Core Team Up Close and Personal — Zan Wu
Dear Atlas Community,
During the last couple of weeks, a lot of our community members have reached out to the CM team in order to learn more about our Core Team and Atlas. This gave birth to the idea of an “insider” series of articles, to be posted on our Medium and showing you the personal side of our Core Team members. We hope you will enjoy this series and that it will knit our community closer together! Of course, what better place to start the series than at the top office — our CEO Zan Wu..
People would like to know about the real Zan, what can you tell us about yourself?
I was born in China and grew up there till I was 14. I was fortunate enough to receive a government scholarship and attend high school in Singapore when I was 15. It was my first time outside of China. And at that time, very few people had the chance to go overseas.
After graduation from Raffles Junior College in Singapore, I took two gap years and went back to China. During those two years, I was a MTV VJ in China and also started a food-delivery start-up on the side.
After that, I went to university of Warwick in UK and also won a scholarship to study at Tokyo University in Japan for a year. I graduated with a first class honor in Economics and Finance.
After graduation, I joined Morgan Stanley as an investment banker based in Hong Kong. After 6 years with Morgan Stanley in HK, Singapore and Shanghai, I quit my job and started Zanadu.
In the past 6 years, we have built Zanadu into a successful company and China’s leading luxury travel platform, with the backing of Tencent, Matrix and Prometheus Capital. Now, in the wake of blockchain and token-economics revolution, we saw unseen potential to change the status quo in travel industry and unleash significant value for consumers and merchants in a highly centralized and platform-dominated industry
An impressive resume indeed, but what about your free time, any hobbies?
I like music and I would save up all my scholarship money to buy CD at HMV when I was in high school — which also lead to my gap year stint at MTV.
I like traveling which lead me on a path to Zanadu and now Atlas. I also like maths and was good with numbers growing up and love dreaming up entrepreneurial ideas to change the world.
So, studying at the University of Warwick and University of Tokyo, the parallel study in two cultures must have been a real experience for you?
I have never been to Europe before I enrolled to Warwick and I have never been to Japan before I got a scholarship to do a one year exchange at Tokyo University. Both were fascinating experiences. I have always been intrigued by Japanese culture, and interestingly — in some way, Japan has preserved the old Chinese culture better than ourselves. Chinese culture including the language, philosophy and architecture design were brought to Japan during the Tang dynasty. As the country has never been occupied or ruled by foreign forces, Chinese culture is well preserved and assimilated into current Japanese culture.
My experience of studying and living in different cultures also led me to a path of promoting travel and cultural exchange. In Zanadu, our motto is “ Life is a journey” and I truly believe travel is the only thing you spent money on that makes you richer.
After college, you worked at Morgan Stanley for six years — what was that like?
Fresh out of college, I joined Morgan Stanley as an analyst in investment banking in Hong Kong. First year was hell. You don’t know anything and there is a steep learning curve and you are always out of your comfort zone. The hours are long and there were a couple of times I had to work through 2–3 days without sleep.
But it is also character building and you have a sort of crash course on business, presentation and accounting skills, which are very useful. You meet great, smart and energetic people — many peers with whom I still remain close today.
Now we’re getting to the interesting part — you decided to leave them and start Zanadu. That’s quite a leap, from finance to web/travel — how did that come to fruition?
Eventually the learning curve flattens out and you start to hear your inner calling to build something of your own.
It is a leap into the unknown and leaving a very comfortable and financially-secured career path.
But I crave the excitement of new adventure in life — I know I am a dreamer who wants to build something on my own and I have to follow my heart.
What were your goals when starting Zanadu?
Zanadu is the result of combining my interests in travel and internet with an entrepreneurial zest. The overall business theme is that we believe the rise of Chinese consumers will produce a market of travelers that seek quality and premium travel experience.
China is already the most important outbound travel market and will eventually become the biggest market for luxury travel. Zanadu aims to become a leader in this emerging segment and the brand that stands for quality.
You feel very confident about achieving that goal — is there an accomplishment you’re particularly proud of?
We are proud that we are the market-leader in Chinese luxury travel today. We’ve had over 1.5M users subscribe to our services and we are also the most awarded luxury travel company in China.
We are the preferred partner with many top hotels in the world, including Peninsula, Shangri-la, Aman, Rosewood, Hyatt, W, Starwood Luxury Collection, Leading Hotels of the world and etc. We are also the exclusive luxury travel service provider for American Express in China.
We are thrilled that we are sending Chinese consumers to premium holiday experiences that they have not been before.
We live in a fast-paced world and people often look to information providers, such as Zanadu and Atlas, and trust their recommendations/choices. How do you see your responsibilities towards those people?
There is a lot of information out there today but it is not easy to effectively access it. When it comes to travel content, there has not been one place that can provide comprehensive and personalized recommendations. There are many good sources of travel articles and blogs but they are not aggregated together in one place that is easy to access.
Instagram has many travel-related posts but it is not geared towards that purpose, which makes it hard to use it as a travel recommendation app. Tripadvisor lacks high-quality in-depth content and reviews and the ranking of recommendation are highly biased towards vendors who pay them fees. It also fails to provide personalisation in its content/recommendations.
And all the internet-based UGC platforms today don’t adequately compensate users who contributes quality content.
There is a need to create a non-profit-maximizing platform that compensates contributors according to the value of the content contributed to the community, and provides unbiased and personalized recommendation not influenced by the advertising revenue. Atlas is developed with such intent.
By connecting all the venues and vendors to Atlas, we build a decentralized, friction-less network of content, transactions and user data that re-distributes value back to creators of content, data and goods and services.
With Zanadu being so successful, why did you decide to branch out and build Atlas?
Firstly, blockchain is a versatile technology that can be widely applied to many use cases. Within the travel industry, different projects may try to solve different problems and the market is big enough for many players.
Atlas is not just a DAPP. We are building both the protocol that underlines the ecosystem and the first DAPP on it. We want to tackle the roots of the problem, bringing the content, transactions and user data all under one platform which I believe essential in building the ecosystem.
If you could envision Atlas in 5 years’ time, what does it look like?
We want to be the blockchain alternative to the current dominant travel platform such as Booking holding, Expedia and Tripadvisor. Depending on the speed of adoption of both blockchain and crypto, we have the potential to rival them in size.
This last one is a bit stereotypical, but what book would you take to a desert island (or a luxury resort) and why?
I am big fan of non-fiction books, especially of biography and autobiography of legends. Their life stories are illuminating and surely make you realize that life is a journey and it is about how you write your own story. Recently, have been reading Robert Kuok (the founding patriarch of Kerry Group and Shangri-la), Principles of Life and Work by Ray Dalio and a book about Wang Yangming (ancient Chinese philosopher).
We hope you’ve enjoyed the first entry in our “Up Close and Personal” series with the Atlas Network Core Team. If there are questions you’d like to ask our team members, drop by our Telegram channel and let us know!
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