Entrepreneurs are the driving force behind innovation, growth and shaping industries. Their role is crucial in building a startup into a unicorn from day one, as a unique perspective and entrepreneurial mindset are key factors that drive the vibrant growth of a new company. On Friday, five leading entrepreneurs spoke at the BEYOND EXPO about how they achieved success in their careers and shared their valuable experiences and insights on entrepreneurship.
Below are highlights from prominent entrepreneurs who spoke with Phoenix TV anchor Richard Wren during the expo’s Founders Forum session: Comments have been edited and condensed for clarity.
Justin Gong, Co-Founder and Senior Vice President, XAG
Our goal is to make agricultural production more efficient and produce more with less effort. This is an ongoing project, and in the short term we want to introduce drones and autonomous technology to farmers so they don’t have to worry about hiring people during the labor shortage.
In the longer term, we hope to use AI technology and robotics to help farmers deal with uncertainties such as changing climate environments.
China continues to enjoy economic growth and has already proven to the world that it can produce world-class companies and start-ups.
My advice to all young entrepreneurs is to find a really good partner. Don’t be too self-confident because sometimes you can be too positive or too negative. Find the right partner, but don’t trust them too easily at the beginning. In my case, it took me 10 years to work with my partner and build a strong partnership. Now we are best friends and partners.
David Lee, CEO and co-founder of NEX
You always have to leave something to start something new. You always have to make sacrifices and hard choices, some of them big ones. Leaving Apple was a pretty big choice for me, but it’s also about the lifestyle you choose and personally pursuing what you really want to do.
I’m a very optimistic person, maybe too optimistic sometimes. I believe we can change the world, do really amazing things, and solve big problems. I have tremendous confidence in what my team and I can achieve. But I’m also paranoid enough to make sure we don’t make any big mistakes. That’s why we run our company. That’s why we’ve been in business for the last seven years, through pandemics, through economic downturns, and are still going strong.
The funding allows us to flesh out our vision into simple hardware that delivers the best experience for the mass market. We release the product, and users love it. We send samples to all the major retailers, and they want to carry it. What ultimately attracted investors was a product that users love, which basically shows market fit. If you have proven market fit, all the conversations will be about [with potential investors] It will make things a little easier.
Carl Wu, co-founder and CEO of New Frontier Group
We were in the right place at the right time because China was rapidly aging and home care was much cheaper. Home care costs about one-tenth of the cost of a senior care facility. This was what Chinese families wanted and was in line with the government’s desire for over 90% of people to spend their retirement years at home.
So, we were in the right place at the right time. We started from scratch and grew to provide 100,000 home visits a day. Today, we run one of the largest home healthcare companies in China, providing everything from basic care and nursing to managing illnesses at home. We took a simple idea – to address China’s aging society – and built a home healthcare service in a relatively short period of time.
Eric Chen, CEO and Founder of Carsome
I think we’ve had a lot of success, especially in terms of creating transparency in the region. Southeast Asia is not just one country; it’s made up of several countries with vastly different markets, including Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines, each with a population of 600 million people. But when it comes to finding and selling used cars, they all share one common problem: the entire market is fragmented and inefficient, in part because much of the transaction process is offline. When we first set out to solve this problem, we focused on our customers’ pain points.
For example, if you wanted to sell a car today, where would you go and what price would you expect? We wanted to create a platform where we could assess the condition of cars and match them with demand across the country. To do that, we needed to be able to develop digital tools to facilitate this matching process. We started with one very simple service: helping consumers sell their cars fast. Everything was done within an hour. We felt a lot of traction. For example, when we started our business in 2015, we sold 30 cars in the first month.
Today, we are selling around 15,000 cars per month, demonstrating our ability to scale and grow stronger every year. I believe a lot of this success is due to our ability to understand the original technology and build and layer digital tools on top of it during the entire transaction process, something that hasn’t been done before in many parts of the world.
Chi Xu, Founder and CEO of XREAL
I don’t know what’s more suitable for this industry. But to me, I feel like we’re in a whole new industry. We need other companies. If we really want to stand out, we need to be disruptive, but that means all the technology isn’t there yet. That’s why it’s so important to have people who really know the limitations of different technologies. Because this is a combination of optics, software algorithms, AI, and hardware in general.
So, if you look across AR companies, you’re not going to find one tech person who knows all the different boundaries. It’s definitely a plus to be an expert in most of these areas because building hardware is really hard, especially knowing the boundaries. And sometimes you have to push the boundaries a little bit. I think that’s where being an expert is a really big plus.
I don’t think entrepreneurs are trained for it. From my personal experience, I don’t want to be a CEO from day one because I don’t think I’ll ever be an entrepreneur. It might have been nice to have someone to learn with instead of leading from the beginning. Entrepreneurs are always very lonely. Even if you have a co-founder, you can’t tell them everything and you can feel lonely because you don’t expect them to share the same kind of workload and barriers as you. So you have to be vision-driven, very committed, very aggressive and very generous-hearted. I don’t think you can ever be trained for that.
