6 Source Code Capital Portfolio CEOs Make "36 Under 36" List of Remarkable Founders

On November 24, 2020, 36Kr released its "36 Under 36: Remarkable Entrepreneurs of 2020" list. The sole criterion — "excellence far surpassing peers" — measured candidates across four dimensions: innovation, resilience, drive, and influence, to identify young forces shaping the future and changing the world.

Among them, six CEOs from Source Code Capital portfolio companies made the list: Zhenhong Zhao, founder & CEO of Baibu; Jinshang Tang, founder & CEO of Wanwudezhi; Junbin Zhang, founder & chairman of Cloud Whale; Jinhong Deng, founder & CEO of Yimutian; Peng Wang, founder & CEO of Juli Xinfang; and Tong Li, founder & CEO of Keenon Robotics.

Below is 36Kr's analysis of the listed companies:

Four years ago, 36Kr launched the 36 Under 36 series to honor 36 individuals who demonstrated "vision,格局, and innovation far exceeding their peers," rotating biennially between investors and entrepreneurs. Following this tradition, this year's focus fell on entrepreneurs: candidates had to be born after January 1, 1984, and were typically founders, co-founders, or key figures driving exceptional companies with significant technological or economic value.

Over the past year, we have deeply felt the profound connection between commercial life and the era at large. Facing unexpected disease, unpredictable international relations, and the cascading effects that followed, each of us has experienced unprecedented "specks of dust" and "mountains." We used to occasionally lament that those born after the 1980s seemed to lack a certain "sense of the times," that it was hard to find elements of fierce struggle against fate or history, rendering success and failure, gain and loss, almost trivial. But 2020 reshaped many things. While tens of thousands of startups faced broken capital chains, massive personnel changes, or even complete business pivots, a cohort of companies continued to radiate intense vitality.

This is how this list of 36 young entrepreneurs came to be. Compared to the 36 entrepreneurs selected by 36Kr two years prior, this year's class displays a more distinctly contemporary character. Most of their companies were founded between 2014 and 2016, the golden age of densest entrepreneurial activity in the past decade; their fields cluster in new consumption, new technology, enterprise services, and healthcare, with typical platform companies now comparatively rare; their average age is 33.2.

Born in 1990, Jinshang Tang founded the Wanwudezhi app at the end of 2018, aiming to reshape the cultural artifacts industry, establish industry standards, and one day become a inheritor of Eastern culture — making cultural artifacts破圈 into a trend of national heritage.

As Gen Z comes of age, the demographic for smart home appliances has grown increasingly young. The "Little White Whale" developed by Junbin Zhang and his team liberated consumers' hands, ranking among the top 25 of the 100 most beloved products among young people. This Double Eleven, within 30 seconds of the final payment window opening, Cloud Whale's Tmall flagship store shot to first place in its category.

In the new home services platform sector, Peng Wang's Juli Xinfang pioneered a high-education consultant service model, providing users with one-stop home buying services encompassing big data property search, city-wide viewing, and online purchase.

Focused on industrial internet, Zhenhong Zhao founded Baibu at the end of 2013, using next-generation information technology to connect upstream and downstream players in the textile and apparel industry, reducing procurement costs for enterprises, improving supply chain coordination efficiency, and increasing revenue.

Jinhong Deng of Yimutian saw the enormous growth potential in rural markets, focusing on the original agricultural goods market and deeply cultivating agricultural industry chain services. He built an agricultural product B2B e-commerce platform providing transaction matching services for scaled agricultural operators, facilitating the smooth circulation of quality agricultural products.

Believing that traditional manual labor will be largely replaced by robots in the future, Tong Li of Keenon Robotics entered the indoor intelligent delivery robot and low-speed autonomous driving space. Keenon has developed multiple commercial service robot products now deployed in nearly 500 cities across China, as well as in the United States, Germany, Canada, Spain, Italy, Greece, Belgium, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and other overseas markets.

Growing up in a year when the commercial world trembled so violently, they are unfortunate; yet in some sense, they are also fortunate. A Kauffman Foundation study indicates that 57% of Fortune 500 companies were founded during economic recessions or bear markets. It is science, not sentiment, that gives us greater reason to believe: valleys are the optimal forge for the strong.

In grand times, whether an individual achieves more through personal striving or historical process is often indeterminate. But without doubt, only those who believe in change, adapt to change, and even skillfully wield change will gain greater odds of winning. As Engels said: "What we see before us is a picture of an endless entanglement of relations and interactions, in which nothing remains what, where, and as it was, but everything moves, changes, comes into being, and passes away."

Source: 36Kr (Read full article)