It is the 16^th of December, 2005 and a long adventurous day has just come to a conclusion, after we ventured out of Shanghai and visited a few very interesting companies, including the SunTech headquarters in the peaceful WuXi district, the company being one of the biggest players in the solar energy industry in the world. The 18,000 square meter building incorporates the world’s largest on-grid photovoltaic facade system, with over 2,552 semi- transparent light through solar panels has an annual power output of over 1 million kilowatt hours of electricity. These astonishing facts still cannot do justice to the elegant architecture of the facility and the tastefully done classy interiors. Apart from Suntech, the agenda included the Social Innovation Park with its avant-garde architecture and location in the mesmerizingly beautiful town of Suzhou. More significantly, it is the largest collaboration project between the governments of Singapore and China. Cradled on the banks of Taihu Lake, the town of Suzhou has an astonishing infra-structure, mingling seamlessly into the surrounding scenery, embodied in the abundant and beautiful trees, lush greenery and the still and serene lake stretching into the horizon. While I will always cherish the day for its aesthetically fulfilling experience, it would be criminal not to mention the succulent and delicious WuXi spare pork ribs that left everybody craving for more.

While my genial batch-mates will cover the details of the visits, the purpose of this particular post is to rewind back to Beijing and recount our get-together with Mr. Tom Wang, co-founder of Nezsoft. Only a selected few of us could interact with him owing to the constraint of table size and I would like to share the unique perspectives he offered into entrepreneurship.

Firstly, I apologise for this little digression to provide a quick recap about Mr. Tom Wang. He has a B.S. in Computer Engineering from the University of Waterloo. Tom’s experience covers a broad range of areas from development tools to IP telephony to client interfaces and web search at IBM and Microsoft. In 2007, as an experienced technical lead, he left Microsoft to found Nezsoft and build a company that could provide rigorous quality in software development. Essentially a consulting firm specializing in web search, Microsoft is one of their main clients. As this business has helped setup a steady flow of revenue, focus is gradually shifting to product development relating to Mozilla Firefox, the details of which we were not privy too (obviously!). Currently, Nezsoft has offices in Seattle and Beijing.

The interesting facet to Tom’s approach to entrepreneurship it is based in the new emerging trend of “hybrid entrepreneurship”. A hybrid entrepreneur is a person who takes advantage of the best of both worlds: A steady pay check with a full-time career and the fulfillment and wealth building that can be achieved through new business ownership. While this rosy definition can hardly mask the deep cracks present in terms of the dedication of time and commitment to either of the roles, one can definitely agree that this approach is conservative and cautious, and is a contrast to the high risk-high reward mindset propagated as the mantra to successful businesses. Of course there are two sides to every coin and the idea here is to present yet another dimension to entrepreneurship. What do you guys think?

As we conquered dish after dish of delicious Beijing cuisine, everybody was drawn into conversation by Tom’s warm-heartedness and friendly open approach. A very interesting insight was the comparison between high-tech and low-tech businesses. Earlier, Mr. Joe Chen, CEO of Oak Pacific Interactive had cast a very ominous shadow on the high-tech market in China advising us to stay away from the sector. His opinion was that traditional businesses receive more reception from the people. This is of course supported in fact too, though the dire message suddenly transformed the difficulties in China, already projected as a difficult mountain to climb into Mt. Everest. This explains why we were talking about this in the first place.

Mr. Tom offered a unique example to showcase two companies, one high-tech and one low-tech achieving the same purpose. He considered the development of a mobile application to help users identify the background and meaning behind traditional Chinese paintings by simply snapping a photograph of the painting. The first way to do this would be write a complex algorithm to identify the parameters of the painting and generate an accurate description. But the problem with this approach is high cost requirement and even higher probability of someone else launching the same product, but the “Chinese product”. Look at Google China and Baidu to conclude what would happen. After all, who, in the eyes of the people aka the market, would know better about Chinese culture, you or the traditional Chinese company? Incidentally, a low-tech approach to this would be to simply hire three professional artists to sit in your office and prepare descriptions of all photographs uploaded from users onto your servers. Once, you consider the low cost labour, it translates to minimal capital investment. Further, you have three traditional Chinese experts analysing the paintings, which would be like melodious music to the ears of the Chinese market. The capital cost can be practically reduced to zero if transform the model into an open forum, where artists are simply rated based on their descriptions, taking their salaries out of the equation also.

I hope you share my enthusiasm in marveling at the simplicity, yet genius of the above example. There were several other very interesting topics of discussion, including strong teams and constant strengthening of the same through smart hiring and the need of extensive networking. But considering the fact that all of us are already dizzy with an overload of information for these topics, I conclude this post here, so that you can reflect on the new ideas brought up through the dialogue with Mr. Tom Wang.

Meanwhile, Shanghai offered a welcome change to the sea of IT in Beijing, in the form of uniquely different companies across industries like fashion, social entrepreneurship and clean technology among others. As we move into the final leagues of our study mission, the enthusiasm is still right up there, coupled with a tantalising aura of anticipation for the Shanghai delights planned over the weekend. You will have to wait for a few more days to gain visibility into these “Shanghai delights”, but if you’re not on-board the Shanghai experience, one clue is in this line itself. And thanks to Juat, Serene and Gladys, Christmas should be double the fun with our motto, “Spread the Joy”. All right ladies and gentlemen, our cruise is about to hit top gear… Let’s go full throttle!!!

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