There is a Chinese saying, “When three people are travelling together, there must be a teacher for me”. This occurred when the iLEADers and I visited Nick Yang, CEO of 牾空 Monkey King Search on the 11 December 2009. Nick Yang recently started his third venture in mobile search engine, targeted towards the 155 million and growing mobile internet users in China. He shared with us his life experiences and principles in entrepreneurship.

That day, the iLEADers reached its Tsinghua Science Park office at Beijing 中关村 – the heart of the IT industry in the entire China nation. Seated calmly in a conference room, Nick Yang was clothed in a rich yellow and red-striped long-sleeved shirt that resembled the vibrancy and busyness of a bumble bee. Instead of the conventional method using PowerPoint presentation, he played a CNN interview video filmed in 1999 on his first start-up company, Chinaren.com. The video depicted us how he and his 2 other partners with a Masters degree in Electrical Engineering and minimal working experience at the age of 23, rented an old office that was scarcely furnitured, showing how employees slept in the office, working countless hours on their project to build Chinaren.com, which became to be the 4th largest online portal in China. After being inspired at the end of the video, he brought us outside of the balcony of his conference room that overlooked the location of his first company a decade ago.

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During the Q&Ａ session, I initiated a question: Upon his graduation, what were the principles he held before he decide to start up ChinaRen.com? Nick Yang shared that he was a person who reads a lot of Chinese philosophy, particularly Lao Zi and Confucius. He remarked that in the Chinese society, people place a tremendous value on “智” or Intelligence; on the other hand, they play down on “勇” or Courage. This deters people from starting something that they really aspire to do. He also added there are two industries which budding entrepreneurs like us must never enter into:

1. Consultancy

Reason: Fear

Once you receive a comfortable salary and working environment, it would require a great portion of courage to venture out into starting your own business.

2. Investment Banking

Reason: Greed
Nick Yang observed that investment bankers would prefer to remain in their industry because the stakes are extremely high.

He personally started his first company because he wanted to make a difference. Now in his third, the pressure is tremendous but he is willing to take on the challenge because he understands the tremendous impact it will have towards the millions of people in China.

Through the numerous questions, he provided many insights through his years of experience. Such insights include the need to know your strengths, which is your “superpower”. Be flexible and adjust your goals, as well as love criticisms – that reveals gaps for improvement – more than praises. He ended off with the Chinese saying at the beginning of this blog entry, “三人行， 必有我师焉” . This means when people gather, there is always an opportunity to learn from one of them, whether the person is your mentor or friend.

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It is an incredible feat to successfully build up one start-up company, even more so for three companies. This requires timeless principles that would never be shaken in uncontrollable, volatile circumstances. Nick Yang has understood this at a relatively young age. I myself desire to learn and internalise such principles that are fundamental to my future success, whether in business, family, community service or any aspects in life.

Hope you all enjoy reading this. Look forward to greater working opportunities together. =)

Loyalle Chin
13 December 2009

Tags: business, leadership, mobile internet, principles, serial entrepreneur

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 13th, 2009 at 12:22 pm and is filed under Beijing, Organizational Writeups, reflections. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.