8 lessons from the Forbes 30 Under 30 Harvard grad.
Yehong Zhu has the fiery spirit of an entrepreneur. Resourceful from her humble Georgia childhood, she has since picked up all the right skills: journalism from Forbes, venture capital from NLVC, building software from Twitter, and entrepreneurship from Harvard Square Consulting.
For the past four years, Yehong has led Zette, her venture-backed software company aiming to democratize access to journalism through eliminating paywalls.
Below are 8 key learnings she picked up on her journey so far.
Selling Drawings, family portraits for a commission
Artist and CEO
Newnan, GA
2008 – 2014
Lesson 1: Demand determines sales, no matter the marketing.
“The best way to figure out if a business is viable is just to present a product to the world and see if there’s any demand. When I was younger and experimenting in middle school and high school, I would print out business cards and I would leave them at the laundromat or cafeteria, the earliest possible form of marketing. But it doesn’t really matter how you get the word out. It matters if there is real interest in buying or receiving what you have to offer. And if there is, then you end up making money.”
Forbes, business and entrepreneurship media
Business Writer
Jersey City, NJ | New York, NY
2016
Lesson 2: Sustainable revenue models are essential.
“The business model of media was struggling because they could not figure out a lucrative way to charge for content. Forbes employed programmatic advertising-based pricing. The articles were free, but you would be overloaded with ads. We were taught to write in a click baity manner, so that people would click more often.
Each ad only generated a fraction of a cent. They needed to pump a page filled with ads in order to keep the business going. I realized they were overcompensating for a business model that wasn’t going to work in the long term.
Every news outlet that couldn’t survive on clickbait would have to put up a paywall. And so what would happen to the internet? Consumers were used to getting all of this information for free, but now, they would have to have dozens of paywalled subscriptions.
I realized if they didn’t adapt, it would be a forced evolution. You have to be able to charge what the content is worth, otherwise, there’s not enough financial incentive to keep producing that content. And so that was the exact problem I ended up working on at my own startup, where we democratize access to quality media by having one central account, similar to Spotify or Netflix.”
Harvard | Harvard Square Consulting, college consulting
Co-Founder & CEO
Cambridge, MA
2014 – 2018
Lesson 3: For startups, competition is often overblown.
“A lot of what they teach you in startup theory is that if there’s a competitor in the market, then you shouldn’t enter. At the time I was doing college consulting, there were tons of competitors. It’s not like you couldn’t find dozens, if not hundreds, of the same service.
What we realized was that there was a lack of education about what the service actually was in the general population, and there were so many students applying to college every single year that there was no shortage of potential clients. If you’re from a high school that’s under-resourced, you’ve never heard of consulting. It was a really good target for us to broaden the market and bring in first time clients because they were the ones most in need of the resources.”
Lesson 4: Harvard students’ career choices are a shocking, missed opportunity.
“One of the biggest shocks from Harvard was seeing how people picked their career goals over the four years. You would meet freshmen with a huge diversity of interests. And then somehow, over time, the class ends up going into consulting, finance, tech, business or grad school. How did everybody end up going into corporate America?
It’s basically the corporate industrial complex, where because of peer pressure, or very slick marketing, or risk aversion fear, some of the smartest minds in the world are then channeled into these highly corporatized, profitable sectors. Had they gone anywhere else, I think they would have had more impact.
There’s almost an obligation, once you get that level of access and privilege and education, to not only build a secure life for yourself, but to do something bigger for the world. And a lot of that idealism is completely lost over the course of four years at Harvard. And I think that’s one of the biggest missed opportunities.”
Northern Light Venture Capital, tech-centric venture firm
Internship Coordinator
Menlo Park, CA | Beijing, China | Shanghai, China
2016 – 2018
Lesson 5: Software can transform society.
“China’s growth of software companies was exponential, and I was able to see a lot of this. From year to year to year, there would be these huge glass and steel skyscrapers that would pop up all over Beijing. That was the tipping point for what made me really want to get into this tech entrepreneurship world, because I was able to see how in this country of over a billion people, all of them could be impacted by software in less than a decade. If that can be true for China, it can be true all over the world.”
Twitter, social media platform
Product Manager
San Francisco, CA | London, England
2018 – 2019
Lesson 6: If you know how to develop software, you can develop any kind of software.
“I was able to see the entire process for how to develop world class software, over and over again. From inception of the idea to the designs that were then vetted through product review processes and technical review documents, and then engineers, and then it would be shipped to a certain percentage of users, and then if the stats were good, you would release it to all of them. I also learned how to sunset features. If you know how to develop software, you can build any kind of feature. And that’s the magic of engineering.”
Zette, democratizing access to journalism with AI
Founder & CEO
San Francisco, CA
2020 – present
Lesson 7: With startups, there’s always more to learn.
“Let’s assume that you graduated from a world class university, that you’ve had a bevy of work experiences that have prepared you well to be a founder. The problem is not that you don’t have the capacity to solve the intellectual challenges of a startup. The problem is twofold.
One, no matter how experienced you are, there will always be things that you don’t know. You might be the best coder in the world, but that doesn’t mean you know how to pitch a VC. You might be the best marketer, but it doesn’t mean that you know how to build out the financials.
So a startup, when you’re first starting, is so under-resourced, because really, it’s only you, and if you’re lucky, your co-founders who are willing to work without pay. How quickly can you learn without getting intimidated? How quickly can you learn, and can you get back up after you make mistakes?”
Lesson 8: The founder’s biggest challenge is emotional, not intellectual
“The second most important insight is emotional resilience. If you were to break a successful startup down into 1,000 pieces and assign each as a problem set for Harvard students, I guarantee you that they would be able to get a good enough answer for that company to be successful.
The intellectual challenges can all be solved. It’s the emotional challenges of how difficult it is to be brave or to stand in your power in the face of tremendous uncertainty, and to pull the trigger on decisions where you don’t have enough information or you don’t know what will happen next. That’s why so many startups end up failing.
There’s a quote that startups die more by suicide than by homicide, and that means it’s less often that competition literally eats your lunch. Usually you get killed because you give up because it’s too emotionally hard.”
All photos courtesy of Yehong Zhu.