When I Was One Step Away from the Founder | Z Talk

Z Talk is ZhenFund's column for sharing insights.

Launched in 2018, the Ostrich Club is an exclusive, closed-door entrepreneurship club co-hosted by HSG and ZhenFund. It has successfully completed four cohorts.

With an average acceptance rate below 1%, the Ostrich Club has consistently practiced small-group, closed-door sessions and lifetime membership. Through in-depth dialogues with industry leaders and exchanges with outstanding peers, you'll find your fellow travelers on the entrepreneurial journey and embark on your own path.

This marks the first time Ostrich Club members' startup stories have been made public. They are either successful serial entrepreneurs or founding executives at startups. With their consent, four alumni from previous cohorts shared with us the decisive moment — that final push — that led them to start their own companies.

Applications for the fifth HSG-ZhenFund Ostrich Club "AI+ Global Entrepreneurship Camp" are closing soon. We look forward to galloping alongside the fastest, most perceptive among you.

Tony Ren

Member of the fourth Ostrich Club cohort, serial entrepreneur

Founder and CEO of Recurve, received angel investment from Sequoia Capital/ZhenFund

Founder and CEO of Yimian Data

When Tony joined the fourth Ostrich Club cohort, he had already made up his mind — he was going to start his second company.

He brought mature entrepreneurial experience. In 2014, he founded Yimian Data as founder and CEO in Shenzhen. At the start, the company rented a single open-plan room of less than 100 square meters in a "dilapidated" four-story factory building in Shenzhen's tech park, with a team of fewer than 10 people. Through rapid growth, Yimian Data's products and services gradually matured and scaled. Its clients ranged from well-known global primary and secondary market investment institutions to dozens of multinational consumer goods companies including P&G, L'Oréal, Nestlé, and Mars.

In 2019, Yimian Data was fully acquired by Ascential, a multinational group focused on data services, becoming an important branch and strategic presence for the group in China. The company moved into a brand new 3,000-square-meter office right next to that original small building. By then, Tony was managing a China and Asia-Pacific R&D team of 400 people. Later, Ascential's Digital Commerce division was integrated into the new brand Flywheel. As Amazon's largest advertising partner, Flywheel helps brands manage hundreds of billions of dollars in advertising on Amazon annually.

"By 2023, I had already decided to start another company, but I didn't yet have a concrete direction for the product form. The entire Ostrich Club experience was constantly helping me refine, validate, and simultaneously falsify my various ideas."

The accumulation of past experiences led Tony to focus on "providing data services for enterprises," and gave him a general sense that his next entrepreneurial chapter would center on more foundational Data Infra. But what kind of infra exactly? At what level? In what form should infra and AI be combined?

The answers gradually became clear through guest presentations at the Ostrich Club and discussions with fellow members. "Although I come from a technical background, I hadn't personally hands-on led large model R&D work, so I wasn't 100% certain about the boundaries of model performance, actual implementation costs, or resource consumption. But in our cohort, two-thirds were classmates engaged in AI research and development at major tech companies or well-known startups. After in-depth exchanges with them, I gained much clearer judgment about these matters."

AI offers significant empowerment for Data Infra, particularly in tasks that previously required substantial human effort, where existing large model capabilities can drive efficiency gains. Another small delusion was dispelled — his hope of relying solely on large model capabilities to complete all data processing and orchestration without human intervention. Based on the general consensus, this was unlikely to happen anytime soon. So on the product front, Tony abandoned the route of fully depending on AI agents for end-to-end task completion, and instead firmly chose to use co-pilot to enhance data processing and governance efficiency.

As a serial entrepreneur, Tony came to the Ostrich Club with clear purpose. "Because I've started a company before, and the previous one encountered some limitations and bottlenecks, I wanted to address those issues this time around."

After the Ostrich Club concluded, he founded Recurve, an AI-native data orchestration platform. Regarding choice of registration location, corporate structure, market, and investors, he followed several suggestions from HSG mentors. "Having a global mindset from Day 1, choosing global markets, and building a global corporate structure — this was enormously helpful to me."

