With 21-Year-Old Ceo, Achieve Small Goals
This blog post was translated by Mistral
I’m a 3-month-old photo taken at Y Combinator in Silicon Valley. The room was filled with people starting businesses, most of them in their 20s from various parts of the world. The feeling I got was that the cream of the crop of my generation were already on the entrepreneurial path. If I didn’t join in, I would be left behind. So, once again, I set sail.
I received 218 praises, thank you very much for each friend’s support.
How did I get here step by step? What motivated the 21-year-old me to disregard everything and determinedly make things happen?
Experience
My experience. Simple, I started coding in junior high school and joined algorithm competitions. In college at Beijing Forest University, I wrote multiple Android applications, one of which had 3,500 users in the school, named “North Forest Assistant.” After developing it for several months, I created “iword.” I interned at LeanCloud during my college summer vacation and then dropped out to work there for one and a half years. From the beginning as a novice to later performing well among colleagues at Google, Alibaba, and ByteDance, I developed both the Android and iOS versions of “LeanChat” for the company, wrote numerous demos, and developed the iOS SDK, which earned me a salary of 15k. In November 2015, I, along with Leifeng and other partners, established “Reviewcode.cn.” We organized exchange meetings and training classes, generating revenue of 150,000. In the team, I was responsible for backend development, half of the frontend development, and half of the training, pushing the product forward and ensuring things were implemented. In March, I went to Silicon Valley to learn and visited Google, Y Combinator, and had a good opportunity to work there, but I gave it up. Later, when I returned to the country in June, the team’s direction faced issues and we discontinued. I joined the second entrepreneurial team led by my ex-boss Lei Laoban and CTO Yang Junge of Juju Me, and often worked with them until late at night. During this period, I often chatted with them in my free time. Both my bosses were 30-something successful and influential figures, teaching me a lot. However, I was too impulsive… I’m sorry for disappointing my bosses’ expectations, but I created another startup myself… I, at the age of 21, was about to enter my fourth year of college, giving up a 25k salary, and started a business again. In fact, those who had worked with me would have a better understanding of me, and the introduction was just superficial. I could find jobs in the range of 20k-30k for positions in iOS, Android, backend, and frontend. Some startups also invited me to be the technical director.
However, I am still a novice. Please don’t laugh at me, masters. Although I have more acquaintances, I still have self-awareness about where I am.
Why start a business?
Initially, I didn’t have the courage to start a business, and starting a business was a complicated thing. Where does the money come from? Where do you find people? What do you do? Etc. Even registering a company was a headache. After experiencing many things and seeing many people and events, I naturally gained courage and confidence.
During the summer vacation after graduating from college, I did two things: 1) I learned Lisp 2) I read “Hackers & Painters” multiple times. At that time, I hadn’t achieved anything notable in algorithm competitions, and my college entrance exam results weren’t good. On one hand, I was being bullied by international gold medalists like Chen Liujie. On the other hand, I was bullying the thousands and tens of thousands of high school students. I was really ordinary, and the “arrogant” me was even more ordinary…. As a child, I thought I would become an extraordinary person when I grew up, but reality was, you gradually realize how ordinary you are. The pressure was immense, so I wanted to do something to change things. First day in Beijing, went to CSDN’s Chinese Software Developers Conference and talked to Cloud Wind, the main host of “Da Da Ji Xian,” he didn’t mention anyone he exchanged code with back then, just enjoyed it himself. I ran into Dennis, LeanCloud’s tech leader, who was speaking about Lisp. I sneaked up to the front row and chatted with him, curious about what software he used to write code. Later, I emailed Dennis and ended up interning and working at LeanCloud for a year and a half. I learned from my colleagues and bosses, including my boss, Jiang Hong, a Yale PhD, who had worked at Google for three years before returning to China to start Meizhi Shuqian and then LeanCloud. Dennis, as the tech leader, not only bore the technical responsibility but also handled daily technical management work. I was always curious about how they maintained high productivity. Other colleagues were also very professional. I’m grateful for the wonderful experience at LeanCloud.
LeanCloud spent half a year in Microsoft’s incubator, so I met some friends and bosses from neighboring companies, such as Wang Rui from Gongfu Xiong and LX, and many people from Quantitative Team. They were previously in charge of Baidu Video products and came out to start their own businesses. Some came back from Wall Street and Google. Some companies were all composed of people from Tsinghua University.
