How Innovation Works Works: Lee Kai-Fu on Entrepreneurship in China

CEO and founder of Innovation Works, Lee Kai Fu, spoke at Qinghua University this past Saturday. Besides sharing his thoughts on mobile Internet trends, Lee also talked about how Innovation Works works. Don’t expect to learn any insider secrets or magic formulae leaked by Lee and his team. He gave a pretty general introduction on how his fund works, good enough for entrepreneurs to understand how Innovation Works can help scale their business from nothing to something.

Lee began by explaining that the investing landscape has changed. He attributes the boom in elastic cloud computing, social media marketing, and open source concept which brings the costs and time required for development and promotion. He said that with 1.5 million RMB (approximately USD $235,000), it allows founders to build a team to test out a product concept for about nine months. Lee explains that a typical team includes one CEO, one CTO, one user experience designer, and seven developers.

To Lee, the entrepreneur’s sweet spot is currently in the mobile Internet. For investors, the sweet spot is in early stage investing.

Lee says that entrepreneurs should focus most of their time building their product. He says that standalone entrepreneurs usually have to handle administration matters, like accounting, legal, recruiting, and permit registration which takes the focus away from the product.

But at Innovation Works, entrepreneurs don’t have to worry about these administration issues as they are taken care of. Innovation Works also has its own in-house designers, office spaces, and legal consultants to lighten their burden.

And on product development, Innovation Works adopts the lean start-up model. Entrepreneurs backed by Innovation Works are pushed to launch their minimal viable product (MVP) to the market to collect user data. Lee says that the MVP should take around three months to develop and emphasized that it doesn’t matter if the MVP has flaws, as long as it helps solve the problem that was identified by the entrepreneur.

The key for this step is to collect user data and iterate the product accordingly. He gave a simple AB testing example: If an entrepreneur can’t decide which colored fonts to use, test it by giving half of the users color A and the other half color B. If the data (time spent on site or bounce rate) reflected that color A is better, then it is obvious that color A should be used for all users. The process of build-measure-learn will continue as a cycle of improving the product.

From what I understand, Innovation Works is very particular with two criteria when choosing its investment:

1. Explosive growth in an industry
2. Talented entrepreneurs who will be driving the vision

Once these two criteria are met (on top of its other criteria, etc), Innovation Works is happy to provide funds to let the entrepreneurs develop their products, market it at low cost, gather data, and improve the product. If the product proves to be good, Innovation Works may invest in the start-up again.

Lee is skeptical that Chinese fresh graduates with little experience can be good entrepreneurs. Of course, his remarks caused quite a big reaction from the moderator and the crowd. The moderator listed a lot of examples of drop-out/fresh from school entrepreneurs, including Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg.

While Lee said that there might be a slim chance that there are such talents in China, he feels that it is more sensible, for now, to invest in founders who are proven or at least have working experience. He urged aspiring fresh graduate entrepreneurs to gain some experience first before setting up their own business. He says that it is an uphill battle for fresh graduates with little experience to fight against experienced entrepreneurs like Lei Jun.