Another particularly memorable session for Tony came from Yusen Dai, managing partner at ZhenFund, who shared a retrospective on his own entrepreneurial journey. "An entrepreneur's inner journey through different stages of a company, facing different difficulties and choices — this is nearly impossible to access through other means. Books and interviews always carry some degree of polish and beautification. But in a safe, private setting like the Ostrich Club, Yusen's sharing was extraordinarily candid. Experiencing entrepreneurship immersively alongside him, I would constantly think: how would I approach this? How would I solve it? Through this one-to-one comparison, I examined the blind spots in my own thinking."

Before coming to the Ostrich Club, Tony described himself as having only "a stone." At the Ostrich Club, he carved that stone into "the most ideal sculpture in his mind."

Yili Lin

Member of the first Ostrich Club cohort

Founder and CEO of BodyPark, received angel investment from Sequoia Capital/ZhenFund

Former VP of Product and GM of AI Innovation Division at Mobvoi

"The Ostrich Club's greatest help to me was piercing that layer of window paper. At the time, I had worked at Mobvoi for six years and had gradually developed the desire to start my own business. Though the idea grew stronger, I still lacked a clear timeline, and the confidence and momentum to take the first step. The Ostrich Club was the catalyst that finally made me pull the trigger."

Drawn to "creating products people love and find exciting from scratch," Lin left Boston Consulting Group in 2014 to join Mobvoi, which had been founded just two years prior. A decade later, Mobvoi — a company accompanied by both Sequoia and ZhenFund throughout its journey — successfully listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange's Main Board, becoming the "first AIGC stock."

As a founding executive in product, Lin experienced Mobvoi's journey from 0 to 1 to 10, rising from product manager to VP of Product to business unit leader. He led teams to launch a series of AI smart hardware and software products including the Xiaowen AI voice assistant, TicWatch smartwatch, and TicMirror smart vehicle console. The first TicWatch smartwatch created in 2015 became a global Top 4 smartwatch brand immediately upon launch. Each generation won world-class industrial design awards, with shipments in the millions. "As an executive one level removed from the founder, fighting through challenges all the way, I could consider myself perpetually in a 'semi-entrepreneur' state."

But at the Ostrich Club's very first session, Bob Xu (founder of ZhenFund) directly asked everyone in the room, "What is entrepreneurship? What is it for?"

Students gave various answers: to innovate and change the world, to realize dreams, to create user value, and so on.

"You're all right, and you're all wrong!" Xu said. Entrepreneurship must be for equity. Having ownership is what makes it entrepreneurship. Executives who work for others, strictly speaking, aren't entrepreneurs.

Those words carried weight — "It really struck me, almost felt like a slap in the face." At the end of the day, many highly-paid talents don't bear responsibility for outcomes. Lin recalled, "I felt this was very fundamental. Many corporate executives do hold considerable equity, but it certainly carries different weight from founder's share. When you're not the one holding the bag at the end, the level of risk and challenge you face is completely different — and of course, so is the potential upside."

Xu's words made Lin more eager to fully embrace the responsibility of the founder role. "My understanding of ownership in that statement has only deepened over the three-plus years of building BodyPark."

Not long after completing the Ostrich Club, Lin resigned from Mobvoi and founded BodyPark, an AI-powered fitness and wellness technology company, in 2021. Mobvoi founder Zhifei Li was also inspired by Bob Xu and Wang Qiang to return to China and start his company. "I'm especially grateful to and admire Zhifei. The year I decided to start my company, I was roughly the same age as when Zhifei returned to found Mobvoi. At that point in time, you just want to do something yourself, and feel that you can make it happen."

