Many people will feel strange when the name Ruan Yubo is mentioned, but if you look at his experience, you will be surprised.
Born in 1996, Ruan Yubo taught himself computer programming at the age of 6, and won 13 scientific and technological invention awards and 5 patents during middle school, including the first prize of Microsoft Imagine Cup, the first prize of the Nuremberg Invention Competition in Germany, the first prize of the National Robot Competition, etc., and was known as a genius geek teenager. At the age of 17, Nguyen Oo Bo, who was in high school, founded Ali Simba Technology Company and served as CEO, devoting himself to the development of children's financial education hardware.
In 2017, 21-year-old Ruan Yubo founded the investment institution Bawei Capital in Silicon Valley, usa, focusing on venture capital in the field of cutting-edge technology, with a capital management scale of more than 60 million US dollars, and was selected as one of the top ten blockchain investment funds by the mainstream media. Prior to that, Ruan Yubo worked at Danhua Capital, founded by the famous Chinese scientist Zhang Shousheng, and co-founded Skylight Investment. Entrepreneurship and investment did not delay his studies, and he studied computer science and finance and economics at Boston University, the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford University.
From geek teenagers to entrepreneurs to investors, the 25-year-old has surpassed most of his peers. Now, he has a new identity , founder of Parallel Finance.
Polkadot is the ecosystem founded by former Ethereum co-founder and CTO Gavin Wood, regarded as Ethereum's biggest competitor, and Parallel Finance, founded by Nguyen Oo Bo, is a DeFi parachain built on the Polkadot ecosystem and is the head project in the Pokhara ecosystem.
Yubo and Polkadot founder Gavin Wood
In November 2021, Parallel Finance received strategic financing led by Sequoia Capital and Founders Fund (a venture capital fund co-founded by Peter Thiel) with a post-investment valuation of US$250 million, which is sequoia Capital's first investment in the Boca sector. At the time, Parallel Finance had only been in existence for 7 months.
In the view of Josephine Chen, a partner at Sequoia Capital, the platform established by Ruan Yubo and his team in a short period of time has made DeFi (Decentralized Finance) more friendly to institutional and retail investors, and has taken the first step to penetrate the traditional financial field, with the possibility of realizing the vision of pushing DeFi to billions of people in the future.
Due to his technical advantages, coupled with his independent personality, Nguyen Oo Bo often has unusual ideas and creativity, and likes to break the traditional way of thinking and doing things to create completely new products or rules. Participating in various science and technology competitions since childhood has made Ruan Yubo have an extraordinary sensitivity to technology. When he learned about blockchain technology, he quickly discovered new entrepreneurial opportunities.
In Ruan Yubo's view, blockchain is the next generation of the Internet, and even a social cooperation method on a larger scale than the Internet, which will bring about a huge change in the technological infrastructure. "I think in the next decade, the vast majority of companies will exist in the form of decentralized collaboration, or will build their own applications on the blockchain network."
Ruan Yubo believes that blockchain will give users greater rights and greatly change existing business models. "The traditional business model is that the company acquires customers and the user links to the service provider, resulting in a good user experience, while the blockchain model will enable the user to become part of the company, and the user has the voting rights of the entire platform operation, while sharing more benefits through smart contracts."
Back in early 2018, the concept of blockchain exploded in China, and Xu Xiaoping, founder of Zhen Fund, called for "all in the blockchain" internally, and blockchain projects mushroomed on the ground, becoming a popular entrepreneurial outlet. However, after the explosion, there was a cold, and blockchain projects were gradually questioned as "bubbles".
How exactly is blockchain defined? It was crucial to have one document. In June 2021, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the Central Cyberspace Administration issued the Guiding Opinions on Accelerating the Application and Development of Blockchain Technology. The opinions pointed out that blockchain is an important part of a new generation of information technology, is a distributed network, encryption technology, smart contract and other technologies integrated with a new type of database software, through data transparency, not easy to tamper with, traceability, is expected to solve the trust and security problems in cyberspace, promote the Internet from the transmission of information to the transmission of value change, reconstruct the information industry system.
In Ruan Yubo's view, the current development of blockchain is mainly limited by two aspects, one is supervision, and the other is technology. "This process can take 5 to 10 years, and the financial industry will be the first to be affected. With the acceleration of the development of blockchain technology, in the future, Internet industries such as O2O, social networks, and shared travel will be combined with blockchain in some form, which is an inevitable stage of social development. ”
Ruan Yubo's experience has made investors full of confidence in him. John Luttig of the Founders Fund fund said that Parallel Finance is at the forefront of the DeFi ecosystem, and by providing a wide range of financial services across the globe, Nguyen and his team will profoundly impact the way individuals interact with cryptocurrencies.
From the age of 17 to the present, Ruan Yubo has achieved achievements while also carrying the rare pressure of his peers, and various challenges are everywhere. He said that he had also thought about giving up, especially when he first started a business, in addition to technology, he also faced company management and operation problems, but he had a special sense of achievement along the way, and now he has fully enjoyed it.
In more than 20 years of growth, Ruan Yubo felt that he had two things that he had the most sense of accomplishment, one was to go to Stanford to study, and the other was to start a business in high school, which gave him the opportunity to contact the business society in advance. Mr. Nguyen said his high school idol was Steve Jobs, who inspired his idea to start his own business. "I loved Jobs, and when I saw the book Steve Jobs in high school, it had a big impact on my worldview, and I found myself longing for a career like Entrepreneur."
In the future, Ruan Yubo will continue to move forward with the dream of entrepreneurship, investment and technology. Cover source: ccl.org