Sun Zhengyi had studied at the University of California, Berkeley before he returned to Neon to found SoftBank.
Thus, he was not a stranger to Silicon Valley in California; he had spent a few years of his campus life there.
However, merely relying on these connections, Sun Zhengyi was still unable to penetrate Silicon Valley's venture capital circles; he remained an outsider.
Without networking and being Asian, it was very difficult to infiltrate Silicon Valley's dense venture capital network.
But Sun Zhengyi had acquired a Merril technology publisher, as well as control of a leading American computer field organization.
It was only after these shell operations that he was somewhat accepted by the local capital circle.
Right when Microsoft's Windows 95 was about to be released, he visited the Yahoo office, just a few kilometers away from Stanford University.
When they first moved in, David and Yang Zhiyuan had painted the walls, but their office was still in a mess.
