TAS Founder Yiqun Wu: from Alibaba Music to Top-5 Public Blockchain
By Trust Among Strangers on ALTCOIN MAGAZINE
In Wu Yiqun’s office, there is a huge white board, which clearly lays out the plan and actions for the month. To this start-up company, which was just established last-year, every minute counts.
Over 60% of the team are former “Aliren”, that naturally explains their passion for their current undertakings — to make it to the top 5 among all public blockchains.
Even more eye-catching than the white board is the slogan above — “winter is coming”. Since the very first episode of Games of Thrones, summer has lasted 9 years, and everyone is scared of the coming of winter, and quite a coincidence, it has been exactly 9 years since the generation of the “genesis block” of Bitcoin in Jan. 3rd, 2009.
From the underground popularity among geeks to the entry of large institutes, from the very first ICO to the capital craze, Wu believe a winter is destined to fall, which would last two years to rule out the counterfeits and restore the order of the industry.
It is not Wu’s first time to start up a business. Learning from his experience in making Xiami Music, one of the largest music streaming service in China which was later acquired by Alibaba, Wu knows clearly the cruel the competition is, so he told his team to stay sharp.
In the Blockchain space, he knows exactly what he’s going for — dApps and digital copyrights. But he is wise enough to know that before all ambitions, his team must survive.
From 2007 to 2013, Xiami had its hard times. At first, it was the six of them in it, until the one who was in charge of the user client left them, making it a story of five — which was known by many Chinese music enthusiasts. After that, came the most unforgettable period for Wu.
Dealing with both the user client and the server client, Wu was exhausted. But backing down wasn’t an option for him, “I’m the CTO of Xiami, if I back down, everything is done.” Every night, he got drunk, feeling nowhere to go, but the next day, he would wake up to the sun and head for a residential building somewhere in Hangzhou, coding for their business ambition.
Financing was an even greater challenge. The deck was revised over and over again, until the investors felt satisfied, only to be stood up again and again. In such cases, he would always console his colleagues that all they needed was wait — to wait till the investors showed up and ask for five minutes for their BP.
So, when Xiami was eventually acquired by Alibaba, he felt bittersweet — back then, Xiami was out of cash, so being acquired by Alibaba at least meant the story of Xiami could go on, but to Wu, he felt there was something left unfinished.
Xiami had its very beginning on the 8th floor of Alibaba Venture Building, and in the end, they ended up in Alibaba once again.
With Xiami being acquired by Alibaba, the whole Xiami team became “Aliren” or Alibaba employees — but to Wu, it was already his third “visit” to the Ali Empire.
Wu started his career in ArcSoft, the global leader in imaging intelligence technology. It was during that period that he received the invitation from Ali for the first time. At first, he was reluctant, for Ali was not a leading tech company back then. It was the sincerity of Ali that made him say yes, “they sent one of the 18 founding members for me, quite sincere”.
For this time, he stayed two years, from 2002 to 2004.
Wu believes he is an emotional person. After leaving ArcSoft for Alibaba for 2 years, he went back to ArcSoft — an emotional decision as he put it. To help out an old acquaintance.
Time flied to Aug. 11, 2005, Wu received a phone call, “come back, I’m calling from the scene of our conference”. On the other side was Wu Jiong, CTO of Alibaba, and he was at the news conference when Yahoo’s 1 billion investment in Alibaba was announced. With the hustle and bustle of the conference in the phone, he agreed.
As is known to all, the second time Wu left Alibaba was for Xiami. According to the plan, Wu had a conversation with Jack Ma before he left, who was away on business that day, so the conversation actually happened between Wu and Lucy Peng, “according to our principle, you can only leave and come back once, so I don’t want you to leave. But in case you want to come back someday, you’re still welcomed”.
After the acquisition of Xiami, Wu first worked in the music BU, then transferred to the security department as the Chief Big-data Architect and lead of machine-learning product.
Leaving for the third time is inevitable, as he put it. There is a gap too huge between being a professional manager and an entrepreneur. On Mar. 2017, Wu left the Ali Empire once again, though in a month he will be granted another 1-million-worth of stocks.
He knew too well that after this 1 million, there will be other shackles in the form of “double”, “promotion” to hold him down. He put it quite frankly, “I no longer fall for such things…I’m no longer young, and all I want is to do something I love once more, with all my energy and motivation”.
