Eight Years of Building

He told me he was twenty-eight years old and that he had been running his own business for about eight years. He began his story from the year 2008, the year that, as he put it, changed everything.

He said that on May 12th of that year, everyone in China knew about the Wenchuan earthquake. That day happened to be his very last day at his alma mater, a second-tier college — Sichuan Normal University. It was supposed to be their graduation ceremony. “You can probably imagine the whole scene,” he said. “Basically all of us ran. We didn’t even know why exactly; we just felt that the building was going to collapse.” But it didn’t collapse. That day became the final moment he and all his classmates ever spent at their school. After that, he never returned.

He said that 2008 was an extremely important year for him personally, because on the larger scale, the Wenchuan earthquake had happened. His hometown was Dujiangyan, and among his close friends and classmates there were some who lost their lives that very day. “That affected me deeply,” he said. “Even though I didn’t experience a building collapsing right in front of me, the shock of it changed me.”

He remembered that for several months afterward, everyone was staying in Chengdu. He himself, at that time, stayed near a Starbucks because it had Wi-Fi. “I set up a tent underneath that Starbucks,” he said. “I slept there for two whole months.” During those two months, he thought about many things — questions about life, about why people work so hard just to earn money. “I was too afraid to go home,” he said, “so I just stayed there and thought.”

He told me that 2008 also marked a major shift in his work. That year he completed his initial accumulation — he made what he called his first bucket of gold. Around that time, he also left Sichuan for the first time. “Two months after the earthquake,” he said, “I took my first flight ever. We went to Wuhan to open a branch company of our own.” In that same year, 2008, he bought his first apartment, and at the end of that year, his first car. “So many things happened in that one year,” he said. “That was also the year I graduated.”

He told me he had entered university in 2004, studying business administration at Sichuan Normal University. His entrance-exam score had actually been quite good; it was above the key-university line. His first choice had been Harbin Institute of Technology, but he missed the mark by two points. His second choice had been China University of Geosciences, which that year admitted only seven students from Sichuan. He wasn’t one of them.

“Because of that,” he said, “I entered a second-tier school as a so-called student of the ‘key-class.’ I was confused about life then.” People around him kept saying, Don’t be discouraged, you still have a chance — you can go to graduate school. “So,” he said, “studying for the graduate-school exam became the central goal of my freshman year.”

That year there were ten thousand students in his grade, and he ranked first. He received his first scholarship — a Ford scholarship of one or two thousand yuan. “That was the first time my name appeared on the red honor board,” he said. “I was listed as the top student in the whole grade.”

At the end of his freshman year, he went to Liangshan Prefecture, because, as a student of a normal university, everyone was expected to spend some time teaching in Yi minority areas. “I taught there for three months,” he said. “Every day I got up at six in the morning, taught until ten at night, and then from eight to ten I tutored city kids as a private teacher, earning five yuan each time.” Those three months, he said, left him with deep feelings.

“When I was teaching in Liangshan,” he told me, “I often shared my own story with the students. I told them that I came from a rural family, that my parents divorced when I was seven, and that during high school I basically lived alone with my grandmother.”

He said that his freshman-year tuition came from his stepfather, because after his mother remarried, the stepfather gave him two thousand yuan. His older sister, behind her husband’s back, gave him another two thousand. “That was my freshman-year tuition,” he said.

He told his students, You must study hard; you’ll have a chance to go to Chengdu for college. But the children would tell him, Brother, we know that, but even one or two hundred yuan in tuition is hard for us to collect.

“I always thought I was poor,” he said. “In Dujiangyan, collecting four thousand yuan for tuition was already very difficult. I never imagined there were people who couldn’t even gather one or two hundred. But that’s how the world is — the divide between rich and poor is just that wide.”

When he returned to Chengdu for his sophomore year, his life changed again. There was a poster on the campus bulletin board. A senior student was recruiting people to help him sell dictionaries. “You could earn fifteen yuan commission per book,” he said. “I already had this entrepreneurial instinct.” He thought, If there’s a fifteen-yuan margin, maybe the profit could be higher. He checked the online campus forum and found that a dictionary cost a little over sixty yuan wholesale and sold for over ninety yuan retail — more than thirty yuan profit.

