Gong Haiyan: plain jane factory worker to founder of China’s biggest dating site

Gong Haiyan is one of the most celebrated female tech entrepreneurs in China, having successfully founded Jiayuan (NASDAQ:DATE), China’s answer to Match.com, back in 2003. She served as its CEO through its IPO in May 2011 and until December 2012, when she voluntarily stepped down to begin another entrepreneurial journey.

Gong has since gone on to found another venture-backed company in education technology that currently operates two websites, 91waijiao for English learning services, and Tizi, an education resource and curriculum management site for elementary and junior high school students, their teachers, and parents.

Startup Grind Beijing, a participant in the May 2014 #40forward campaign by Google for Entrepreneurs, was very fortunate to Gong for an intimate fireside chat on Tuesday, May 27 at Beijing’s Tech Temple co-working space. Given her stature and gender, I was not surprised that a good third of the hundred-plus audience was female and well-versed in the Jiayuan story.

To start off, host Gordon Chen asks Gong how she came to name herself Xiaolongnu, or “Little Dragon Girl,” the name of a beautiful and much-adored heroine in one of the most beloved Chinese martial arts classics of all time, Legend of the Condor Heroes. It elicited some laughter from the audience, because Gong is famous for her plain appearance. She says:

First because my last name, Gong, contains the character for dragon, second because I am born in the year of the dragon, and third because on the Internet they call girls who look like me ‘dinosaur,’ which also contains the word Dragon. I knew it would be one of those nicknames that would at least warrant a second look, and even though there were many people who would email me and beg me not to ‘abuse’ their revered heroine’s nickname, I still stuck with it and here I am today.”

Ridiculed for being plain

The above story is Gong in a nutshell: direct and unapologetic, persistent and thoughtful. Unlike many of her peers who made it in the first wave of the internet gold rush in China during the late 90s and early 2000s, she was not the typical returnee entrepreneur who had received advanced degrees from prestigious universities abroad or at least studied engineering.

Her unlikely journey begins in Taoyuan county of Hunan province, in a poor farming family. She excelled in school, but a car accident when she was in junior high put the family in debt. Eager to rectify the family’s finances, she dropped out in the eleventh grade, convinced her father to borrow RMB 3,000 (about US$400 at the time) and opened up a store selling snacks and nicknacks to students.

To her surprise, the store made RMB 8,000 (roughly US$1,000) in profit that first year, and she was even more convinced that the decision to leave school had been a good one. Leaving the store in her family’s hands, she went to the southern coastal city of Zhuhai to work in a factory in search of greater riches and adventure. Although the work was numbing, after a few months, she was able to stand out by winning an essay contest for the factory’s internal newsletter due to her superior writing skills, and she worked a desk job for the next two years.

For Gong, chance occurrences seemed to direct a lot of the major changes in her life, and perhaps the most important one came when she was 21 years old. She realized that she left school too hastily after a visit from an old classmate.

“When he told me about what our other classmates were doing, enrolling in fancy universities and getting white-collar jobs, I thought to myself, I wasn’t stupider than any of them. If they can do it, I can do it too.”

She abruptly left Zhuhai and was determined to return to school. Although it was three years after she voluntarily dropped out, she got accepted at one of the most prestigious universities in China upon graduation – Beida, or Peking University in Beijing. She then continued graduate studies in news journalism at Fudan University in Shanghai, where the idea for Jiayuan was born. She was consistently a few years older than her male classmates and, much to the chagrin of her mother who fretted over her marriage prospects, found it difficult to date among her peers.

There were a lot of matchmaking websites at the time, but they all required users to pay for membership and were full of fake data. When she confronted one of the companies about their fraudulent practices, they refused to refund her money and even made fun of her appearance. Furious, she called a friend who knew a thing or two about websites and decided to make her own.

Non-entrepreneurs now considered unambitious

See more interviews in our Female Entrepreneurship series: