Entrepreneurship

Wednesday, Jul 23rd 2008 No Comments

P2P Student loans - Qifang.cn founder Calvin Chin

By James Z. Feng

Posted in Video

Calvin Chin, CEO and Founder of Qifang.cn

Calvin Chin talks about how his company is working to provide Chinese students opportunities to receive higher education. Find out how this ABC former corporate worker made his jump to China. Plus, find out what kind of advice this Chinese American has about coming to China and starting your own business.

Qifang.cn: A social venture that is China’s first P2P student loan community.

Interview Transcript:

Give us an introduction about you, what brought you to China and how long have you been here?

I’ve been here for four years, and I currently live in Shanghai. In 2004 when I first came here, I joined SMIC, a semi-conductor company. The decision to come here was really part career opportunity and part wanting to return to our roots. My wife and I are both American born and we wanted to get closer to China and see the exciting changes while also seeking a deeper understanding of our parents’ immigrant experience.

Can you give us an introduction to your company and its background story of how it all came about?

At the beginning of fall last year, some colleagues and I started to brainstorm and do a new project. Our heart was going towards social ventures and we wanted to help ameliorate this gap in opportunity and life which many in China are a victim of. Through those conversations, the three of us started looking at international models for microfinance, we looked at prosper.com, zopa.com to learn from their models on finance for consumers. Around those ideas we really figured out what would work for China, so the 3 of us started Qifang, basically doing a pure lending model focused on Chinese students wanting to go to school.

How’s the reception so far? Can u take us through the steps, the challenges, and the opportunity?

Thank goodness everything has been really well received so far. The investor community has shown strong interest whether it’s early stage of investors who express strong interest in this round of funding, or late stage. We’ve also received interests from the government, partnerships with schools, companies with training programs or are hiring new graduates, and most recently we are gaining interest for partnerships with financial services around technology handsets. We are receiving all kinds of different partners, reception is great!

What stage are you guys at right now? Where are you hoping to be in a few years? What’s the end goal?

Well, as of right now, it’s about 9 months now and we’ve developed a prototype of a product. As of this week, we’ve launched our first live transactions in a close beta format, partnered with one school, and in the next 6 days, we’ll be partnering with two more universities. These pilots are mainly us to build relationships as well as getting feed back on our product. Important feedbacks that we know can be felt in the new versions of the product as we start to hone our model and product.

You’ve been in China for a long time now, what general advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs who want to come to the market in China?

I strongly encourage everyone to be entrepreneurs whether it’s in your home market or in new emerging markets, there’s something irreplaceable about it. I’ve taken the traditional corporate path before and worked in big companies including investment banks. Now having worked with good friends on this new project and doing something that’s our own doing, not only are we building a lucrative profitable business, but also helping society with our own social venture. We want to extend to the 900 million Chinese in western and inland China and give them the opportunity that our parents gave us.