'Serial entrepreneur' to deliver a sound device to the market

Like Nick Woodman, founder of GoPro, a business worth $2.25 billion that solves the inconvenience of using traditional cameras to videotape outdoor activities, Zhu Huaming in Beijing is trying to bring the best sound and music by developing a wireless smart headset that aims to be the first of its kind in the world.

The product is called VINCI, paying homage to Leonardo da Vinci and his quote "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication".

VINCI combines music player and headphones with no quality loss of music, targeted at the outdoor user.

According to Zhu, the first generation of the product will start pre-selling this month and will be officially launched in the Chinese market a few months later.

A rule breaker

The 30-year-old entrepreneur calls himself a rebel, a rule-breaker. He was a dropout from Michigan State University and later MIT, and he has been a "serial entrepreneur" for 10 years.

"I always want to improve how we communicate and connect with one another," Zhu said. "The philosophy of me doing business is simple: find a problem, solve it. I do things for their values."

"Think differently" is what Zhu emphasized.

Immediately after graduating from Tsinghua University in 2006, he got into a PhD program in material science at Michigan State University. He quit a year after because he sensed the vitality of Internet startups in China.

His first business was a social network website called tongxue.com. He did it from 2007 to 2010. It was the first social networking website for overseas Chinese college students. The website had more than 30 million users overall. It was one of the top three social networks in China in 2008. It raised three rounds of funding from venture capital firms and strategic investors.

After that Zhu did a product called MM - Mobile Messenger - which was the first generation of mobile messaging application, like "Wechat", and raised funding from top venture firms. He did it for two years.

Wearable Intelligence

"In 2012, I hit a point where I knew wearable intelligence is the next step for me. I then went to MIT for an MBA, which was a break for me to think about my next step," he said.

"My inspiration came from running along the Charles River. In the States, I love jogging while listening to music. It is very inconvenient to wrap an iPod or iPhone on the arm and have headphones connecting to the devices."

Speaking of why he is so sure of wearable intelligence devices, Zhu has his own theory.

"We always want to amplify the function of a certain part of our bodies in nature, I think it's part of human nature," he said.

He thought about putting devices on all body parts, from the head to the toe.

He thought about shoes, thinking that intelligent shoes can make people have better natural experiences. He thought about glasses, something like Google glasses, but he realized that the lenses are actually confining the vision to an extent.

"I want to amplify our five senses, liberating those parts and make us humans perform better in the nature," he said.

He later finalized his idea of the headphone because he realized that sound is the most fundamental thing through which we connect with people.

"It contains the most information and from headphones you can ingest a lot of information while doing other things at the same time," he said.

With the headset, users can have hi-fi experience without worrying about cables, bluetooth, wraps, etc.

Once he consolidated this idea, he quit his MBA program and found his two partners who shared the same values. They are Wu Wei, also a dropout from MIT and Ning Zhou, a graduate from Rhode Island School of Design.

They oscillated between doing it in Silicon Valley and doing it in China, and Zhu chose the latter.

"There are more natural advantages in producing hardware in Chinese factories since the chain is mature and cost is lower," he said.

He thought that the innovation ability in China is competitive, especially in the micro-innovation area.

"It's important to keep updating the product and always present the best to the people, like Xiaomi and Apple. In this sense, our product would have more landing capacity doing it in China," he said.

Vision for the Future

Zhu said that their targeted users are the Generation Z and Generation A (those who were born in the 1990s and 2000s).

"Our surveys showed that the VINCI (appeals to) Generation Z. They are adventurous to try new things," he said.

"Our product is a combination of hardware and software," he said.

Hardware wise, they strive to achieve the "ultimate" by "simplifying", making sure that the product has a simple look, user interface and a memorable logo. Software wise, music is their first step, and after that they will expand the function to be more social networking oriented.

"We are thinking of the function of making friends via music," he said. "We don't want to define and confine it now, it can be anything in the future."

yangyao@chinadaily.com.cn