The first Ostrich Club cohort had fewer than twenty members, sharing, exchanging, and befriending one another in a safe, private environment. "We sat in a small room, listening up close to Cheng Wei, Huiwen Wang, Nan Zhang and others share, exchange, and answer questions — this experience transcends time." "The cognitive caliber of HSG and ZhenFund guests was truly high. Notes I took then still yield new insights every time I revisit them."

When BodyPark went through difficult periods, these Ostrich Club classmates and friends gave him tremendous support. Every time he visited Wu Xu (member of the first Ostrich Club cohort, founder of Maoyan), Xu would offer perspectives from completely different angles, along with many resources. Numerous other Ostrich Club classmates also provided encouragement and help on direction, organization, and fundraising.

At a cross-cohort event, Lin met Songfan Yang (member of the third Ostrich Club cohort, founder and CEO of KaiKai Huacai). Before Mobvoi and BodyPark, Lin's experience focused more on software products and AI smart hardware, while Yang was a user growth expert in K12 before entrepreneurship. "Though our products and businesses appeared different on the surface, after talking with Yang, I realized there was fundamental common ground," gaining deeper understanding of customer acquisition, unit price, and conversion rates. "This continuing, cross-cohort Ostrich Club organization, with regular reunions, provides long-term support that brings everyone back to a warm state and creates new exchanges."

The most important things in entrepreneurship are the courage to start and the perseverance to continue. "Beyond the level of 'technique,' what the Ostrich Club gave me was more at the level of 'principle' — including the nature of human beings and the world, closer to the first principles of entrepreneurship."

Songfan Yang

Member of the third Ostrich Club cohort, serial entrepreneur

Founder and CEO of KaiKai Huacai, received angel investment from HSG & ZhenFund

Former head of AI Engineering Institute at TAL Education Group

"The Ostrich Club helped me find the source of motivation for my second startup." Before joining the Ostrich Club, he had given up his associate professorship at Sichuan University to come to Beijing and go all-in on entrepreneurship, founding FaceThink, an AI emotion recognition technology company. After experiencing rapid growth, FaceThink was acquired by TAL in 2017.

Yang subsequently joined TAL as head of the AI Engineering Institute, leading a 400+ person team and investing over 100 million yuan in AI+education technology and business model innovation. Among these, the next-generation AI open platform developed and opened more than 300 AI technology interfaces across computer vision, speech, natural language processing, and data mining, while the dual-teacher AI small-class model served over 1,000 institutions externally.

He never stopped thinking about entrepreneurship. If he left TAL to start a second company, where would the entrepreneurial drive come from? Wang Qiang's lecture at the Ostrich Club on "Aesthetics and Creativity" made him aware of a higher-order spiritual need.

During his time at the Ostrich Club, entrepreneurial motivation gradually built up within him. He keenly perceived the enormous potential of the silver economy: as China's population ages, middle-aged and elderly people's demand for high-quality cultural, entertainment, educational, and social experiences continues to grow, representing massive market opportunity. In October 2020, the second month after the Ostrich Club concluded, Yang set sail again in Beijing, launching his second startup in the silver economy space, with angel investment from HSG and ZhenFund.

In early entrepreneurial notes, Yang wrote: "Is there a more sustainably developing enterprise, and a matching capability growth curve?" He called such organizations "H2 organizations," directly pursuing Happiness and Health, with fulfilling and enriching work processes that also allow participants to gain financial returns.

He believed serving the silver-haired population was precisely such an enterprise — one that could help parents' generation users improve their quality of life while also giving service providers a sense of achievement and fulfillment. "All our company's culture and thinking centers on valuing these two things: happiness and health. Employees must work happily to serve our parents' generation students well and bring them joy too. Short-term results require hard work, but in the long run, entrepreneurship requires lasting and sustainable self-driven motivation."

