In late 2014, I started to fit in and one day got an mass email from Shenzhen BnE (I think, though I can't recollect the exact sender, I think either that or another Shenzhen business-oriented organization), saying that YCombinator has just started a startup course called How To Startup A Startup at Stanford University, and they would like to screen the lectures in local communities, therefore they are asking if someone from Shenzhen would like to help organize such events.
I didn't even wait for the end to say yes, as this was exactly the thing I wanted to do. So Julie, another girl who agreed to do it, and I embarked on a 3-month journey of organizing startup events on these startup courses in Shenzhen.
Every week for three months, we would download the courses, make presentations, make subtitles (because the courses were just uploaded from Stanford, no one had the time to do the translation, and half of our attendees didn't have a high-level English) and host the events. Besides that, we would also make posters, event posts and promote.
The events were instantly a hit in Shenzhen. We conducted all the showings and discussions in English. In the beginning, we didn't have a proper classroom like venue so we did it in multiple coffee places. My WeChat (the most popular social app in China) got blown up by new contacts, from ~100 to 1000 in weeks.
I guess the success we had with the YCom courses was partly due to the lack of such events in Shenzhen before. "Community" was still a new concept here, either to business folks or regular citizens. We didn't charge a fee, we talked about paying forward, and we didn't have a goal to turn it into profit-making things or scale it up like many would say in the startup world.
And soon I discovered a mainstream mindset here in Shenzhen, was if there is something remotely showing promise like they are attracting traffic, it would not make any sense if you don't think about what's the business model or when are you going to scale up?
To be honest, at that time I never had good answers for that. But I learned the way how people in Shenzhen would usually look at things, the lenses they use to look at and scout new opportunities, and I used this way of thinking later on to build my own communication with local startups, to get familiar with them and think from their perspectives. Ultimately it really helped me build my cognitive system again in Shenzhen, and sent me to on the way to further help the local startup ecosystem thrive and grow.
Not long after I started doing the YCom events, someone called Yan attended one of my events, and asked if I want to join Startup Grind. Like what I did when I got the YCom email, I said yes immediately. When I was a tech reporter in Chicago, I had been to several Startup Grind Chicago events, I loved the down-to-earth feel of the events, no fancy food, no tons of suit-up staff, just get right into the substance of entrepreneurship.
So in the end of 2014, I started with Startup Grind Shenzhen as a volunteer first, then co-director, and in 2015 January, I became officially the Director of Startup Grind Shenzhen chapter, and had been running this chapter ever since.
I think for this chapter of my life, one thing I should leave a note to is when I got the first email from someone called Michael who I still remain friends with to this day, and I asked him, whether my plan for doing the events would be too ambitious. And he replied to me, There is no such thing called too ambitious. And he gave me the proof that when he started Startup Grind Shenzhen with Yan, there were only 20 people with nearly no marketing, and it rapidly started to attract partners from tech giants and rising startups. Shenzhen Daily captured this history here. This sentence really helped me get through many bumps along the way and clear my mind when I tend to doubt myself before making real actions.
I didn't even wait for the end to say yes, as this was exactly the thing I wanted to do. So Julie, another girl who agreed to do it, and I embarked on a 3-month journey of organizing startup events on these startup courses in Shenzhen.
Every week for three months, we would download the courses, make presentations, make subtitles (because the courses were just uploaded from Stanford, no one had the time to do the translation, and half of our attendees didn't have a high-level English) and host the events. Besides that, we would also make posters, event posts and promote.
The events were instantly a hit in Shenzhen. We conducted all the showings and discussions in English. In the beginning, we didn't have a proper classroom like venue so we did it in multiple coffee places. My WeChat (the most popular social app in China) got blown up by new contacts, from ~100 to 1000 in weeks.
I guess the success we had with the YCom courses was partly due to the lack of such events in Shenzhen before. "Community" was still a new concept here, either to business folks or regular citizens. We didn't charge a fee, we talked about paying forward, and we didn't have a goal to turn it into profit-making things or scale it up like many would say in the startup world.
And soon I discovered a mainstream mindset here in Shenzhen, was if there is something remotely showing promise like they are attracting traffic, it would not make any sense if you don't think about what's the business model or when are you going to scale up?
To be honest, at that time I never had good answers for that. But I learned the way how people in Shenzhen would usually look at things, the lenses they use to look at and scout new opportunities, and I used this way of thinking later on to build my own communication with local startups, to get familiar with them and think from their perspectives. Ultimately it really helped me build my cognitive system again in Shenzhen, and sent me to on the way to further help the local startup ecosystem thrive and grow.
Not long after I started doing the YCom events, someone called Yan attended one of my events, and asked if I want to join Startup Grind. Like what I did when I got the YCom email, I said yes immediately. When I was a tech reporter in Chicago, I had been to several Startup Grind Chicago events, I loved the down-to-earth feel of the events, no fancy food, no tons of suit-up staff, just get right into the substance of entrepreneurship.
So in the end of 2014, I started with Startup Grind Shenzhen as a volunteer first, then co-director, and in 2015 January, I became officially the Director of Startup Grind Shenzhen chapter, and had been running this chapter ever since.
I think for this chapter of my life, one thing I should leave a note to is when I got the first email from someone called Michael who I still remain friends with to this day, and I asked him, whether my plan for doing the events would be too ambitious. And he replied to me, There is no such thing called too ambitious. And he gave me the proof that when he started Startup Grind Shenzhen with Yan, there were only 20 people with nearly no marketing, and it rapidly started to attract partners from tech giants and rising startups. Shenzhen Daily captured this history here. This sentence really helped me get through many bumps along the way and clear my mind when I tend to doubt myself before making real actions.
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