“I was bold,” he said. “Money meant everything to me back then.” He took two thousand yuan to buy dictionaries. The next day he borrowed a little cordless phone from his girlfriend, since he didn’t own a cellphone, and went to sell dictionaries to the new freshmen at Sichuan Normal University. “That very day,” he said, “I sold two to three hundred copies. Later, within a short time, I sold over a thousand.” Very quickly, within the first week of his sophomore year, he had earned twenty thousand yuan.

“For me,” he said, “four thousand yuan was already a huge amount — that was my tuition — so earning twenty thousand in seven days was unbelievable.” That success left him confused. “I didn’t know if I should keep studying seriously or focus on business,” he said. “I wondered whether making money was what I should be doing.”

He kept looking for new ways to earn. First it was selling dictionaries; then he expanded his business to other universities — the Conservatory of Music, the College of Foreign Languages — setting up stalls to sell. When dictionaries were done, he resold used military uniforms from freshmen to laborers. Then he thought, What else can I sell? Later, he sold MP3 players and digital products. Eventually he began assembling computers for students.

He told me that before that point, he had never even used the internet. “Don’t laugh,” he said. “When I started college in 2004, many rural students had never gone online. Even if we had, it was only in computer-class, learning simple coding — never truly using the internet.”

It was through helping others assemble computers that he entered the IT industry. “In 2005, I first encountered the internet,” he said. “That was the beginning.”

After discovering the internet, he decided to build his career in IT for two reasons. “First,” he said, “because at that time the internet had this huge Web 2.0 wave. In 2005, blogs became popular in America.” The second reason was that he had been preparing for the graduate-school exam and needed to improve his English. “The best way was to read foreign IT websites,” he said.

“So for the first half of 2005, I spent all my time reading overseas IT sites, and I became passionate about the internet,” he said. “They were talking about Web 1.0 as the previous era and Web 2.0 as the new one. Now we talk about the mobile internet as another new era. It seems every few years there’s a new era.”

That was also the year he met a foreigner named Edwin, who had come to China to start one of the earliest blog websites. “I wrote him an email,” he said. “I told him, ‘I’m a student from Sichuan, and I really want to start a business with you.’” That became his first startup. “He gave us a lot of ideas,” he said. “He invested some money, and I organized a group of college students in Sichuan to build websites.”

During that year, they created many sites. When blogs were popular, they built blogs; when RSS was trending, they built RSS sites; when the Digg model was hot in America, they copied Digg; when Delicious (bookmark sharing) was hot, they copied that too. “Whatever was hottest in America, we copied to China,” he said. “We spent a whole year playing with concepts, but we didn’t make a single cent. That was our first conceptual startup.”

He told me that looking back now, he realized that many young people want to start businesses — especially college students — but few ever think clearly about their business models or how to generate profit. “At a capital-forum not long ago,” he said, “I said that starting a business in 2005 was miserable. There was no VC concept then, no investors in Sichuan, no solid business models. It was all about playing with ideas.”

He compared that to the present. “Now our classmates at Tsinghua and Peking University can easily get investments. Investors are eager to fund young entrepreneurs. Back then, we had none of that.”

In 2006, he and his team created their second website, an SNS called ‘Cool Tribe.’ “The same problem,” he said. “It didn’t take off.”

By 2007, he began reflecting seriously. “I asked myself: Is running my own website — my own media — a good business? Can I succeed without any capital base?” He thought for a while and said, “Running your own site is like having a child. You raise it, nurture it, and eventually you earn from it through advertising. That’s what most media in China do — they live off ads.”

“Then I asked myself another question,” he continued. “Could I become a babysitter instead?”

In Sichuan, there were already some decent websites whose ad businesses were struggling. “So,” he said, “raising your own child and babysitting someone else’s are two different models. If it’s your child, you need years to raise it before you earn; if you’re the babysitter, the child isn’t yours but is already growing, so you can make money faster.”

He concluded, “So yes, maybe being the babysitter was a quicker way for me to profit.”