In the dilemma between a professional and an entrepreneur, Wu chose the latter.
His first attempt was Artificial Intelligence — it was his original field of research interest. But the thing was, with no real datasets, it would be impossible to dig into the AI world.
At this time, the 09/04 regulation had provoked wide spread discussion of blockchain, it was at this time that blockchain technology came into the sight of Wu. He spent a week reading the codes of Bitcoin and Ethereum, and found what he called “the genius design of the next era unveiled”. Soon as he finished reading the codes, he started out building a team consisting of his fellow colleagues back in his Xiami/Ali days.
He decided to race in the track of “public blockchain”.
Wu had a clear vision for the future: to make to the top 5. He admitted that compared with competitors who started out much earlier, the late comers had to make way more efforts to catch up, and to him, he would focus on two aspects: truly innovative technology, and truly useful dApps.
As regards technological innovation, he chose a path that no domestic competitors dared to take — VRF. In the global stage, projects such as Algorand, Dfinity and Ada were all following the direction of VRF, however, nobody dared to do so back then in China, until Wu did. The fact is, Wu not only incorporated VRF into the project, but also managed to guarantee 100% true random number.
While VRF is technologically advanced, it is more a concept to the general public, “everyone believes their project is rooted in real-world application, so do we…but the implementation of dApps will make the real difference.
For this purpose, Wu has made efforts in both aspects: on the one hand, the smart contract of TASchain was built with the needs of different industries in mind; on the other hand, funds and technical support will be used as incentives to facilitate the implementation of dApps.
By then, the opportunity for him to catch up will reveal.
There was first XiaCoin, then Xiami Music.
Back then in the Chinese environment, the protection of music intellectual property was in a primitive vacuum. However, these music enthusiasts were determined to construct a well-designed incentive system for digital contents.
For this dream, they worked 7/24 with definitely no precedents to follow. They had come up with so many drafts just to scrap them and start all over again, until about 4 months later, they filed their application for the patent Digital Product Selling and Sharing Method Based on Point-To Point Document Exchange System (CN1889119A) — which was also known as XiaCoin.
As a matter of fact, XiaCoin was a year ahead of Bitcoin, in its world, there’s no “miner”, but if the users went “online”, they would be given a 0.1 XiaCoin per day as a reward.
When reflecting on it during the days of Copyright Race, when the P2P incentive mechanism of Xiami was fading day by day, Wu remarked, “(it was) a martyr way ahead of its time”. As a virtual currency, XiaCoin was a pioneer and visionary in the world of digital copyright, however, its decline was just inevitable given the general environment.
He was convinced that XiaCoin, which was 80% similar to the model of token economy today, was actually defeated by “time”.
Wu frequently refers to his identity as the founder of Xiami, that might explain for his keenness on the implementation of blockchain technology in digital copyrights.
Currently, many artists own their own studio and the copyrights are no longer monopolized by recording labels. By incorporating the blockchain technology, the distribution and consumption of music contents can be approached in a totally different manner.
He admitted that the idea of cutting into the digital copyright market was sort of making up for the regret from his old days.
Apart from digital copyrights, Wu is also found of mobile games. Just like digital copyrights, it is also a purely online scenario.
Although there aren’t many practical cases of how blockchain can change people life, Wu believes, “in that very day of its breakthrough, everyone will realized how many people have laid foundation for what it has become”.
Back to the reality, Wu is not found of playing with words or bragging about unrealistic concepts. When asked about his opinion on those projects that claimed to have achieved millions of TPS, he joked, “if so, it would not only be the no.1 project on earth, but the no.1 project of the whole universe.”
As for cooperation, he’s not in a hurry. He has dedicated this year to perfect technical infrastructure, and he’s not concerned about the number of applications, rather, he cares about applications that are truly rooted in real-world implementation.
Winter is coming, but Wu will not panic, he knows clearly the first priority is to survive. He has a full-fledged plan for his team. The future is not only about technology, but about globalization and the operations of technology, community and ecology as well.
Wu is not fight alone. Talents from leading Internet companies and veterans of public affairs are joining him in building a bright future. To these people of financial independence, it is the meaning of their undertaking that matters.
To fight again for things he loves, Wu is all-in to realize his ambition of crafting a top-5 public blockchain of the world.
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