Reflection On Entrepreneurship In College

A lesson from my 5 wantrepreneurship in college

Entrepreneurship. No, wantrepreneurship.

I’ve founded and assisted 7+ startups in e-commerce, O2O platform, clean technology, and program trading. 5 of those happened while I was still in college.

Was I a serial entrepreneur? No, I think I was just a wannabe entrepreneur.

A lesson from my journey of wantrepreneurship

My journey as a wannabe entrepreneur was fun, but in the end, all of my 5 startups had failed.

My ventures had many reasons that contributed to their failure, but one critical problem had consistently been at the center of all other reasons for failure. People weren’t fully committed and had “backups”.

My backup was to continue the course of my student life. Many of my ex co-founders also had other backups. So we failed. But my journey of

No. And there was another guy — a high-ranking Chinese official (and his wife) — who wasn’t committed to any of the work but held more equity shares of the company than those held by the two leaders combined.

The leaders of the company asked me to join them and help their high-net-worth Chinese clients to send their academically underperforming kids abroad to study at American and European schools. Sounds fishy, right? I know, but I did anyway and built a pretty large network of American universities that are looking to take rich Chinese students without giving much thought to their previous academic performances.

I (probably) had joined them on the sole fact that a high-ranking Chinese official (or his wife) was the largest shareholder. I had falsely believed that any business with guanxi in China will do well.

It turned out, the Chinese guy I so trusted as a great guanxi wasn’t “all in” and had neither financial nor operational commitment. The business closed within a few months after my joining.

Indeed, we must avoid partners who rely solely on connections, especially if they aren’t fully