Wei Meizhong: Why Did I Start a Company?

The following is an open letter from Wei Meizhong, Chairman and CEO of Every Moment Technology (Meike).

April 28, 2020 — this was no ordinary day. Dahua Technology officially announced that I was leaving the company after fifteen years! Many friends reached out to ask why. Some speculated that I was going off to start my own business.

First, I want to thank my alma mater. Its unconventional teaching system gave me so many dreams. Second, I want to thank Dahua for giving me the chance to realize those youthful dreams. I thank my former colleagues at Dahua — it was their support that carried me to where I am today. Finally, I thank my family for enduring my endless self-imposed restlessness.

Many people don't understand why I would start a business at nearly fifty years old. Walking away from a senior executive position at a well-known company, stepping out of my comfort zone, heading into an unknown world — my family has been asking me this too, and it's truly a question that gives one pause.

Over thirty years ago, I was still on campus studying accounting. When I took my first computer course, a sudden inspiration struck me, and I posed two questions:

1. Once computers are fully applied in enterprise management, could they handle everything from recording vouchers to generating financial statements?
2. When our work becomes highly computerized, could the accounting closing period be something other than once a month — could it automatically close once a day?

With these two questions — also my dreams — I was assigned in 1990 to a unit in my hometown township, where I stayed for five years, passed the CPA exam, and arrived in Hangzhou at the end of 1995. Over the following decade-plus, I worked at a well-known private enterprise, a foreign enterprise, and a university-affiliated company. Though I never had the opportunity to realize the dreams from my school days, I kept searching for chances to teach myself about enterprise informatization on the side, because I believed that one day the opportunity to fulfill my dreams would come, and I had to be ready. I came to Dahua in 2004. Back then, Dahua was still small — just 120 million RMB in annual sales. But the opportunity was excellent: they put me in charge of ERP implementation right away! I was in unfamiliar territory, and the challenge was immense. The task was to launch the inventory and accounting modules within one month, and complete full ERP rollout within a year. The real killer was that the supply chain site and finance site didn't even have network connectivity. Through sheer effort, and despite never having used an ERP before, I pulled off the implementation. At the end of 2007, I led the team to switch ERP systems in just 20 days! Then again in 2014, the company spent a year switching ERP systems once more. I'm proud that many of the finance, IT, and HR backbone talents I trained and developed are still there today, working toward Dahua's great goals! And those who left have found even better paths for growth!

In my first eight years at Dahua, I led the team to初步 realize my first youthful dream. In the eight years that followed, while continuously optimizing that first dream, I also kept conceiving and experimenting with the second. Every Moment Technology was born from these experiments! I had originally wanted to turn this dream into a new industry within Dahua, but unfortunately it was too far removed from the core business, so Every Moment had to develop independently. From that moment on, there was no turning back.

Every Moment Technology's first product — Every Moment Reimbursement — is essentially an expense data purifier. It collects scenario-based expense data, filters it layer by layer according to standard rules, and ultimately forms accounting data that flows into the accounting system! Thanks to the trust of many peers, this product has been adopted by many medium and large enterprises. Dahua was Every Moment Reimbursement's first major customer.

Every Moment's second product is the accounting electronic archive system, launched in the second half of last year. Already a number of enterprises have gone live with it, and many have saved considerable human resources by no longer printing electronic invoices, bank electronic receipts, and internally generated vouchers. This product was built entirely for paperless finance — it is both an accounting archive system and a storage layer for integrated business-finance data.

Every Moment's third product is procurement collaboration and invoicing collaboration, which effectively solves the problem of how procurement data can be automatically purified into accounting data.

Every Moment's fourth product is sales collaboration and invoicing collaboration, which effectively solves the problem of how sales data can be automatically purified into accounting data.

Going forward, Every Moment will continue to roll out a series of data purification platforms based on SaaS cloud architecture, serving enterprises in their goal of real-time automatic purification of business data into accounting data, ultimately helping enterprises achieve daily closing and changing the century-old accounting standard of monthly closing!

In short, I hope Every Moment Technology can distill my youthful dreams and Dahua's practical experience into a series of SaaS cloud platform products, enabling more enterprises to achieve cloud finance, cloud shared services, and cloud office — at low cost and high efficiency!

Oasis Capital is a new-generation venture capital firm in China, dedicated to discovering the most vital entrepreneurs of the next decade and growing alongside them to create long-term value. "Nurturing Vitality" is Oasis's vision and mission. This vitality is both the direction of structural transformation in our era and the force of resilience and evolution within entrepreneurs. Oasis Capital focuses on early and growth-stage investments, with individual ticket sizes ranging from $3 million to $30 million, concentrating on education, healthcare, enterprise services, and other technology-enabled service sectors, supporting China's new service upgrade driven by technology.