During the days at Microsoft’s incubator, I actually met a lot of people, including Matt Scott, CTO of CodeLon, who was a senior development manager at Microsoft and had authored many papers at top-tier conferences, on Suzhou Street at 2 am, he told me, kid, be patient and cultivate your core skills to do world-class work, it’s not just curiosity, but also the desire to change the world, to imagine that one day, your work will have a big impact on the world. I met some impressive peers later, like JZP. He approached LeanCloud to experience the startup atmosphere, emailed me. JZP won the first-place award in the national information contest in junior high school. Now, he spends university holidays interning at Microsoft and Google. He reads browser engines, MongoDB source code, and researches deep learning in his spare time. He occasionally participates in ACM competitions to relax. I found that they were always researching difficult problems, so I thought difficult problems were nothing to them. They were curious about the principles of things and passionate about their interests, delving deeply into them.
Later, Yi Long came to the company. His Weibo account “iOS programmer Yuan Yidong” had over 20,000 followers, mostly iOS engineers. I introduced him to the company business, and he helped promote my open-source projects, attracting more people to pay attention. Fame is a good thing, even though engineers should quietly write code and cultivate themselves, but with fame, their work will attract more people to focus on and provide suggestions. The company was the same way, requiring not only good products but also good market promotion.
In November, I met Leaf City, another big V in the iOS circle. We had dinner together and came up with a startup idea, which we discussed enthusiastically. I had wanted to start a business in my heart, and this opportunity ignited my entrepreneurial journey. After three months of development, the product “Reviewcode.cn” was launched in mid-February, attracting about 8,000 PVs per day by the end of February. However, I found that this idea did not have strong demand, and our offline capabilities were weak. I then organized exchange meetings, training classes, and tried organizing offline activities and experimenting with offline things. Later, I spent my days teaching programming to students and gave lectures on Douyu in the evenings. I felt that offline things could be done, but there were more chores and experimentation than I had imagined.
In March, I went to Silicon Valley. With the help of my big brother XH, I had breakfast at Google and visited around. I met his colleagues and roommates, who were graduate students from Peking University and Tsinghua University, and had come to work at Google. They rented a large villa and commuted to work by car. On weekends, they went to optimistic places and played in New York. I saw another way of life. I visited the Computer History Museum and saw various achievements of our predecessors, from abacus to personal computers.
At Stanford, I met some impressive people. There were classmates who studied biology here, American-born students from Stanford’s Computer Science Department, and a brother who graduated from Cambridge with a Ph.D. in Chemistry.
Next, I went to Y Combinator and met many young entrepreneurs. I met a Chinese team called “Mailtime,” whose English name is “Simple Mail.” The founder, HH, is a serial entrepreneur who previously started [something]. Talkbox, the pioneer of voice chat functionality, his father couldn’t type while talking, so he thought about sending voice messages for chatting. The Mailtime team members are all impressive, co-founder Hockey graduated from Clemson and Caltech, both from Ivy League schools, worked at Twitter for two years; Evan, graduated from Tsinghua and Carnegie Mellon; Sister YX and Frank are also impressive graduates from the University of Hong Kong. They talked about going to a party at the Gmail founder’s house and how luxurious it was.
I also got to see many things, the Airbnb host knew Steve Jobs since the Apple IPO in 1984. He mentioned that high tech requires a lot of energy, something young people do. Suddenly, I felt that Steve Jobs was so close.
I also went to watch an NBA game, played at the beach, Golden Gate Bridge, Union Square, San Francisco City Hall, and various other places. The world is big, speaking English every day is interesting. The feeling of exploring the world and meeting various kinds of people, not knowing what you’ll encounter each day, is wonderful. For example, chatting with a girl on the stage and the sunset, she was a director, showing me beautiful natural landscapes in her photographs. She, the sunset, and endless snow were all beautiful. Business was successful, and there was fun everywhere. I couldn’t believe life could be this brilliant.
