October 19, 2018.
The first Silicon Valley class of Changjiang Chuang Chuang Community opened in Beijing.
More than 30 new students from Silicon Valley, New York, Seattle, London, Shenzhen, Shanghai and Beijing are deeply engaged in artificial intelligence, new materials, online education, health care, aerospace and other cutting-edge technologies. From that day on, they will start their one-year study and life at Chuang Chuang, exploring innovative models, understanding the Chinese market and thinking about global strategies together.
More than half of the students in the class graduated from Oxford University, MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, UC Berkeley, UCLA, University of Florida, Peking University, Tsinghua University, USTCM, and many of them have doctorates from prestigious universities and are scientists or professors in related fields.
Anatole France said, "If the road itself is beautiful, do not ask where it leads." The wonderful stories that originally happened in parallel all over the world finally converge in Chuang Chuang. Thirty interesting souls stand on the same starting point again, and will catalyze a more beautiful symphony -- a new Chuang Chuang story, which will not only be related to China, but also closely connected with the whole world.
It was a rare but inevitable encounter. So many stories to tell, so many moments to remember. At the moment of departure, it is better to meet 30 interesting souls, listen to six parallel stories, and meet their inevitability.
In 2014, the human genome was sequenced 13 years ago. The market for genetics, which has digested the froth of the early years, is moving in a brighter direction. Although there is still a long way to go at the application level, fierce market competition has made many technology applications at widely acceptable prices.
This year, Guochun Liao, a PhD student in genetics and bioinformatics at the University of California, Berkeley, decided to make some new attempts in this field, combining his technical background in biology and computer science with his more than ten years of genetic accumulation. So, together with two University of Utah professors, he founded IDbyDNA, which uses a suite of search methods developed at the university for years to locate pathogenic bacteria and help hospitals and doctors more accurately detect the cause of an infection.
Also in 2014, also in Silicon Valley, Mike Bukhovtsev from Russia and his friends started a smart hardware company called CINEMOOD. Mike called this product "portable interactive cinema". The original purpose is very simple and tender, that is, he wants to use this small "box" to accompany his daughter to study and entertain her anytime and anywhere, so that she can grow up happily. With a prototype of the first product, the team developed and optimized the hardware, while actively buying the rights to anime, manga and e-books and expanding the content library.
In Chicago in 2014, Wang Wen, a girl born in the 1980s who has been engaged in consulting work for many years, watched the EAA(Experimental Aircraft Association) flight convention for the first time. She was deeply attracted by the pilot's performance. That day, Wang decided to get a pilot's license.
Back in New York, she visited flight-training establishments near the airport, only to find that the industry was still stuck in the family-run growth phase, with opaque prices and little standardized service. At the same time, getting a pilot's license and leasing planes are in high demand in the United States. After the study, getting a pilot's license became less of a priority. Wang decided to start a company to build a bridge between flight suppliers and flight enthusiasts, offering private flight services with transparent prices, convenience and speed.
Meanwhile, in Madison, more than 1,000 kilometers from New York, another young woman, Joy Tang, has started a new company called Markable. Joy likes to take risks and go out of her way. She was willing to give up an already secure option for something she was truly passionate about and passionate about. In 2002, Joy won a gold medal in the Math Olympiad while still in high school. She decided to forgo the chance of admission to the best universities in the country and instead applied to American universities, and was eventually accepted by MIT.
In 2014, Joy had been working in Wall Street for 7 years as the chief artificial intelligence machine learning master in risk high-frequency hedging quantitative trading. This was the year Joy, a fashion lover, decided to do something a little more interesting. Can customers identify the goods they want and buy them with one click when they see the good clothes in movies and TV dramas? This is a problem Joy is trying to solve with her algorithmic experience.
Her ultimate goal is to transform the advertising industry by increasing the efficiency and liquidity of the apparel industry through artificial intelligence. Joy found it annoying that the advertising industry was electronic, but its business model was still traditional. She hopes for a future in which advertising becomes a "feature" rather than a "nuisance" and users interact with ads spontaneously, rather than turning them into electronic trash cans.
While in Beijing in 2014, Oxford University student Nicholas Shekerdemian started his exchange student trip to Peking University. He gave himself a Chinese name, Shi Nike, and tried his first business, offering elite online English tutoring to Chinese families by linking professors at Oxford and Cambridge.
This short entrepreneurial experience makes Nick find the life he really wants. True success, he believes, means meeting interesting people and doing what you love every day when you open your eyes. His first venture was a trial run, and Nick is already planning a new one.
Also in Beijing in 2014, after detailed industry research and a year of intense preparation, VIPKID, an online English education company founded by Mi Wenjuan, officially launched its Beta product and began to recruit students for experimental classes. At that time, they had only 20 foreign teachers and 200 students.
It was also in this year that Professor Liu Jin, Mi's MBA supervisor at Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business, began to discuss with several Cheung Kong alumni to jointly build a "Cheung Kong Creation" project to help entrepreneurs grow and succeed quickly. In the spring of 2015, the first project of Changjiang Chuang Chuang Community, the first class of Qingteng - Future Business School, which cooperated with Tencent, officially opened. Mi Wenjuan took VIPKID to study in Yangtze River again. Together with more than 40 other entrepreneurs, she became the first group of students in Yangtze River Chuang Chuang Community.
