4 entrepreneurial lessons from former Groupon CEO

Prenetics CEO Danny Yeung at Hong Kong’s Rise conference 2015. Photo credit: Rise.

To entrepreneurs in Hong Kong, Danny Yeung needs no introduction. But for those who may not be familiar with Hong Kong’s favorite serial innovator, Danny’s long list of accomplishments is irrefutably impressive.

His entrepreneurial journey began at the age of 12 when he started selling baseball cards, learning the importance of buying low and selling high, and negotiating for the best deal in the process. Since then, Danny’s varied ventures have seen him selling Hong Kong-style desserts in San Francisco, closing multi-billion dollar furniture deals in Vegas, and, most famously, selling his group buying website UBuyIBuy.com to Groupon only six months after founding it, with zero ecommerce experience beforehand.

I had the pleasure of sitting down with Danny recently to ask him about his incredible journey. Here are a few of the valuable lessons he’s learned.

You don’t need prior industry experience to be a successful entrepreneur

Danny is already working on his fourth company now and the one recurring theme across his resume is that with each new venture he pursued, he never had prior experience in the field it operated in.

His first real venture was franchising Hong Kong-style mango desserts in San Francisco. Living in California, Danny observed the large Chinese population growing overseas in the city and he realized that if he picked the right product with a high brand awareness, it could essentially sell itself. He saw an opportunity with Hui Lau Shan, the Hong Kong-style mango dessert chain.

Without hesitation, he cold-called the owners and offered to pay them for the franchise in America. The dessert chain was a family oriented business, so they had nothing to lose and offered him the deal.

Danny’s second venture was in the completely unrelated hotel furniture business. Once again, after studying the market and realizing the great demand for affordable customized furniture solutions, he cold-called furniture manufacturers in China. His persistence paid off when he landed a US$5 billion project to furnish 2,000 hotel rooms for MGM in Las Vegas.

Entrepreneurship is a mindset and to be successful, you need grit, perseverance, and thick skin.

Danny’s third entrepreneurial pursuit is the one he is most famous for: his group buying company UBuyIBuy.com which he sold to Groupon only six months after he launched it in Hong Kong. Again, he had no prior experience in ecommerce or retail for that matter, but he found an idea that he could replicate quickly in a developing market.

After his exit, Danny once again got the entrepreneurial itch and, true to form, started looking into industries he hadn’t had experience in before, where he could make a significant impact. The two that came up were education and healthcare. He picked healthcare, the more specialized of the two, because not many entrepreneurs would dare to enter that space without prior experience. Within 24 months of taking over Prenetics, his company is now the largest genetic testing digital health company in Southeast Asia employing over 55 people.

The moral of the story: Entrepreneurship is a mindset and to be successful, you need grit, perseverance, and thick skin. What you don’t need is prior work experience in that particular field.

Ideas matter, but it is all about execution

In December of 2010, after a close friend sent him the headline that Groupon had just raised a monster US$950 million round (valued at US$4.75 billion), Danny immediately saw the value in their business model.

Always be selling, but do your homework first

The customer is always right