At that time, he became the regional agent for a Chengdu lifestyle site. Then he became the “middle babysitter,” representing ‘Quan Search,’ and later an even bigger babysitter, becoming an agent for Tencent and Sina and other portals. “Whenever any major media came to Chengdu looking for an agency,” he said, “I was there.”

He described how he would visit companies like Xunlei or Mop, telling them, “If you’re planning events in Chengdu, do you need a local agent? I can be that agent.”

Sure enough, in 2007, an opportunity came. Tencent was launching its localization strategy, building local portals — Dacheng Net in Sichuan, Dayu Net in Chongqing. “We happened to catch that opportunity,” he said. “At the time, the internet in Sichuan was very immature — no clear concepts, no mature ad companies — so we were lucky. There weren’t many competitors.”

He remembered clearly: Tencent set him a sales target of 1.6 million yuan and asked for 160 thousand yuan as a security deposit. “There was absolutely no way I could afford that,” he said. “But I didn’t lose confidence. I told them, every website needs ad materials, and we can design them. Let’s offset the deposit through our work.”

At that time, he had two classmates who majored in computer science and could build websites. “So we offered to create websites and ad materials for clients, charge them later, and use that to offset the deposit.” It worked.

That year, he said proudly, their 1.6 million target turned into 11 million in sales.

“That was our first bucket of gold,” he said.He told me that in 2008, during that same year, he earned his very first five million yuan. After that, he said, he took the business model they had proven and copied it to other places. “We duplicated it in Wuhan, in Chongqing, in Fuzhou,” he said. “Every city had a local site, and I went to every single one myself.”

From 2008 to 2009, within only two years, he completed what he called his first bucket of gold — nearly twenty million yuan in personal capital. “To be honest,” he said, “those two years were my second stage of entrepreneurship, and I was very lost.”

He paused for a moment before explaining why. “Think about it,” he said. “At the beginning of 2008, I didn’t even have 10 000 yuan. Our starting capital for the company was 3 000.”

He told me that people often asked him why the company was named Limei. “I really hadn’t thought about it much,” he said. “Because that company came from 3 000 yuan I borrowed. At the time, you needed 500 000 yuan of registered capital to start a company, which meant paying several tens of thousands up front — money I didn’t have. So I used that 3 000 to buy an already-registered company that someone wanted to sell. Its name was Limei. So our company just kept that name.”

He told me that after spending that 3 000, by the end of 2008 the company’s account suddenly had six or seven million yuan on it. “It’s hard to describe the feeling,” he said. “Maybe five million doesn’t sound like much in Beijing now, but for a college student who once couldn’t even pay tuition, that was an enormous amount. That year I was completely confused about life. I didn’t know what my goal should be, or what I was really fighting for.”

After 2008 ended, he said, he bought his first car. “You can see the picture,” he told me. “The first was a Honda CR-V. Then I thought it wasn’t enough, so I bought a Jeep Wrangler. Later I bought yet another car.”

He laughed a little when he said, “What did I do with them? I started traveling. I took my first trips outside the province, flying all over the country. Every morning I would check air-ticket prices — which flight was leaving today, which destination looked interesting — and I’d just go. If it was far, I’d go to Beijing; farther, to Shanghai. In 2009 I visited about fifty cities across China.”

He said that after that he drove those cars, traveling along the western, eastern, and northern routes, circling the whole country. “That was my 2009,” he said. “A rather boring life.”

During that same year he began reading Buddhism and Daoism. “I didn’t really understand them,” he admitted. “But I was searching for faith — for what life should be about.”

Then, 2009 also brought another wave: the rise of the mobile-internet era. “That year,” he said, “I did two things.”

“The first was to study mobile internet,” he explained. “By then, China already had many startups in that field. In Chengdu and Wuhan there were lots of young entrepreneurs.”

He said that because he had over twenty million yuan of idle funds at the time, many friends who were also starting companies came to him for help. “So I began investing,” he said. “I invested in about fifteen companies — just spread the money out — altogether a bit more than ten million yuan.”

He told me the results weren’t bad. “If one company sold, I’d recover everything,” he said. “And one did.”

