Colin Huang is a rare member of a group of Chinese entrepreneurs who started their professions in Silicon Valley, then replaced home and started a technology organization. Huang, a former Google e-commerce search engine engineer, is now running his fourth and most ambitious startup.
Biography
Huang, now 37, grew up in Guangzhou, now home to the pioneer e-commerce industry, Alibaba. His father, who did not manage to finish high school, worked all his life in local production with the boy’s mother. Colin was quickly recognized as a gifted child, so at the age of 12, he was sent to a prestigious school of foreign languages. There he found himself among the children of local elites. However, in the new school, he also kept himself among the best, and this experience changed his life forever. According to Huang, “high school opened his eyes to the world.” He then went to study at Zhejiang University, and then received a degree in computer science from the University of Wisconsin. He says he earned about $ 900 a month working for a local Microsoft division, and during his internship at the US headquarters, his salary already reached $ 6,000 a month.
The search company was gaining momentum. After a successful public offering of shares, profit continued to grow, and with it the capitalization. Even though Juan was only a minor shareholder, the value of his claim reached seven million dollars. He also stood at the origins of modern search, when Google was just learning how to correctly respond to user queries, and advertisers were taking their first steps in a new advertising direction.
Career
Huang returned to China in 2006 when Google was about to compete with local Baidu despite heavy internet censorship. He was soon fed up with the constant flight to Mountain View, Google’s headquarters, where he had to pitch every minor shift to Sergei Brin and Larry Page. His patience ran out after asking him to sign an agreement to change the color and size of Chinese characters to appear in search results. It’s time to move on. Huang resigned with plenty of opportunities behind him.
He founded his first company in 2007: the e-commerce site Ouku.com, which sold electronics and mobile phones to users. Profits grew, but he soon realized that Ouku was no different from hundreds of similar sites, so he sold the business in 2010. The following investment turned out to be more successful. The first was a service called Leqi, which helped companies place products on marketplaces like Taobao and JD.com. Huang then had a hand in creating a game studio that made RPG games for WeChat. Both ventures proved to be profitable, and Huang soon felt financially free.
He came up with the idea to create a PDD while observing two of China’s largest Internet companies: e-commerce giant Alibaba and powerful gaming studio Tencent Holdings, which also owned the WeChat messenger. With the growth of user activity, PDD received about $ 100 million in development, which allowed the company to increase the number of sellers and users. The total number of goods sold, or gross value, jumped from 100 million yuan per month in early 2016 to 4 billion yuan by the spring of 2017. Huang ambitiously says the startup is close to Vipshop, a fast-discount site that is listed on the New York Stock Exchange and has a capitalization of more than $ 8 billion.
For example, Blue Moon, one of China’s largest laundry detergent manufacturers, has posted significant sales growth on PDD since joining the platform last September. Now the service generates up to 10% of total revenue and has already caught up with JD.com in this indicator. The company bosses believe that PDD’s share will grow to 15% in the future. That, however, is still far from the leader – Tmall, giving out 60% of the revenue.
In turn, Huang is taking steps to address this problem. Last month, he expanded his grievance counseling staff to 700. About 200 of them sit at the head office. The verification system is very manageable: after receiving complaints, the PDD administration collects the necessary evidence and submits the issue to the seller for consideration. The rules for working with them are very severe, says Huang.
Most recently, PDD ended an active campaign against counterfeit sellers. The quality of the goods from these companies made some shoppers even turn up at the marketplace office and threaten PDD employees. In addition, the company has introduced a system of penalties for poor-quality delivery. All losses are transformed into coupons that the user can later spend on the site.
Project investors remain loyal to PDD. For example, Duan Yongping, the founder of billion-dollar vendors Oppo and Vivo, got to know Huang during his transition to Google. Since then, they have been in close contact. Duan says he is investing in the project with other investors because he feels the importance of buyers. He argues that many entrepreneurs focus too much on profit growth or global expansion. Another investor, Betty Wang, director of Advantech Capital, chose PDD among 20 other startups and only after personal use as a buyer, making sure that the chosen mechanics worked. She considered the choice of WeChat as the principal platform to be a very sensible move.
Juan is striving for new heights, but he does not intend to spend his entire life managing PDD. He states he has two role models: Lee Kun Yew and Benjamin Franklin. He respects Lee for transforming a country from a weak country into a state of the modern era. And she appreciates Franklin for overcoming challenges: “He left the business at 40. He became a scientist and a politician. It is the life path of a genius.”
