When He Xiaoman came to Silicon Valley, there was only more than four hundred US dollars left in his bank card.
Others come here to join big factories, wait for offers, negotiate financing, and write code. Instead, she opened a two-dollar coffee shop on a side street in Mountain View. The store is small, the tables and chairs are second-hand, the coffee machine seems to be going out of action at any time, and she painted the sign herself.
On the first day of opening, she stood at the door and shouted: "Two dollars! Two dollars! The new store is opening, and a cup only costs two dollars!"
She thought she was selling coffee.
It was only later that I discovered that the people who walked into the store were not buying coffee.
Engineers from major factories who were laid off revised their resumes here. Qin Wen, a doctor in AI entrepreneurship, came in with a robot that could talk. Gu Nanzhi, a female doctor in architecture, transformed a small shop into a place where you can sit. Internet celebrity friend Sumina learned for the first time not to cut other people's difficulties into traffic. Sofia, a Hispanic barista, learned programming while frothing milk. Mateo, a Mexican high school student, wanted to make a small program to help his mother understand English documents.
Everyone in Silicon Valley wants to prove they are worth something.
But in He Xiaoman's small shop, failure does not need to be packaged, and embarrassment does not need to be explained. The people who sit down are the people first and then the data, the projects, and the stories.
Qin Wen once believed that algorithms could understand the world.
He Xiaoman told him: "No matter how smart the machine is, it must first know where people are in difficulty."
Purpose: In a foreign land and a high-pressure environment, a person's value should not only be determined by academic qualifications, work, income, identity and success labels. The work wants to express that failure is not shameful, and the plight of ordinary people deserves to be seen seriously. Real growth is not to become a more expensive person, but to maintain dignity, goodwill and choice under the pressure of reality.