How China's equivalent to TechCrunch evolved from a news site to a crowdfunding platform
LIU CHENGCHENG is the founder of 36Kr, a Chinese online platform offering news about technology and start-ups – the mainland equivalent of TechCrunch in the US.
He talks to JACK LIU about how making bold decisions has helped him to expand 36Kr into a crowdfunding investment platform for start-ups in China.
How did you get started in technology?
I was born in 1988 and have loved technology since I was a child and I taught myself computer programming.
After reading a lot of magazines about entrepreneurship, I decided to drop out of high school and run away from my home in the southern city of Yancheng, in Jiangsu province, to Beijing and launch my own company.
However, the principal caught me the night before I left, so I had to continue my studies and eventually went to university where I studied computer science in Beijing.
In my final year at university, I started to send emails to many technology companies to offer them my advice about their businesses.
Although I was just a student, I truly believed in my suggestions. I still do now.
Many companies ignored me at the time, but some took me seriously. One American robotic company, Willow Garage, even offered me an internship in the United States.
Why did you start your technology media firm, 36Kr?
I knew I wanted to start my own company, but I was not sure what business to get into. So I told my team that we should look at what other companies were doing.
We decided to choose what we should do after checking 1,000 different companies.
The website was primarily just a study note for our team that happened to be open to the public.
When we had recorded more than 200 companies, investors came to us and this tech media business idea took off.
Over the years we have transformed ourselves into a service provider for start-ups.
We are not developing software or making robots, but we are still doing something meaningful.
How did you plan to run 36Kr without media experience?
I think that the reason why we stood out is precisely because we didn’t know anything about media.
We were among the first few media outlets in China to open up our own WeChat public account, which is like the public Facebook page.
We didn’t have any editors for the website – and we still don’t have any. So every writer can post his or her stories the way they want on our website. But they should be responsible for what they write.
Maybe our approach is not the best way to run a media firm, but we don’t want to change it too much.
However, the media is not our main focus right now. We have put most of our resources into other businesses, such as crowdfunding for start-up companies.
A Chinese columnist has described you as a successful example of a ‘weak entrepreneur’ – someone who lacks strong financial backing or a technology background. Do you agree?
The author is probably right. We are weak and don’t have anything behind us, but that certainly won’t stop us.
The chance of success in starting up one’s own business is like the life of Schrödinger’s cat – the famous thought experiment in quantum mechanics. When you haven’t started, your chance is always undetermined. But when you have started, the chance will be set and there is no point talking about it afterwards.
We just jumped in without thinking too much about it at the time. If we fail in the end, there will be nothing we can do.
When we make decisions for the company, we dare to make bold ones. You need to be cool about these ups and downs.
We don’t want to say we are successful. We only say we are temporarily successful. Our current success doesn’t guarantee a safe future.
How long will it take before China gets ready for crowdfunding start-up shares?
In the US, rich people put most of their wealth in equity. Equity investment will become mainstream investment for wealthy Chinese sooner or later.
The only reason why that has not happened in China is not because of the lack of capital, but because of the relatively short history of financial institutions.
Every month since last November, the platform has attracted more than 100 million yuan (HK$120 million) of investment in Chinese start-ups.
Our existing customers are not the general public. About 40 per cent of them are veteran investors already.
It takes time to educate the customers and I think this is something that will take decades to accomplish.
Has your business been affected by the cooling down of the start-up market?
Many start-ups went out of business recently as the market cooled. I don’t think many people will be attracted to the start-up craze now.
However, I believe the start-up market is just like the job market. Great talent will always find great employers, no matter how bad the market is. And great companies will always find investment.
We are not a company that is relying on probability or market trends.
