Starting a technology company is an inherently risky business - more so than in other industries. If the product or service it provides is too far ahead of its time, users may not be able to fully understand and exploit its benefits, and it could fail to catch on. On the other hand, offerings that are similar to what is already available in the market often find it difficult to stand out from competitors. For every well-known success that is Microsoft, Amazon, or Google, there are an unknown number of startups which have fallen by the wayside.
So perhaps it should come as no surprise that Lap Man, who was among the first generation of entrepreneurs to ride the internet boom in the late 1990s, is content to have simply survived.
Today, he is the founder and chief executive of Diyixian, a major provider of virtual private network (VPN) services to companies on the mainland.
This is something that uses the internet to allow companies to connect their computers together from different locations in a secure fashion, keeping proprietary information safe from outsiders.
It employs more than 400 staff, not including an army of 1,000 technical support workers located at two call centres in Guangzhou and Shenzhen.
Operating on the mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Vietnam, the company boasts a total of 31 points of presence - physical access points to the internet - and provides service coverage for more than 700 cities. It also has four internet data centres, which are vast facilities that house computer equipment used to provide the network services it leases out to customers in Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Taipei.