[caption id="attachment_58660" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Mr. PENG Jie at talks to co-organizer Chance Jiang at Startup Grind Guangzhou"]
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Half an hour before the event I sat down with Mr. Peng Jie, our guest for the Startup Grind Guangzhou March 15 meetup. In his Scottish tartan shirt, Mr. Peng impressed me as a typical software engineer, like I've been seeing around town. He came with Mr. Chen Gangqiang, CEO of ShareSDK.cn. Not long after we started the conversation, he spoke in a slow but clear voice, "we are looking for a co-founder who can help the ShareSDK product service international markets, please send us referrals if you have some." I replied, "Hey, you came to the right place!"
During the fireside chat, we shared Mr. Peng's career story, about his rise from obscurity to a tech entrepreneur/investor today. Here are a few interesting points summarized from our chat.
http://youtu.be/arCj9o9ktLY
Can you share your story on why you got started building software
products? How did you get started?
I graduated from a polytechnic college nobody knows with a degree in computer programming. With such a degree, I felt self-conscious and lucky enough to get a job in a small company, other than seeking jobs in big name corporations. I felt lucky to land on a programming job in a small company, and earn 3k RMB/month, enough to survive in Guangzhou back then.
The only thing I could do was focus on my job - programming. Besides programming, I also had to do some marketing, customer support work and everything else necessary to keep the small company going. Since my first job, I have never worried about seeking a job because my friends and acquaintances kept referring new and higher-paying jobs to me. I worked on different roles in those companies from programming to customer support, and I finally focused more on marketing. As a result, I learned early on all aspects of running a software business, which I could not have learned if I were working for a big name corporation in a single role.
Back then, SMS/MMS was the big new thing and applications around this technology seemed hot. I followed it up by building and selling apps around SMS such as analytics tools for corporate clients. Everything seems to happen so naturally, I just scaled everything up with San Ji Networks Tech LLC in 2004.
In recent years, many companies, big or small, are exploring their own 'mobile strategies' whether the pressure is from outside or inside. What general advice you would give them?
Small mobile app teams have the greatest opportunities if they build apps for corporate clients to address their business needs. Most companies lack software DNA and it's in their best interest to outsource the work to specialized teams.
What kind of early startup business or technologies you haven't funded but you wish you can find such teams to work with?
I'm looking for teams that can do big data, but have yet to be convinced by anyone I've met. I think big data technologies built for the corporate market in China can probably have the greatest impact. Mobile games could also be big in China. The 3rd kind, which I have already funded, are startups who build tools that enable people or companies to achieve what they want from using or releasing a mobile app, this is what ShareSDK.cn does.
Comparing 2004 and now, what are the new opportunities you can see
for software startups from the perspective of access to capital and
collective knowledge on software tech?
Between 2000 and 2004, I saw growth patterns that nobody can copy now, such as the 3 big name Chinese Internet companies. In recent years, it's getting harder and harder to achieve overnight success if you only copy their models.
In coming years, I expect to see more and more small but beautiful mobile app companies. They build mobile apps that target a specialized area and make it so good that user adoption is driven only by word-of-mouth, such as Find Something, a leisure game, and Moji Weather, a weather gadget app. They are typically valued between 5 million and 10 million RMB. They don't aim for big IPO. Instead, they aim to build good product for users and good income, good life and work balance for employees. You may think they work for niche market. But when you factor in Chinese mobile user base, the absolute user number of a niche app's in China could be 100 million, which by no means is considered small in western countries.
In between my questions, Mr. Peng is not shy sharing his philosophies on life, such as "Everything that happened to you has been the best arrangement", and "The amount of wealth you can live with is determined by the level of your personal quality. In Chinese, 厚德载物。”
by Chance Jiang, Guangzhou Chapter Co-Organizer