5 years since my last blog post, what if I have kept blogging, it would be a great treasure for me to discover my mind in that period. There are some significant changes inside me, and an obvious one is that my writing skill has died.

We have shut down Shou, completely, and it’s the first time I do this kind of thing. It’s almost the same time that I stopped blogging when we founded our company for the live streaming platform, in mid 2014. Then we tried our best to optimize our technology, infrastructure and grow the community. I have believed that something would pay back our efforts, until we finally shut down the platform in late 2017.

Before the complete shutdown, I don’t understand why companies like Google always abandon so many projects now and then. Why not leave the project running by itself? The code is good enough to operate for years without any modification, the cost is not so big, especially for a company like Google, and the users would appreciate you because they really love the product.

You must focus. I always believe in this rule indeed. However I was still afraid to stop our project, to face the accusations of the active users, to lose millions of dollars from our investors and to accept that I have failed something. When you know something is true and afraid to do that, overcome it and it’s when you grow. Actually it was almost the luckiest thing I have done in 2017, I had the opportunity to start our new project.

Do the things you love. Mixin is almost the first project I have all my passion in it, I’m not saying that I don’t like those previous ones, but an encrypted and convenient messenger has been my pursuit since I was in campus. More than 10 years past, I haven’t seen any communicating apps fulfill my standards, and I have been told and made believe that it is an impossible job to make a messaging app, it belongs to monopolies.

Now we have worked on Mixin for almost two years, I have never felt better than this period. Although I’m still being accused by users from closing last project, and we only have a much smaller user base than before, but I’m much more confident in our future than ever. We innovate on messaging technologies and user experiences, we have loyal and active users, and we know exactly what to step on next.

All my early projects were about images and videos, I have studied knowledge on pixels, codecs and graphics. Now I’m mastering distributed ledgers. I’m an engineer, and I love programming, It’s of course exciting to work on new technologies. However my most important growth is that I have overcome my fear and done the right things that I have always been believing in.