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A Self-Made Woman Gets Lucky In The Middle Seat

This article is more than 8 years old.

This post is part of the “Self-Made Women” series featuring women who came from a world without power or wealth, but with the support of family, teachers and mentors, they  found their way to success.

Picture this: You’re 24 years old. You spent the first five years of your life living in rural China without running water and separated from your parents. When you’re five you immigrate to the United States and are reunited with your parents. You figure out that by winning scholarships through piano competitions and beauty pageants, you can pay your way through UC Berkeley. During your senior year in college, you meet a cute guy at a dive bar. Together, you co-found a successful startup that develops polymers that enable vaccines to survive without refrigeration. For that invention, you win the 2014 Young Innovators Award sponsored by Microsoft and Nokia. Along the way, you join the youth advisory board of Lady Gaga’s Born This Way Foundation.

What do you do next?

If you are Nanxi (prounounced Nancy) Liu, you have been striving, solving problems, and building things all your life. So you don’t stop. You start another company. Nanxi’s latest startup, called Enplug, is the answer to this question: What if we could make those static digital displays you see at stadiums and restaurants interactive and intelligent so you can post Instagram photos and tweets directly onto the displays? In less than two years, Enplug has become one of the most popular software used in the world to show interactive content on displays, and was named Entrepreneur Magazine’s Top 30 Startups to Watch. To make things even more interesting, your Enplug co-founders and one third of the employees all live in the same house in Los Angeles.

Andrea Guendelman of BeVisible and I interviewed Nanxi, to get her stories behind the stories. The interview has been edited and condensed.

One Day, I’m Going To Fly

For the first five years of my life, I lived in rural China without running water, raised by my grandparents, aunts and uncles. My parents had scholarships to study in Europe, but couldn’t afford to take me with them. When I was five years old, my parents immigrated to the United States (my dad was on scholarship to get his Ph.D. and my mom to get her second masters). This time they could take me with them. They waited tables at night. I knew we didn’t have much money, but being on the “free lunch plan” at school and living in subsidized housing was just normal, I didn’t know any different.

One of my most vivid memories from my childhood is when we moved to Colorado and lived by the airport. When I saw planes, I would run outside, look at the sky and think, “Oh my gosh, one day I’m going to be able to fly, to travel.” Even to this day when I’m tired and have to go on business trips, I remember that moment and think, “I’m really thankful to be able to fly.”

Luck Is A Numbers Game

I begged my parents for a piano. One day, they found one at a garage sale for $100, a significant amount of their total savings. I took piano lessons from a teacher who charged $7 an hour. I really got into playing the piano and entered competitions where I won prizes. That was very eye-opening for me. I thought, “If I put in the time and work into playing, I can win.” And in losing, I learned a valuable lesson -- my mom would say, “You’re not any less talented than any of the other piano players. You could have won. The reason you didn’t win was because of the amount of time you put into practicing.” That stuck with me. I learned that I could control outcomes of certain things if I put in the time. I can control my own luck.

Years later, I took a workshop from Scott Sherman, Executive Director at Transformative Action Institute. He said, “I’m going to teach you how to become luckier.” He said it’s all about the number of people you know and the number of people you meet. I never thought about it before, but that’s exactly what I had been doing – creating my own luck.

It’s a number’s game. Wherever I go, I meet as many people as I can and build as many relationships as possible. I always take the middle seat in the airplane so I can talk to the people next to me. I’ve met amazing people on planes who have introduced me to other amazing people.

Every time I walk into a room, I think, “There are 60 people here, I need to get business cards from 40 of them and email them right away.” I’m not naturally an outgoing person. At networking events, I mentally prepare myself and tell my mind that I need to go and meet people because I believe my luck relates to the number of people I let myself meet.

A Great Thing Happened At A Dive Bar

I competed a lot in high school -- all-American cheerleader, student government, beauty pageants and more. I won a lot and lost a lot. I learned how to go after the things I want in life and not let fear of failure get in my way.

One of the life changing things that happened during my freshman year at Berkeley was when I joined Delta Sigma Pi, a coed business fraternity. At first, the reason I wanted to join was because a guy I was dating had plans to join and I wanted to see him more. My chances of getting in were so slim, but I made it.

A lot of the Delta Sigma Pi members had parents who were in business or finance. They would talk about investment banking. I didn’t even know what investment banking meant. I learned quickly. I took an engineering class where we built random gadgets. Instead of just letting the gadgets be a school project, I would take the things we built and try to make money from them. One of the first things I sold were little light inserts that would turn the campus lamps on and off based on light settings. I showed it to the university and won $10,000. I didn’t tell them that I built it in 24 hours! I also developed a text-based 911 system for the campus police department that received an award from the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society.

That was my freshman year, a time when all these little things started to click in my mind. Senior year is when I really tried starting businesses.

