Nanjing — The City Where June Chang’s Entrepreneurial Dream Comes True

By David Li, translated by Shuzhi Zhang

Recently, I had an interview with Dr. June Chang at her home in Acton, Mass. just before she was leaving for Nanjing, China. Ms. Chang founded an online event management website eventdove.com three years ago in Nanjing. Before that, Ms. Chang founded Hyzing LLC in 2009, and now has about a dozen developers in its Nanjing office.

Ms. Chang shows eventdove.com in her home office in Acton.

June Chang received her Ph.D. degree in Mathmatics from Clark University in 1997, and worked as a hardware and software engineer for many years. “When I graduated, I first worked in Lucent as a developer of routers, and then worked as senior engineer in other companies. During that time, I experienced the internet bubble of 2000 and several rounds of lay-offs after that,” said Ms. Chang in soft and gentle voice. Among few lucky ones in her generation in China, June Chang passed the national college entrance exam and enrolled in Nanjing Information Engineering University majoring in mathematics in 1977. Her husband Harry Chen is the co-founder and the first president of the Action Chinese Language School. They moved to Acton in 2000.

When asked how she became an entrepreneur, Ms. Chang mentioned that she was encouraged by her friends Ning An and Daryl Luk when they attended training and events by NECINA. “What I wanted to do was to develop a register tool for the events. I hoped it would be helpful for NECINA and MIT Entrepreneurship Forum.” After that she registered Hyzing LLC in Massachusetts and her daughters assisted in designing the company logo. A year later, she went back to her hometown Nanjing and started a development office there. The availability of many talented software engineers was among one of the reasons that Mr. Chang selected Nanjing. Chang Jun was thankful that she got help from the local government and she didn't have to pay office rent for the first three years. At that time, the Nanjing 321 plan was not yet in place. She obtained funding from JiangSu Double Creation and Zijin Talent organizations. "With the hard work by the development team, eventdove.com added offline functions, online payment method and mobile app capabilities. The core technologies rank at the top among its competitors," said Ms. Chang with a smile. Besides developers in Nanjing, EventDove also has a media center in Beijing and partners with eventown.com.cn to extend its service. Marketing is done mainly through social media. EventDove has become well-known and praised by attendants and event organizers when it is provided to those large conferences, such as Global Mobile Internet Conference in Beijing, and Harvard China Forum in Cambridge, Mass. Ms. Chang (second from left in the front row) with developers of eventdove.com in Nanjing office.

How would she deal with the difficulties running her company? Ms. Chang mentioned every Internet entrepreneur had failures, including Ma Yun and Ma Huateng, two of the most famous Internet entrepreneurs in China. The most important thing is that you must learn from failures. In addition, you have to start earlier than others. As an engineer, she never faced the challenges of managing a company. She went to different classes to learn about human resource management and marketing. “It is not easy to run a tech company in China. Luckily, I have a stable team, and I prefer employee-centered management style.”

Ms. Chang thanked her husband and daughters for their support so that she could realize her dream of being an entrepreneur in Nanjing.