In its fourth year, KaiKai Huacai has developed into a comprehensive platform serving the diverse needs of the silver-haired population, starting from middle-aged and elderly cultural entertainment education, with the mission of "using love and technology to make good products for parents." Courses cover Chinese and Western cultural subjects including calligraphy, traditional Chinese painting, vocal music, piano, and saxophone, having cumulatively served over 3 million students with total teaching hours exceeding 20 million. With artificial intelligence technology as its core driver, KaiKai Huacai adopts an integrated online-offline same-city model, comprehensively covering silver-haired groups' needs in interest exploration, social interaction, cultural tourism, entertainment, and health wellness. Over the next three years, the company plans to establish 1,000 offline same-city clubs nationwide, enabling coordinated development between online courses and offline same-city clubs to help more silver-haired groups embark on the brilliant chapters of their lives.

Liang Li

Member of the first Ostrich Club cohort

VP of Product at Geek+

"The most valuable part of the Ostrich Club is the sharing and reflections from major figures at different stages of entrepreneurship. Guest speakers in the first Ostrich Club cohort included Xiaohongshu founder Wenchao Mao, Xiaohong Chen founding partner of H Capital, and others," whose sharing provided great inspiration for those wanting to do something with independent boundaries. In Li's view, Ostrich Club members are all specialists in their respective roles, not lacking in professional knowledge and skills. But exposure to high-level sharing from senior figures brought more elevated perspectives and insights.

Another key factor for entrepreneurs: if you receive support from Sequoia and ZhenFund at the earliest angel stage, it becomes easier to make up your mind and go all in.

"Early-stage launch is the most difficult — it wastes time, wastes opportunity, wastes windows. Entrepreneurship needs to move fast within a window; sometimes when the window passes, the opportunity is gone. Quickly securing that first funding is itself a form of directional validation for entrepreneurs."

All above content is published with members' consent.

Launched in 2018, the Ostrich Club is a premium closed-door entrepreneurship club co-hosted by HSG and ZhenFund. It has successfully completed four cohorts.

The Ostrich Club is a globally-oriented entrepreneurial leadership development platform, bringing together the deep wisdom of industry leaders including Neil Shen, founding and managing partner of HSG; Bob Xu, founder of ZhenFund; and Wang Qiang, co-founder of ZhenFund and president of the Ostrich Club.

The mentor team comprises founders and core executives of numerous unicorn companies, as well as renowned experts across industries. Past mentors include Cheng Wei, Jifeng Dai, Wenyuan Dai, Jinfeng Huang, Zheng Huang, Zexiang Li, Zhifei Li, Chuanjun Liu, Wenchao Mao, Huiwen Wang, Bing Xu, Hui Zuo, and others.

Applications for the fifth HSG-ZhenFund Ostrich Club "AI+ Global Entrepreneurship Camp" are closing soon. We welcome aspiring future entrepreneurs committed to the "AI+ Global Markets" direction to apply.

We are eager to gallop alongside the fastest, most perceptive among you in this global wave of AI entrepreneurship.

Application Information

Target Applicants:

Corporate executives, technical talents, and industry leaders committed to AI entrepreneurship, as well as passionate, idea-driven emerging talent from universities and research institutions.

Program Dates:

Starting August 24, 2024, ending September 8, 2024, held over 3 consecutive weekends, 6 full days total.

Location:

Beijing or Shanghai, in person. To ensure effectiveness, the program requires in-person attendance; no online participation option will be offered.

Cost:

Free of charge. The Ostrich Club charges no fees to admitted members, makes no demands, and places no restrictions on members accepting investment from any other institutions or individuals.

How to Apply:

Scan the QR code below or click "Read More" to fill out the application form. Applications open immediately; the deadline is July 21. We will conduct interviews and send admission notifications throughout July — please be patient.

This Ostrich Club cohort will continue the Referrer Award. Applicants should truthfully fill in the referrer/referring organization's name and contact information in the "Ostrich Club Application Form." Once your referred applicant is officially admitted to the Ostrich Club as a member, you as the referrer will receive a 10,000 yuan "Referrer Award" bonus!

Join the Ostrich Club, and let AI take us faster and farther.

Text by Wendi

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