

新都桥草原

秋天的树

牦牛在吃草
 

不知名的山谷

木雅金塔的庙门
 

塔公草原，山坡上的彩旗艺术

藏寨的窗户

丹巴的甲居藏寨全景，中国十大最美乡村之一

甲居藏寨

借宿的民居门口