He described it carefully. “One company sold a year ago for 30 million yuan to a large BIT group. I had invested 170 000 yuan in it. It was started by two college students from Wuhan. I put in 170 000 for 34 percent of the shares; they together held 60 percent. We ran it for a bit more than a year, then got another 1 million yuan of funding, and later sold it for 30 million.”

He said, “That deal alone cashed out 10 million for me. Basically, all my earlier investments broke even because of that.” He smiled faintly. “Those companies still exist today.”

“The second thing I did,” he said, “was continue my advertising business.”

He explained that by then he felt the traditional internet had little room left. “Look at China’s most successful internet figures,” he said. “They’re mostly people born in the 1960s and 1970s. For us ’80s kids, there weren’t many chances left.”

“So,” he said, “I wondered if mobile internet could be our opportunity. Back in the Web 2.0 days, people like me — born around 1984 or 1985 — thought the same way: is this our wave? Maybe mobile internet is.”

He described himself plainly. “I am someone who loves chasing waves,” he said. “I am always searching for new opportunities that might shape our future.”

In 2009, he went to Beijing many times. “I remember it snowed heavily,” he said. “I came to Beijing to attend all kinds of conferences — the famous iResearch Forum, B2C events — every meeting I could find. I wanted to understand what the mobile-internet world looked like.”

Then came March 2010. “I made a decisive move,” he said. “I came to Beijing for good.”

He smiled remembering the scene. “We drove here in that car, just two people. And by coincidence, our first office in Beijing was upstairs in my friend’s building. It wasn’t even my own lease. My friend had a 100-square-meter office and hung three nameplates on the door — his company, mine, and another friend’s. The total rent was a bit over 10 000 yuan per month.”

“At that time our company had only two people,” he said. “That tiny upstairs room was where our Beijing journey started.”

He told me that their first year in Beijing moved very fast. “Back then, in 2010, China’s mobile advertising had two major directions,” he said.

He explained what was happening globally. “In 2010, big things happened: Google bought AdMob for 760 million dollars, and Apple bought Quattro for more than 300 million. Those were the most successful mobile-ad companies in the U.S. After those deals, every VC started asking, ‘Is there a Chinese version of AdMob we can invest in?’”

He said those companies focused on smartphone advertising. “When we entered, we faced the same question,” he said. “At that time, there were 300 million mobile internet users in China: 250 million using WAP on feature phones and 50 million using smartphones. Not like now, with over 100 million smartphone users.”

“For us,” he said, “starting in Beijing meant choosing between two paths. The first group of startups here went straight for smartphones, following the American trend. They quickly got funded because they already had a model. Around that time many of our peers received VC investments — they had the model first, then thought about profit later.”

“But for me,” he continued, “I had never even met a VC before. I didn’t know how investment worked. And we were doing WAP — that market of lower-end users. So I stuck with WAP.”

He said that, in hindsight, that choice turned out to be right. “Two years later it proved correct,” he said. “In 2010 we were just two people working upstairs. By the end of that year, we had grown to eight. We made 40 million yuan in revenue and 8 million in net profit.”

He explained the model very simply. “We just did WAP advertising — buying and selling ads,” he said. “We acted as agents for Mobile Tencent, Mobile Sina, sold 360’s software, NetQin, e-commerce firms advertising on mobile. We were just an ad agency.”

Then he said quietly, “I think I was lucky.”

“My luck,” he told me, “was that every market I entered, I caught it at its best moment. When local advertising was empty, I entered. When WAP advertising was just beginning, I entered. Each time, the timing was right.”

He told me that by 2011 he finally began to understand what an ad platform really meant. “Before that, I didn’t know the difference,” he said.

That same year, IDG Capital started looking for mobile-ad companies in China. “Through a friend, they found me,” he said. “It was coincidence. They had visited several tech companies in Chengdu — all doing well — and they asked each one who their investor was. It turned out every single one of them said my name.”

“They thought, ‘Who is this guy?’ ” he said. “So they came to Beijing to find me.”

