The guy who made Myspace fun now wants to bring toys to life

PowerCore founder and CEO Jia Shen is a self-diagnosed otaku and lover of toys.

In Japan, business cards are everything. Jia handed me his new card for PowerCore featuring an anime avatar of himself. It was complete with hair sweeping to the left and eyes full of entrepreneurial sparkle. “Plastic?” I asked confused. “Each of our cards has an NFC chip in it,” explained Jia, tapping the card to his phone. Within seconds Jia’s character was onscreen ready to do battle.

I wondered what type of special moves he had. The ability to bring massive scale? Viral marketing? How would his skills port into what he’s working on now?

Jia may best be known for founding RockYou, where he showed the world the power of social networks and how to grow really, really fast. For a time the startup was the largest ad network on Facebook, and even featured in Facebook’s first F8 conference.

California here I come

Jia moved to Silicon Valley in 2000. He politely describes it as a time when “everything was going to shit.” Within his first year he changed jobs three times because companies kept going out of business.

“Every time I changed jobs, I decided to change business models and tech stacks as well,” he says.

RockYou started as an experiment and grew into a monster. The concept was fundamentally simple, but revolutionary at the time. On Myspace, users could create a widget to upload photos or publish a slideshow to their page. Then friends could click a link to make their own.

This is 2005, in the days before startups could buy server horsepower from Amazon. RockYou was tripling in traffic week over week and taking down their host’s servers. “We were throwing money at them but they kicked us out,” laughs Jia. “We weren’t funded yet and couldn’t keep up with demand. I was applying for credit cards left and right.”

Jia might want to add bags under the eyes of his biz card avatar. “It was the hardest I ever worked in my life. We couldn’t sleep. Whenever I closed my eyes the servers would go down.”

It’s not all sunshine and buffets.

Jia scaled the business to serve over 100 million widgets a day and grew the team to over 200 people. Three companies later, he has acquired over 400 million users and raised over US$140 million. He also has done the hard things. “Up to about 150 people I tried as hard as possible to know every single person.” He describes the significant number of layoffs RockYou had to do to stay afloat as “fucking horrible.”

The firings led Jia to change his management style. He has some tips for any new entrepreneurs who ask – like, “it’s not all sunshine and buffets.” Now he stresses these three things:

1. Transparency

Jia suggests that leaders should be transparent about the financial situation a company is in.
Being transparent helps people “feel the hunger” and be thriftier. When teams are aware of the burn rate and other financials, if a change has to be made, people are not especially surprised.

Woody and Buzz would be proud