In June, the team faced some issues and I had to find a job. I met the vice president of Jumei, Mr. Ye, who was building the live broadcast and shopping platform “Papaya King” at the time. Mr. Ye’s life was impressive, graduating from Beijing University, creating a business one year after graduation, and launching the cosmetics e-commerce website “Fenpi Er” in September 1999. They competed fiercely with JD.com for half a year, and in April 2011, they merged with Jumei, with Mr. Ye becoming the supply chain vice president. He left Jumei in 2014 to become an angel investor for a year. Mr. Ye was amazing, almost the life I wanted! CTO YangJun was also an impressive person, having been the CTO of Jumei before and having sold a company before. So I agreed to join them! In the past month at Papapang’s, I often chatted with the boss during free time, joining him for meals and walking with him in the hallway at night. We talked about how they started the business, how they secured brand partnerships, and how they operated. He said, even if users don’t like it, ask them why. Don’t be afraid to push others, learn to push. Keep trying if it doesn’t work the first time, try again and again. Don’t just sit back, ask questions, and have thick skin to ask. The boss is a hardworking person, often still waiting for interviewees at 2 or 3 am. He works tirelessly every day from Saturday to Friday. Besides sleep time, we hardly have any leisure time. We all willingly accept this. This is what makes him great - he found this group of determined people and made us work together.
A week later, he asked me if I liked it here. I said I did, fully invested in my work, no matter what we would do in the future, it would be better for us. He agreed, the harder we work now, the better the future will be. I couldn’t help but think, this is a great employee.
The boss served as an example of a CEO for me. Amigo gave me a CTO example. In the first two weeks, I often worked with Amigo until late at night. Amigo, a former CTO of Jumuka, was also a wealthy person, and yet he was still so determined. As a weakling, I had no reason not to work hard. Later, when Amigo got sick, I went back earlier. We walked down the artistic Wanjiang SOHO, waiting for Amigo’s Uber car to come, continuing to chat with him. He told me many stories about Jumuka, how it used to crash during the rush hours, taking two years to solve, and then retiring after the solution. He built the Jumuka Chengdu R&D team of several hundred people. From the weekend mountain climbing activities, he met some determined IT colleagues, inviting them to Jumuka, and they performed well. During work, Cheng O watched him write code and fix bugs.
However, after a month of work, I couldn’t suppress my desire to build a company from scratch. I talked to the boss, and he said, “It seems you’re too focused on superficial things, getting anxious when you hear about people who are powerful or impressive. I had a blind belief in myself when I started, believing I could definitely succeed. Look at those who have reached the pinnacle, they all have strong inner strength.”
This sentence lingered in my mind, fearing I would forget, and I wrote it down in my notebook. Amigo finally told me, “The world is cruel, like Cheng O and the boss, those who have reached the pinnacle have suffered and experienced hardships, which you can’t even imagine.” In my mind, I have been deeply immersed in thought for a long time. I must get on the road and at the same time prepare myself for bitter experiences. Understanding the background of the boss, I believe I have a chance to do the same. Although the road will be filled with potholes and tears, I am willing to go out and use my best years to do the hardest things, write a beautiful life story.
Friends, are you willing to join me on this journey?
The past month has been very busy and fulfilling. I have registered the company, filed tax reports, opened a bank account, developed the backend, developed the frontend, and created design drawings. My other partner is responsible for developing the iOS App and has almost finished. I have been eager to quickly release the first version, but I have not found the right people, but by gathering excellent people, the company can run faster. So, we are looking for a design partner, a technical partner (backend or Android), an operational partner, and a general partner (excellent is sufficient). The shares of the partner can be between 10% and 30%. This is not my company, but a company of young people with a common vision and fighting spirit!
We will do things by considering the networks I have accumulated over the years and using all resources to create the most valuable (earning money) opportunities. It is a new direction discovered through insights into the cloud computing industry, the e-commerce industry, and the IT education industry. I am willing to spend my precious youth to make this happen.: My WeChat is lzwjava. If we’re friends, please message me directly. If we haven’t met yet, you can add me on WeChat and send me your resume. I’m glad to meet you, and I’m even happier to have the opportunity to build dreams with you! If you’d like to be friends, you can also add me on WeChat. By the way, I need help and ask for your assistance. Thank you.
Life is short, and before we know it, our parents have lived to our age, and we’ve reached thirty or forty. We can work steadily for twenty or thirty years, or we can work ourselves to death for four years to earn a lifetime of living expenses. There are still many beautiful things we haven’t done, such as traveling around the world, making a movie, or exploring nature. We can first earn a lifetime of living expenses and then realize these beautiful dreams or do something bigger to benefit society. The 90s generation is gradually emerging, why not let us be the ones standing on the stage? We’ve always lived in the shadows of others’ children. We can give ourselves a challenging task to overcome a bend in the road! Experimenting is itself an interesting thing, and the fruits of enduring hardships are even sweeter!
The average age of World War II pilots was in their twenties. Come on, let’s create a great company together in our most powerful years!