In Seattle in 2015, Jing Zhou, a chemistry PhD, and her friends founded a company called OxiScience. Five of the founding team are microbiology, chemistry, and veterinary scientists who have been working on the smell removal technology of polymer coatings for more than 20 years. This technology is 100% safe for pets and families, and the effective time is more than one hundred times longer than similar products in the supermarket. It can not only be used for pet care and home care, but also has made a number of successful cases in industrial waste gas, elderly care and medical sterilization.
In the same year, Wang, who saw a business opportunity in the process of getting her pilot's license, launched AIRACER in New York, becoming the world's first online trading platform for the private aviation market.
In 2016, Nick, back in the UK, started the second phase of his thoughtful journey by setting up an online platform that allows job seekers to create their own profiles, providing a thumbprint-like portrait to judge the match between the company and the candidate from the perspective of values, culture and technology. Solving this problem requires the application of machine learning, using thousands or even tens of thousands of employee surveys and data analysis to figure out the parameters required by a company's culture and technology.
If Markable's dream is to disrupt the advertising industry, Headstart's is to disrupt the recruitment industry. "Talent is more than just a resume," Nick and his founding team believe that there are a lot of specific scenarios and information behind the hiring data, and they want to use technology to transform the hiring process to make it as fair and efficient as possible.
This year, Liao Guochun's IDbyDNA completed A series of financing, further focusing on the development of DNA search technology based on taxonomic monomers, and carrying out clinical trials of infectious diseases based on metagenomics. As the CEO, Liao Guochun also started a new busy, running between China and the United States, hoping to fully integrate the advantages of China and the United States, so that advanced technology can benefit more patients.
Zhou Jing's OxiScience label NonScents also went public that year and has amassed a large number of users and positive reviews on Amazon. The success of the US market has made Zhou Jinghe and his team see huge market potential. Technology is OxiScience's greatest strength, and Zhou is clear that she wants to bring the company's technology brand to China, working with domestic manufacturers to replicate products and business models that have been successful in the U.S. market.
A few months later, CINEMOOD successfully raised a Series A round of funding to focus more on acquiring content rights. The product's ease of use and scalability enabled the founding team to see great promise in marketing. Mike, who used to work for Huawei, began to think about how to promote this device, which integrates learning and entertainment functions, to the K-12 market in China.
Finally, on October 19, 2018, their timelines successfully converged in the Changjiang Chuang Chuang Community. On this day, the first Silicon Valley class of Yangtze River Chuang Chuang Community officially opened. On this day, Liao Guochun, Mike, Wang Wen, Joy, Zhou Jing and Nick set out with the other students of Chuang Chuang Silicon Valley to start a brand new Chuang Chuang journey.
After five years of development, the number of service users of VIPKID has grown from 200 to 500,000, and the number of foreign teachers from 20 to 60,000. As the senior sister of Chuang Chuang, Mi Wenjuan came to the opening ceremony of the Silicon Valley class and said to the freshmen: "One of the things that I'm very proud of is that VIPKID continues to create value -- value for parents and kids by providing quality faculty and content, value for teachers in the United States by providing tremendous job opportunities, and value for global partners through content and copyright partnerships. In the same way, one of the things that I find particularly remarkable about Chuang Chuang is that you put all the best entrepreneurs from around the world in the same room. To bring people who aspire to change the world together to do something more worthwhile and meaningful."
Mi Wenjuan at the opening ceremony of Changjiang Chuang Chuang Community Silicon Valley Class
On this day, the total number of students in Changjiang Chuang Chuang Community reached 425. With the opening of the Silicon Valley Class, Changjiang Chuang Chuang Community, an entrepreneurial ecosystem that helps entrepreneurs grow and succeed, took a solid step toward globalization. At the opening ceremony, Professor Liu Jin, the founder of Changjiang Chuang Chuang Community, said to everyone:
All of you here are excellent entrepreneurs. You come from all over the world. You have your own core technology and industry experience. Running a company is not just a skill, it's an art. We come to Chuang Chuang, is to learn this art.
In Chuang Chuang, people can get support from three levels: knowledge level, learning business management courses of business schools, knowing how to judge the economic trend, how to do marketing, how to do management; At the class level, the students in this class come from different countries, different industries, different backgrounds and different enterprise stages. I hope you can have more exchanges here, establish deep friendship, and find more ideas and opportunities. At the alumni level, the alumni friendship of Changjiang River is very profound, and they are willing to help each other and grow together. What we open for you is the whole ecology of Chuangchuang River and the platform of the whole Yangtze River.
I hope you can broaden your horizons, learn knowledge, build friendship and do great things together here.
Professor Liu Jin at the opening ceremony of Changjiang Chuang Chuang Community Silicon Valley Class
This is the first class of Changjiang Chuang Chuang Community Silicon Valley. New Chuang story, to be continued.