I took this entrepreneurship class where the final project was to pitch our idea, a project we worked on for the entire semester, to a panel of judges, including the founder of Bing. After I presented, the professor told me, “I normally don't tell students this, but you need to be an entrepreneur and actually do this.” I wasn’t sure I had what it takes to be an entrepreneur, but she insisted.

That professor gave me confidence. A lot about starting a business is believing in yourself and having the confidence to pull together the team to make it happen.

Then one night it all really clicked. I was at a dive bar in Colorado hanging out with friends, when I saw this cute guy. My friend tells me, “That’s Balaji Sridhar, he’s a talented biochemist.” Balaji comes over to me and we start talking. He is fluent in five languages, he was an Intel Science competition winner in high school, studied at MIT, pursued an MD and Ph.D. – obviously very smart. I said to him, “I don’t care about dating you because my bar for dating a guy is lower than my bar for working with someone. You’re at the higher bar -- let’s start working together.” This is midnight at a dive bar and we’re talking about stem cell research and collagen regeneration.

Soon after that, we launched Nanoly Bioscience, a company that is developing a chemical shield that allows vaccines to survive without refrigeration to enable safe and cheap delivery to hard-to-reach areas of the world. Last year, we won the coveted Young Innovators Award at the Tech Awards that is sponsored by Microsoft and Nokia. People ask us how we did it. We had the skills and drive to build it into a business and actually make it happen. That’s where a lot of great ideas fail – people have the skills or the ideas, but they don't actually make it happen.

Got A Game Changing Idea? Count Me In!

The question I always ask is, “If I’m going to build something, can it become huge and game changing?” With Enplug it was very clear, yes, this is a huge market opportunity, which no company is addressing effectively. We call this opportunity “public computing.” We had personal computing that sprung up in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Then we saw the rise of mobile computing, turning cellphones into smartphones. Now there is cloud computing.

We are taking the next step. Think about posters or displays that you see at stadiums, restaurants, hotels -- they haven’t changed in the past decade. They’re showing the same old static content that you can’t interact with. If you look at futuristic movies, all the digital displays that you see in these movies, they talk back to you. You can interact with them, they provide you with curated content. You can share information.

At Enplug, we are creating software to transform all public displays into intelligent displays. Our goal is to get every public display running on our software, networking them all together and making it a better experience for users. We now have hundreds of companies, ranging from local cafes to Fortune 500 companies, that use our software and Enplug’s App Store to show live social media, news, games, menus and more on their displays.

Experiences Trump Money

My mom passed away when I was in college. It really changed my perspective in life -- what I wanted to do with life and what risk meant.

I recognized that even if I had made zero money, the worst that could happen is I crash on the couches of my friends. I can do that. The downside of not making money doesn’t look so terrible. Right now, I could have zero dollars in the bank and it wouldn’t impact me -- I’m much more about the experience. My friends were shocked that I didn’t take a full-time job in investment banking where I would have made $150,000 in my first year after college. I thought, “$150,000, so what? I’m not going to change my life because of that.” I care about building something impactful that could potentially make me $150,000,000.

I don’t live a life of luxury. I bought my first mattress this past December. Before that, I slept on the floor, on a thick cover. The only reason I have a mattress is because the cover I slept on was destroyed in a rainstorm and my landlord offered to reimburse me a mattress to replace the cover. For my first apartment in Berkeley, I found the cheapest place I could – it was a room with no windows. It had a shower and sink, but the toilet was down the hall. I thought, “It can only go up from here.” And it has!

I Live With My Co Founders And Teammates

When we first started Enplug, all five cofounders (four guys and me) shared a one-bedroom, one-bath apartment. The best part is my co-founders were living pretty good lives, one of them drove an Aston Martin. So why did we all move in together? Because I believe you have the most growth when you’re uncomfortable, when you’re in scrappy mode. If there is one way to get know your co-founders, it’s for all five of you to live together for several months in a tiny apartment.

It worked. We figured out we could save a lot of money not paying ourselves a salary, living together and sharing food. We said, “Let’s rent a house now.” We rented a house in Bel-Air and then said, “Let’s invite the people we bring on board to join us and live in the house. Instead of paying them full salaries we’ll give them a stipend and free room and board.” That’s what we did and that’s how we were able to make the little investment that we had last a long time. We’ve grown to 30 teammates and we live with a third of them.

The 10% Rule

Sometimes my success comes from doing 10% more than others. Other times, it’s not necessarily 10% more time, but getting 10% more results.I saw my parents struggle and I watched them figure it out. My parents taught me that it’s not the position that you’re in, it’s what you make of where you are. It’ s not the decision you make, it’s what you make of your decision.

My approach to life isn’t because I’m an entrepreneur. Even if I were working at a big company, I would work to be the best employee there. That’s who I am. Whatever position I’m in, I’ll do as much as possible. I want to live so once is enough.

Self-Made Women Series Post #1:  From Murder To The Mayor’s Office: A Story Of Grit And Excellence

Self-Made Women Series Post #2: From Outsider To The C-Suite: A Story On How To 'Get To The Yes'

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