Writing at 2018 Forbes 30 Under 30 China Listing
To be selected at 2018 Forbes 30 Under 30 China List, is a lucky thing. I have been enjoying the journey with my partners at SpringRole and my teams at Meitu GPIG. I would love to share my special thanks to those friends and my sense of missions where I might want to go with for the next stage.
Original post: http://www.forbeschina.com/review/list/002451.shtml
Acknowledgement
I co-founded SpringRole, a AI and referral based recruiting platform. That was before my graduation from CMU in 2014, together with 3 colleagues. In 2015, we experienced series A fundraising failure, conflicts in product idea and then trust issues. I decided to quit as a safe play so that I could get a H1 visa sponsored by more established company and stay in US. My partner, Kartik, an Indian 90’s, laid off most teams and took the project from Santa Monica to Bangalore to continue. He controlled the cost and survived by providing recruiting and software outsourcing service. Until mid of 2017, he found the opportunity in blockchain domain and pivoted the project into professional profile attestation. I was invited back to SpringRole as a strategic advisor in late 2017. In 2018, we succeeded in a new round (over 2M USD), and Kartik continues leading the business to success.
It is an extremely challenging but fun journey at Meitu GPIG. A global product line, AirBrush was strategically abandoned by the company in late 2016 before IPO. I with few early partners of mine in US secretly got it back in 2017 April due to the believe in its brand, product quality, potentials in organic growth. Starting from 2017 Aug, we officially took over AirBrush and BeautyPlus Me (another innovative product in India). Since then, we started rebuilding the team into a standalone startup driven team with talents from Shenzhen, US, Brazil, India, Mexico and Russia. In 2018 H1, we organically doubled the MAU compared to when we took over. In July, we launched the subscription model as the first team at the company and kicked off the subscription strategy. In September, we achieved profitability. Considering the frequent changes in company leadership, this team has gone through much and fortunately overcame them all. This journey is about how the team believes and keeps building and keeps growing itself.
SpringRole, Inc. and Meitu GPIG are my only experiences after graduation. It is great luck and great honor to see them growing on. I appreciate every GPIGer in contributing to the products and business. I specially appreciate Kartik and his perseverance when facing the difficulties of building a business. That character inspires me all time. End of day, standing at the frontline of either external or internal startup, we are facing these authentic challenges. Nothing more difficulties than these. Nothing worse than the mistakes that we made. I wish to enjoy every minute in making things happen.
Sense of Missions
Talking about the sense of missions, what I want to build is a team that can survive, a team with honor, a business with honor. I regard honor is the key to the everlasting competence for any teams or enterprises. This is how I define Honor in 4 dimensions:
Respect business, respect money
We shall not sacrifice our characters, dignities and values pursuing a fake name by building a fake business where we can’t make money. We always have to seriously figure out a the sustainable model and make some good money. We need money to shoulder personal responsibilities as father, mother, lover or other roles in the society. A person with honor shall balance his all kinds of roles in society. A business with honor shall balance all kinds of benefits of its own, stakeholders and employees. A business with profitability is the greatest honor.
Don’t cheat on users
If we cheat on users, users will cheat on us. Eventually we are making products or delivering services to users. Profitability is because of its quality and needs. Sacrificing quality or play tricks on users will only give a short-term success or even none. The old saying “Water can carry a boat. Water can also overturn the boat.” is about this. A team and business with honor always follow user first.
Having the contract spirit within team and within industry
The contract spirit is some character many teams ignore or lose for long time. The spirit is about pursuing freedom, equality and trustworthy. A team having the contract spirit is transparent, trusted, accountable and deliverable. Which are the keys to success. We follow agreements among teammates. We follow contracts with industry parters and collaborators. A team with honor, I would say us, should be the team by default with the stronger professionalism in delivering the contract spirit.
To build a decent brand and reputation is the only everlasting competence
The industry is changing every minute, and it is a naturally impossible to always catch the right innovation and make the right decision. Therefore, a more sustainable and everlasting way is to build a team with decent brand and reputation. So that users, partners, investors and teammates will trust and give it more time to evolve to the next stage. On the other side, any members leaving team will have the positive leverage from its brand which is also an important part of enterprises’ responsibilities for its employees.
