How an entrepreneur with two failed ventures went on to clone Rocket Internet’s tech hub in Asia

Joshua Kevin is a former community manager for KakaoTalk Indonesia and blogger for Tech in Asia. He is now working on Bridge Inc, helping startups in the Indonesian market.

What do you do when you’re commanded by Rocket Internet to tear down a 160-person powerhouse tech center responsible for the launch of over 50 global online ventures within a 12-month period? You clone it.

“Company shutdowns come fast and furious at Rocket, often without any notice,” says Sean Liao (pictured above).

Liao has been at the center of a tech revolution in Asia during the last six years. He was co-founder and managing director of Rocket Internet China where he built and managed a tech center that brought to life over 50 global Rocket online properties including behemoths Lazada and Zalora. He was also personally in charge of building and initially operating the first Airbnb of China, Airizu, as well as executive producing the ill-fated Pinterest clone, Pinspire. Both of these companies, along with Rocket China, were shut down.

“After just 18 months of operation, Airizu was just a signature away from being Rocket’s first success story in China,” says Liao. The eight-figure term sheet put on the table by a major online property rental company was rejected by Rocket HQ as being too low. “I guess we needed another ‘0’ on the term sheet,” Liao jokes.

He has come back swinging and is now handling technology development for ex-Rocket executives worldwide through his new company, Imaginato. “I hate to say it, but I’ve been a part of one too many failed ventures, especially at Rocket. On the flipside, I’ve gained an enormous amount of invaluable insight that hopefully will help my clients succeed,” Liao says.

Entrepreneurship, technology, and independence

Born and raised in the U.S., Liao got his first computer at the age of nine and began teaching himself programming. He built his first database application soon after, and an animated game before a year was up. “Computing has been a strong point of focus for me since fourth grade. When I’m on a computer, I tend to zone out and go into my zombie-mode,” Liao says.

“I was exposed to entrepreneurship and independence at a young age,” he says. His father was self-employed, starting multiple businesses, while his mother encouraged Liao to generate his own spending money doing things around the neighborhood. “As a young teenager, I was delivering newspapers at 5am, mowing lawns, and painting houses. My friends had no idea.”

After college, Liao dabbled in tech consulting before joining a startup. His first role at that startup involved building online enterprise applications in what Liao refers to as “crazy, unreasonable timeframes.”

“I spent my first few years there programming 18 hours a day, catching a few hours of sleep under my desk. No weekends, so I could make milestone after milestone.” His effort made an impact as the startup matured into a strong cash flow business. Later, Liao would engage with several Indian outsourcing firms to help accelerate progress on those same software systems he had architected. He found the quality appalling and vowed he could do better. “I had been visiting China for about five or six years by that time and saw such transformations year after year. It seemed like the right time to go and try it out,” says Liao.

In 2008, Liao moved his family to China to establish, at first, a small development extension to his U.S. company. The experiment proved successful, and soon the extension grew into a full-fledged tech center, servicing other U.S.-based clients. With another entrepreneurial itch to scratch, Liao pitched an idea back to headquarters to do tech business incubation from China. The result: a social and mobile gaming company co-founded by Liao that raised $1.5 million in funding, and a Chinese group buying site. Around the same time, Groupon was looking to expand into China, and Rocket Internet was handling its expansion.

Lessons learned

Cloning Rocket’s Launch center