Being Bold Together: From Pleasanton to Liberty State Park
The Currency of Effort, and a Koffeemocha Moment with Roger
After publishing A Quiet Pause in Pleasanton, I’ve found myself thinking more deeply about what community really means.
Not in the vague, idealistic sense — but in the practical, everyday sense.
The kind that makes room for young people with bold ideas, where resources are not just grants or investors, but relationships. Where a startup doesn’t just get funded, it gets nurtured — by mentors, by peers, by people who care enough to listen, and smart enough to challenge.
We’re living in a time that celebrates creativity and ingenuity.
We’re building wealth — not just in the financial sense, but in the emotional and intellectual space that allows us to thrive. And yes, there’s nothing wrong with promoting what you’ve created. But the key is this:
True promotion is rooted in demonstration.
When you demonstrate your effort:
You’re not just selling a product — you’re revealing the care and curiosity that shaped it.
You’re not chasing attention — you’re earning respect.
You’re not demanding support — you’re attracting alignment.
In the context of community and innovation, demonstration becomes the bridge between vision and trust.
People don’t support you just because you have a good idea —
They support you because they see what you’ve already risked, built, tested, and iterated. They believe in your direction because they’ve seen your discipline.
So yes, promotion is necessary. But when it’s anchored in lived effort, it becomes more than marketing — it can become momentum.
When we show others the effort behind our work — when we lead by example rather than by pitch — we offer something far more valuable than a product…
We offer proof of purpose.
One such moment arrived surprisingly, during the Tongji Foundation’s 25th anniversary BBQ at Liberty State Park. It was one of those golden-hour afternoons: old classmates, new voices, grilled skewers, skyline views, and the soft hum of stories reconnecting across years.
There, I met Roger — an entrepreneur building an aviation scheduling software platform designed to manage operations automatically and in real time. That may sound niche, but in aviation, that’s like giving oxygen to a fire that never sleeps.
Roger didn’t just build a product. He built a response to chaos. He talked about the gaps in traditional scheduling tools — the ones that fail when a storm hits, or a crew member times out, or a client changes their mind at the last minute.
His answer?
An intuitive interface plus a smarter decision engine. One that understands indeterministic queries — the real-world, human-sounding questions that enterprise systems usually fail to parse well:
“Can we still make this flight tomorrow with proper crew rest?”
“Which tail number has the range, clearance, and availability for San Jose?”
With OpenAI API, Roger turned these questions into actions — live, contextual, and human-friendly. He told me how his system doesn’t just generate schedules, it advises. It interprets. It helps schedulers make better decisions — faster.
In a world flooded with pitch decks and AI buzzwords, Roger’s story felt refreshingly real. It was effort over ego. It was solution over slogan.
That conversation reminded me of why I created koffeemocha in the first place. It’s not just about writing or reflecting.
It’s about recognizing the blend of imagination and intention in everyday people, and holding up a mirror to that effort.
Because this is what community really looks like:
Not just having ideas. Not just networking…
But building something meaningful and inviting others to join the process through effective execution.
So if Pleasanton was my quiet pause, Liberty State Park was a quiet ignition.
I walked away that day with more than a memory — I walked away with clarity.
Clarity that the most powerful thing we can share isn’t just our product or our story.
It’s our ongoing effort — the visible commitment to helping others by showing how we help ourselves, thoughtfully and boldly.
And when we build a community around that spirit, we don’t just move forward —
We lift others with us.
That’s being bold together.
Kefei/Koffee in NYC