I’ve been heavily involved in China’s digital startup arena for the past 20 years. Hundreds of entrepreneurs are starting up their new endeavors in Beijing’s ZhongGuanChun area everyday, where I have been living from the spring of 1998, when I accepted an offer to work in Microsoft China as a product marketing manager for Windows 2000 after my graduation of MBA from the Netherland.
My Passion has always been helping young entrepreneurs to be next founders of Tencent, Xiaomi or Meituan. So I started a social enterprise called Campus VC (www.xiaoyuanvc.com) in 2016 after being retired from my own startup Edutainment Toys, along with several friends from x-lab of Tsinghua University. In the past five years, Campus VC has been evolved into a global digital startup academy.
This article will share my thinking for the next phase of a startup community like Campus VC. I’ve published a book called, Zero to Hero, in the end of 2016. In that book I’ve provided a roadmap for young entrepreneurs to go, from play, to startup, to invest. After that book’s publication, I’ve been fascinated by which is the best way for young entrepreneurs to kickoff their tough life in startup struggle.
Gradually I start a meme called 3C digital asset, as I believe this is a good way for youth to understand and grasp essence of startup. 3C refers to Content, Code and Crypto. Let me explain in the below.
The purpose of a startup is to decouple founders’ time from customer discovery and value creation. Passive income is an important measure for how successful the startup is. Assets can generate passive income which make founders’ time spent unnecessary. Therefore entrepreneurs need to accumulate assets as a way for startups to succeed.
My thesis is digital asset is more precious than physical assets, even long before COVID strengthening it in 2020. From my reading of Albert Wenger’s book World After Capital, attention will be the most important capital in knowledge era. Only digital assets can attract attention, not physical assets.
Content refers to text, picture, sound and video, etc. Those are knowledges in its essence, i.e., signal rather than noise. In a more broad sense, intellectual property of trade mark, domain names, software copyright are content as well. Even those transaction data generated by Amazon’s ecommerce site, Uber’s travel service or browsers’ activity data in Facebook or Tik Tok are content. They are all bits of 0 and 1 in existence, but meaningful bits.
Code refers to software. I think software is essentially content as well, but a high level of content, which can be understood by computers and executed by computers. If we set Content base value to be 1, then Code base value will be 1000, as a machine programmed to do jobs for human is more valuable than something human need to read, understand and then to do jobs. Code is much more efficient then Content.
Crypto refers to decentralized software based on blockchain technology. I think Crypto is essentially Code as well, but a high level of code, which is governed by protocol not by a centralized person or organization. If we set Code base value to be 1000, then Crypto base value will be 1 million, as human can only been coordinated by Crypto protocol to reach a true global scale of collaboration, which is called “ownership economy” by Jesse Walden.
3C digital assets are my core course to teach entrepreneurship in leading Chinese Universities. From my teaching, I gradually find we need to help youth to be creator of Content, to be builder of Code, and to be owner of Crypto projects.
Creator of content has been explained by Li Jin in her excellent article of creator economy. Though her definition of creator may be far exceeding of content creator, I do think content is essential to gain attention (i.e. traffic) in nowadays. Although the entry barrier of content creation isn’t high enough, this is a good first step for youth to take forward.
Builders of Code are referring to programers to do coding, designers to provide feeling and product managers to provide idea. Owner of Crypto means the most important of startup capability is to have a grand vision to reveal leadership, like Jack Ma of Alibaba or Vitalik Buterin of Ethereum.
Besides teaching, peer, challenge and feedback is important to youth to learn entrepreneurship. Therefore I come out three key skills for youth to master in new age of startup: search, discovery and output.
Search is very unique to digital assets, as you can’t search physical assets. But you can’t search something you don’t know. Once we enter a passion community, we can discover key insight from chatting with member experts, out of our little box (so-called echo chamber). However, there are still too much things to learn for everyone nowadays, so output is the most important for us to learn anything.
For example, if I want to learn programming, I go to a library, there are simply too many books are yelling to me: from newbie to expert, etc,. But I usually go from newbie to giving up as there are too many moving pieces all the time and the learn curve is too intimidated.
We are learning as if walking in a maze and the best way is to start from the exit backward. If we find something we don’t know from building something as “output first”, we can certainly search and ask experts. This is the best way to learn effectively.
I have sketched a framework as below, for global digital startup community, including all the points raised above.
How we can make the above framework into a digital product, so youth everywhere can easily access to abundant opportunities offered by global digital economy. I’m thinking about the next phase of startup community (e.g., Campus VC community).
From reading of “The rise of community-curated knowledge networks” by Sari Azout, I find we are thinking about the same thing and I will share what I’m currently thinking on how to realize the next phase.
Community platform is the backbone of online community, and I found Discord is very attractive. Peth of MetaGame has shown me creative ways to use Discord emojis, channels and bots to cultivate and grow a vibrant emerging crypto community. Knowledge management tool called Logseq, developed by tiensonqin, is my toy right now to play with, to gain first-hand experience.
Why I’m interested in Logseq? I find Founder Library made by Steve Schlafman is quite useful. However the base module of Founder Library are articles instead of cards in knowledge base like GetGuru.com, so it’s difficult to absorb, update and remix. I hope Logseq will provide me more granularity of knowledge to manipulate, yet to see, as I’m still new to it.
I’m thinking to combine Discord (H/T to Peth) with Logseq, and enhanced by SourceCred by Dandelion Mané as an effective capital allocation tool to award those knowledge curation work by community members.
It’s certainly an experiment right now, and I don’t know what the result will be. Nevertheless, I’m excited for this experiment and looking for you to join me in this cool journey. Just reply a few words and let me know how we can work together, as I’m a big believer of #givefirst. Thanks,
Jason