Kuwo CEO follows her dream

Dressed casually in a red T-shirt and jeans, Huai Qi looks more like a college student than CEO of an information technology company with more than 100 employees.

When Huai recalls the dilemma she faced after graduating from Stanford University in the United States about whether to accept a consulting job in the US with a promising salary or start her own business back in China, she feels lucky she made the right decision.

She chose the latter and established her own business called Kuwo Music Box Player.

Five years later, Kuwo entertainment center software has tens of millions of users and has kept up a double-digit growth rate despite the global economic downturn.

Huai Qi, CEO of Kuwo Music Box Player, is dressed in casual wear. But Huai is serious about how to build the company culture, business and daily operations. File photo

Huai believes that the most important thing to do in starting and running your own business is to find the right partners who are reliable, share the same concepts and values and who have complementary strengths.

"It is really difficult to meet all three requirements. But luckily, I met Lei Min at Stanford, who left Baidu as chief architect," she says.

Lei Min designed Baidu's first generation of process code, and is considered by Robin Li, the founder of Baidu, to be one of the top engineers in China.

Kuwo was established in August 2005, and released its software in February 2007. It took more than a year for Huai's company to do the research and development work.

Starting small

At the beginning of the operation, there were only four full-time staff members and 10 part-time employees at Kuwo, working from 10 am until midnight.

"We rented a flat close to Tsinghua University and hired part-time students, learning from the US model of starting a business in the garage," Huai said.

Now the company has 100 employees, with 60 conducting R&D work. The company partners with 200 record companies, including the top four global music corporations.

Kuwo communicated with users through QQ, Baidu, and BBS.

Employee Guo Jing recalled the company's early days. "Sometimes Lei Min and Huai Qi went to Internet cafs to talk with users and find out what kinds of functions they preferred to use most, " she said.

Now Kuwo has multiple functions such as music downloads, video clips, game downloads, images, forums and more.

Besides listening to music, Kuwo Music Box player also provides the user the ability to sing karaoke.

Holding to the dream

"Sometimes, you have to hold fast to dreams," Huai said.

She said that relatives, including her parents, were against her decision to turn down a steady job and a $100,000 salary to start her own business.

"At their age, they preferred a stable life status, and a $100,000 yearly salary was regarded as the best choice for their daughter," she said.

So she asked herself two questions.

"One is, 'When facing these multiple choices and opportunities, which one will make you feel regret if you give it up?' I had one clear answer, and it was about setting up my own business," Huai said.

"And the second question was, 'If I failed, would I regret it?' The answer was no," she recalled.

Huai said that while living and studying in California's Silicon Valley, where Stanford University is based, she saw many emerging enterprises founded by young people. She was curious to find out which companies ran well.

"In Silicon Valley, everyone is talking about setting up their own business. I think this was another motivation for me to become self-employed," she said.

As CEO, Huai is more focused on how to build the company culture, business and daily operations, while Lei is in charge of products and technology sectors.

Huai allocates a spare room as a kitchen for the company, providing breakfast, lunch and dinner for employees. Every quarter, she organizes a tour. She also promotes a wallboard plastered with staff photos.

"One of the advantages of being a female CEO is that for females, it tends to be easier to ease hostility," Huai said.

The key to business negotiations is to win mutual trust, she said.

"I was kind of a perfectionist. Now I realize that there is no perfect solution to deal with issues, but you need to choose the best direction for the company," she said.

Huai has ambitions for Kuwo. She hopes that one day when people want to search online for music, they think of Kuwo first.

(China Daily 11/16/2009 page4)