A Different Kind Of Angel
a friend invited me to a dinner the other night for Shanghai's angel investor community.
i know some of you may find this hard to believe, but i feel intimidated by networking events where i don't know anyone. and in this case, even more intimidated that i was in a room with a bunch of smarty pants China investors.
i spent the first half hour before dinner standing by a wall of the restaurant being that nerd in the room on the iphone not talking to anyone.
but you can only do that so long until it starts to look really rude.
so i struck up a conversation with a guy named Steven who was the president and partner of a private equity firm in China. nice guy who probably figured out i wasn't an angel investor so we had a good chat about more macro stuff that does interest me ...mainly the growing trend of Chinese capital investing overseas and all that fun stuff I usually like learning more about these days.
anyways, he ended up sitting across from me at dinner so conversation turned to small talk about where he went to school.
Boston he said.
no really? me too. I went to BU i said. and asked him which school he went to. I was guessing Harvard.
Harvard he said.
oh cool. my sister went there. what year were you.
I went to Harvard for my MBA from '97 - '99.
Wow. then I bet you knew my sister Susie.
...then I told him my sister's full name. And sure enough. A pause and complete change of expression and demeanor once the mutual connection set in ...followed by a bit of sadness because he knew and I knew that she had died some years back.
Turns out he not only knew my sister from Harvard days. He had worked with her at Boston Consulting Group a few years before that. He even met my parents in the mid-90s when they were running a clothing company in Shanghai and my sister and him were researching the garment industry in China. So needless to say, he remembered her as a friend.
That's good to know. He gave me his card and I'm definitely going to take him up on the offer to grab a coffee next time i'm in Shanghai.
I never got a chance to really spend much time getting to know my own sister in the 10 years before her suicide. So in the past year this makes 2 people already that i've randomly met who knew her well during those years I didn't. I'm not a religious person in the institutionalized sense of the word, but I'd like to think these opportunities aren't totally random either.
Just wanted to share.