He hadn’t planned on raising money. “But when we met, we talked,” he said. “That day several VCs were present. I shared my story.”

“They told me, ‘Shuyi, you already know how to make money, but you look like a young local boss. Do you have a dream?’ Of course they didn’t say it so directly, but that’s what they meant. ‘You’re young — can’t you build a company that could someday go public, something bigger?’ ”

He said he thought about that for a long time. “I realized they were right,” he said. “China doesn’t lack local bosses, and it doesn’t lack dreamers. What it lacks are people who can combine both — who can make money and still hold on to ideals. I decided that would be my goal.”

He told me that in 2011 they secured Series A funding from IDG. “It even included a profit-guarantee agreement,” he said. “Back then, in mobile internet, no one had those — only we did.”

That year, he said, they moved their office from that small upstairs room to Dacheng International, renting two units and expanding to 150 people. By the end of the year, they relocated again — this time to BlueCastle International Center — renting an entire floor. Their team had grown to 300.

“In May of this year,” he said, “we faced another round of funding — our Series B. We received 20 million U.S. dollars from KPCB and IDG.”

He told me that even then, many outsiders remained puzzled by the company. “People still thought Limei was a bit rustic,” he said with a smile. “Even our founding team — all of us — were considered local guys who hadn’t seen much of Beijing. People wondered why this company could get two rounds of funding in a row.”

He said, “Inside our team, I often repeat eight characters that matter to me most: 心存高远，脚踏实地 — ‘Keep your heart high and your feet on the ground.’ ”

“I tell my colleagues often,” he said, “that in China, there are plenty of people with lofty ambitions — especially in Beijing — all dreaming big, copying American models. And in the South — in Shenzhen, in Chengdu — there are plenty of people who are practical, just focused on earning money. But what we lack are those who can combine both — people who dream big and still work steadily.”

“I think maybe our company carries that gene,” he said. “We can imagine the future of mobile advertising and still keep our feet on the ground, doing what’s in front of us.”

He told me that after all these years, even now, he wouldn’t call himself successful. “I don’t have any great achievements,” he said. “But these years made me think a lot about entrepreneurship.”

He said it was hard to summarize everything, but he tried. “First,” he said, “timing — opportunity — is crucial. Lei Jun once said, ‘When the wind is right, even pigs can fly.’ Every entrepreneur must think about timing. Is this industry your chance? If you start a video site now, it’s too late — the market’s taken. You must find where your real opportunity is.”

“Second,” he said, “diligence matters — that’s obvious. Running a company requires hard work.”

“Third,” he said, “there’s hardship. You can see from my story — there were failures, waves I missed — but I kept grabbing for the next one. If you start a company and, the moment you hit a problem, you run away and say ‘Entrepreneurship is too hard; I should get a job,’ then maybe you’re not suited to be an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs must constantly face hardship and constantly think about the future.”

“The fourth,” he said, “is what I just mentioned: keep your heart high and your feet on the ground. You must imagine the future. If you only work steadily without understanding the larger picture — your macro structure, your business model — your company can’t grow. But if you only chase concepts and never ground them in reality, you won’t succeed either.”

He told me that, looking back on a personal level, his life in those years had been rather monotonous. “There wasn’t much entertainment,” he said. “But when I look back, we did a lot — teaching in minority areas, reading economics books, traveling.”

“In college,” he said, “I read through most major economics texts — though our school wasn’t top-tier, I read overseas works and finished most of the main Chinese ones.”

“In these years,” he added, “I’ve traveled to dozens of countries and across China’s many cities. Life is really about thinking — what future do we want?”

He told me that many people asked why he married so early. “They say, ‘You’re a millionaire, maybe even a billionaire; why marry now?’ But it’s not about choosing whether to marry; it’s about a way of life. When you reach a certain age, you want stability.”

“It’s not that getting married early is too soon,” he said. “Everyone has their own way of living. The key is whether you like it, whether you enjoy it, whether when people ask you about your past, you can feel proud and smile.”

“These,” he said softly, “are my plain reflections on life. If five years from now my company goes public — I’ll be thirty-five or forty — I hope I can share my experiences again with everyone.”