In 2012, Jiang Wei and two of his engineer friends established Zhuoyuan Electronic Technology Co in the Hefei National High-tech Industry Development Zone in East China’s Anhui province. The road of entrepreneurship is full of thorns but they keep striding ahead. 

Jiang, who is now the general manager of the company, comes from a rural area in Hunan province. He enrolled at the School of Computer Science and Technology of the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in 2002. 

Jiang recalls the memory of his first day at the university and said that as he grew up in the countryside and had never left his hometown village before, he was suddenly lost in the dazzling world full of temptations. He said honestly that he once took the wrong path, indulging in computer games, skipping classes and failing exams.

Jiang Wei, an ambitious underachiever’s path to entrepreneurship. [Photo providede to chinadaily.com.cn]

“I met a very important person in my life when I lost myself -- Chen Bo, who was the university counselor of our class,” said Jiang. Chen was only a few years older than Jiang and he witnessed Jiang indulging himself. 

Knowing that Jiang’s family was in bad economic status, Chen often invited Jiang to dinner and shared his own life experience with him, helping him to turn over a new leaf. 

Jiang was moved by Chen’s care and good intentions, and started to find his life’s goal. In the last year of university, Jiang studied hard and graduated with a bachelor’s degree. Then he got a job at a tech firm. 

Jiang Wei and his tean members [Photo providede to chinadaily.com.cn]

Jiang Wei and his tean members [Photo providede to chinadaily.com.cn]

In 2012, Jiang resigned from the big company and registered his own company together with two friends, each investing 100,000 yuan ($14,600). The company’s business volume that year was 500,000 yuan and Jiang’s actual annual income was in the tens of thousands, much less than his previous salary. Though he had to eat a poor diet at that time, he kept conveying his optimism about the future to his business partners. 

His company, after five years, now has an embedded development team of more than 30 people, most of whom have over ten years’ experience in embedded development. The team is very skilled and experienced in embedded processors such as ARM, DSP and FPGA, as well as the Linux operating system and DSP, FPGA software programming. It also has rich experience in developing large-scale systems. Last year, the company’s turnover reached 10 million yuan, growing step by step. 

The three partners of the company are all from the same university and their company is absolutely an alumni enterprise of USTC. 

“We grasped the good opportunity of starting business when the Hefei National High-tech Industry Development Zone provided housing subsidies and the government offered national high-tech enterprise subsidies, and we were very lucky to realize our dreams in entrepreneurship,” said Jiang proudly and gratefully. He doesn’t forget the time at college when he lost himself and always reminds himself to be responsible for his life and future and to work hard.