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Movers & Shakers By Paul Judge June 23, 1999


Chai Ling: From Tiananmen Leader to Netrepreneur
Now CEO of Jenzabar, she draws on her smarts, tenacity, and harrowing experiences to run a startup aimed at Net-bred students

Successful entrepreneurs invariably have some personal experience they call on to keep their team going when the struggle to launch a company seems overwhelming. For Chai Ling, the 33-year-old CEO of Jenzabar.com, the touchstone was spending four days and five nights inside of a shipping crate being smuggled out of China in the spring of 1990.

Wanted by the Chinese authorities for her role as a student leader of the Tiananmen Square uprising in 1989, Chai faced imprisonment or even death if she and a companion were discovered on the desperate journey to Hong Kong and freedom. "There was no way to know where we were, whether we were succeeding or not," recalls Chai, who spent 10 months on the run before climbing inside the crate and being loaded into the hold of a boat. "That taught me faith. In a startup company, like Jenzabar, there will always be ups and downs. Faith keeps me going."

POLITICAL GIFTS. In the decade since she rallied thousands of students massed in Tiananmen Square to press their demands for democracy, Chai has journeyed through Princeton University, Bain & Co. as a consultant, and Harvard business school. Along the way she mastered English and used her political gifts to make connections in Corporate America. She hopes eventually to return to China, but for now, she is plunging into life as an Internet entrepreneur. Given her searing and profound experiences as a university student in China, it's not surprising that Jenzabar.com is aimed at college students, faculty, and administrators.

Jenzabar's product is a portal for universities that's built around an integrated calendar that draws course information, campus events, news, and entertainment into a personalized package. Students can log on from their dorm room laptops, the library, or student center kiosks and check E-mail, assignments, and lecture schedules -- even look up the first name of someone in a virtual "facebook" of students.

 

She's giving the software to students for free in hopes they'll demand that their colleges adopt it
 

Chai has done her homework, and sees a major opportunity for targeting the highly desirable 18-to-24-year-old U.S. student population with ads and E-commerce. But first she has to build a community, and that requires getting hundreds of colleges to sign up for Jenzabar. Administration and faculty have a built-in predisposition, Chai believes, for a standard platform they can use to organize coursework and communications with students and the rest of the campus community. But it's the students themselves, Chai believes, who will make Jenzabar a success. She's giving the software to students for free in hopes they'll like it so much they'll demand that their schools adopt it. "Today's 13-to 19-year-olds are really the first Internet generation," she says. They are going to demand a good Internet offering when they get to college."

To get as close as possible to her market, Chai has recruited college students from Harvard University, Yale University, and Swarthmore College to intern at Jenzabar this summer. The interns are critiquing the Jenzabar design and adding new features, like a Web-page builder. Many of them already conduct their lives on the Web, buying plane tickets, textbooks, and groceries via the Net, finding summer roommates through online listings and scoring cheap futons through electronic auctions. To get there, however, wired students usually bypass the university Web site, which typically serves as a tool for admissions and alumni relations. "The amount being spent on people being educated through campus Web sites is very limited," Chai says.

BANNER ADS. Jenzabar provides a standard template for schools that don't know where to start or lack the resources to build their own intranet. To seed the market, Chai has offered to give away Jenzabar free to the first 50 institutions that ask for it. So far, five have taken her up on it, including St. Michael's College in Colchester, Vt., Dakota Wesleyan University in Mitchell, S.D., and Atlantic Union College in South Lancaster, Mass. Chai figures if she can get 20% of the 750,000 faculty in the U.S. to adopt Jenzabar, she can claim victory.

Chai's business model anticipates four sources of revenue: corporate sponsorships, with high-profile placement of logos; subscription fees of $20 a year for each student, faculty member, and administrator; banner ads that would appear on the Jenzabar pages; and a percentage of E-commerce revenues from merchants that reach students through Jenzabar. Jenzabar is still very much a startup, with no revenues and 20 full-time employees. But its energetic founder, famously pictured holding a megaphone and exhorting demonstrators just hours before the tanks rolled, has managed to secure financing from Paul Fireman, CEO of Reebok International, WebTV founder Steve Perlman, and several Bain partners. Now, Chai hopes to raise $20 million in venture capital this summer.

 

Her past usually helps, but "big companies that want to do business with China don't want to support me"
 

Like any good entrepreneur, Chai has used every advantage she can muster, including her illustrious past, to get Jenzabar off the ground. It hasn't always helped. "Big companies that want to do business with China don't want to support me," she claims, without identifying the corporations. "They don't want to jeopardize their business interests in China." But more often than not, her reputation has been a boost. She met Fireman at a reception in support of human rights in China and pitched her company. "I'm sure it makes a big difference," says Fireman. "When you call someone and send them a resume that says you've been nominated twice for the Nobel peace prize, it tends to get their attention." But Fireman, who holds about 25% of Jenzabar along with a group of investors, says Chai's idea is sound and her business instincts are sharp. "As long as she is the persevering type, I'm interested in putting money in," he says. "Tiananmen Square and those experiences she had, they demonstrate how intense a human being she is."

There's little doubt that Chai was born to lead. Among her recent hires is Joseph D. Malone, who recently completed his second term as treasurer of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Malone has signed on as director of sales, marketing, and business development, and will try to use his contacts to build Jenzabar's customer base among colleges and universities, including big state institutions. Other Jenzabar employees took big pay cuts to join the company. More than once, Chai says, she has reminded her team of those dark days and nights inside the shipping crate. "When it feels like the worst moment, like we are going to fail, I tell them, 'It won't always be like this,'" she says. It's hard not to believe her.

Judge covers technology from Boston


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