Paulitex

I landed in Shanghai  and my little nokia buzzed with an automated sms from China Mobile, something along the lines of “We welcome you very much in China. There is happy for your stay.” I couldn’t believe I was receiving this from a multi-billion dollar company only two years before the Beijing olympics, so I did some research with my friend and future business partner, Mathias. Translation by native Mandarin speakers cost 2-4 $/hour, where translation by native English speakers was in 50 $/hour range. There was no middle ground so everyone - even China Mobile - went local.

It was a pretty obviously opportunity. We could hire students at UBC to polish the English for 10 $/hour,  get the first pass done locally for 3 $/hour, and offer essentially the same product as the 50 $/hour guys - but for 1/3rd the price! Fantastic!

The crux of the business was being able to collaborate between Beijing and Vancouver. We decided (in hindsight quite naively), to build a custom internal web app. We found some funding and then some developers and got to work. Circle/Square English Auditing opened for business in Beijing about 6 months later - and closed about 6 months after that.

I learned a ton of things about business and particularly business in China - most saliently that competing on price alone is far from sufficient - but it frustrated me that all our value was being delivered by a web app and I knew almost nothing about *that*. So I went back to school.

Out of historical interest, here is the last revised version of the Circle/Square Business Plan. If you want to know more of what we were up to, it’s *all* in here.  It was the real first business plan I ever wrote and while I inevitably cringe when looking back on it, we did manage to raise 60K USD with it so I suppose that’s something.