Founder Spotlight Ep7: From PhD drop-out in Signal Processing to coining the term Engagement Commerce with Chen Li
Chen Li is the co-founder of palmstreet, the e-commerce platform for rare plants, crystals and hand-made items. He was working on his PhD in Signal Processing and got hooked by the iPhone to become an app developer. After working at Apple, Facebook and Firework, he launched palmstreet and is redefining e-commerce.
Matthew Lee: “Tell us some of the critical decisions you made while launching palmstreet”
Chen Li: “If you are slightly better than an existing solution, people are not going to transition… You want to be 200% better. The moment we launched live shopping, people were engaging, commenting, buying like crazy…everything was off the charts!”
Matthew Lee: “What is engagement commerce?”
Chen Li: “when i hear the music, when i enjoy the sunshine, sip some coffee with my friends and family, when I buy some plants and ceramics from local vendors. That experience was really really good, much better than the Amazon buying experience. This kind of unforgettable Sunday morning experience should not be limited to a local main street in a far away town on a Sunday morning. It should be experienced every night on every phone on the palmstreet app.”
Matthew Lee: “What advice do you have for our other founders?”
Chen Li: “think long term and be very very patient to build your steps to becoming an entrepreneur…get hands on experience developing software…observe how it works in a big company…learn operations by joining an early stage startup…need investors who not only have capital but experience. A lot of the time it’s about long term relationships.”
Chen Li: “be really scrappy and hustle. If I think something is important and I need to make a change, I wouldn’t wait…I would start today and have a rough plan and find out low hanging fruit and start acting right now. That’s the only way you can move fast enough.”
