Steve Jobs inspires Harvard MBA to join China car website Autohome

Harvard MBA Qin Zhi says he found Steve Jobs' "Stay Foolish" commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005 so inspiring that he left his consulting job at McKinsey & Co in New York for an internet startup in China.

"After reading those words, I thought to myself what I was doing then was absolutely not my passion," Qin, now chief executive of Autohome, which operates China's largest vehicle comparison website, said in Beijing, where he was born. "What I did had no risks, and I felt like I was wasting my life. So I decided to seek a change."

Six years after joining Autohome in 2007 as employee No 38, Qin has helped oversee a 100-fold increase in revenue, which topped 1 billion yuan (HK$1.26 billion) last year.

Today, the company employs more than 1,000 people, and its namesake website attracts an estimated 6 million unique users a day, about double that of the online car section of top Chinese internet firm Tencent.

Closely held Autohome is 66 per cent owned by Australian phone company Telstra.

Chinese car-shopping websites might be attractive for investors seeking to profit from the nation's expanding vehicle sales and the fact that no country had a bigger cyber population, said Xu Hao, an analyst at IResearch in Beijing.