A physicist's twenty-year detour through the internet
Singapore, Spring 2026.
If you'd met me in 2001, I'd have told you the next twenty years would be spent in particle accelerators and detectors, chasing the smallest pieces of the universe.
If you'd met me in 2008, I'd have told you we were rewriting Taobao's search engine in the wildest years of Chinese e-commerce.
If you'd met me in 2018, I'd have walked you through 5Miles — the C2C local marketplace I built from scratch in Dallas, Texas — and how it ended up named Entrepreneur of the Year by D CEO Magazine.
If you meet me today, I'd point you at ByteTrade Lab's Olares — our personal-cloud OS and the Olares One hardware that goes with it — and at the next generation of American creators growing up on Clapper.
In 1991 I entered the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), majoring in nuclear physics at the Department of Modern Physics. Five years of undergraduate study, with a thesis titled Simulation of Light Propagation in Crystals. That was the first time I really felt the magic of physics: complicated phenomena reduced to clean equations, then re-conjured in code.
Graduate school took me to the Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, where I worked on pion mass measurements. That training taught me to live with error bars — there is no truth without uncertainty, only smaller uncertainty.
In 2001 I went to the United States to pursue a Ph.D. at Southern Methodist University (SMU), focused on high-energy physics and new analysis methods at the LHC. My 2005 dissertation, Significance Calculation and a New Analysis Method in Searching for New Physics at the LHC, was the academic culmination of all that. Along the way, I served as president of the Chinese Students Association — my first real attempt at running an organization.
I assumed I'd spend my life doing physics. Then the Chinese internet took off, and everything changed.
The story actually starts in 2003, while I was still working on my Ph.D. in the U.S. In my spare time, my co-founder Kevin Wen (文心) and I started Blogdriver (博客动力) — one of the earliest independent blogging platforms in China. "Blogging" was a brand-new concept back then — no Weibo, no WeChat, no TikTok — and blogs were the most cutting-edge way for ordinary people to publish themselves.
In 2005, Blogdriver was acquired by Bokee, and I joined Bokee as CTO. What had been a graduate-school side project became my first full-time internet job — and the moment I formally left particle physics behind for the internet industry.
Going from particle physics to internet products looked like a huge jump from the outside. From the inside it felt natural: user behavior is just another kind of experimental data — the error bars come from people, not detectors. I learned product cadence, user growth, and technical architecture — none of which had appeared in any of my dissertations.
Those years also became the source material for three books on UNIX systems and search engines that stayed in print for years afterward.
I joined Taobao in 2007. Those were the years Taobao went from "a fast-growing platform" to "a piece of national infrastructure."
I started by rebuilding Taobao's search engine, advertising platform, and data storage — the systems behind every "white down jacket" or "free shipping under $15" query a buyer typed. Every latency improvement, every recall lift, translated immediately into seller revenue and buyer experience. The feeling that hundreds of millions of people were using what we shipped was something I had never experienced in a physics lab.
Then I was promoted to General Manager of Taobao Wireless. The years around 2010 were the eve of China's mobile internet explosion — the iPhone was still spreading, Android was just emerging, and most people had never bought anything from a 4-inch screen. Our job was to move the entire Taobao experience from PC browsers onto phones.
Later I served as the founding GM of the Wasu-Taobao joint venture, an early experiment in connecting e-commerce to TVs and set-top boxes — what we'd now call "living-room commerce."
In 2011 I joined LightInTheBox as CTO. The company was a cross-border B2C platform shipping Chinese-made apparel, accessories, and consumer electronics to customers in Europe and North America. It went public on the NYSE in 2013.
Alibaba had taught me about scale inside one country. LightInTheBox taught me about cross-border compliance and global operations. When an order leaves a warehouse in Shenzhen, clears customs, and ends up at a doorstep in Berlin, the coupling between technology and supply chain is much tighter than it looks from the outside.
This experience is what eventually pushed me to move to the U.S. and build something locally.
In 2014 I moved to Dallas, Texas, and founded 5Miles — a hyperlocal C2C marketplace where neighbors within a 5-mile radius could trade used furniture, phones, cars, and local services.
The U.S. C2C landscape at the time was dominated by Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace. Craigslist's product was frozen in the 2000s; Facebook hadn't put real weight behind Marketplace yet. We saw a real opening — if you got mobile, trust, and local operations right, there was a meaningful market to take.
5Miles raised over $30M in venture funding, was repeatedly profiled in the Dallas Business Journal as "the local marketplace challenging Craigslist," and in 2018 I was honored to receive Entrepreneur of the Year from D CEO Magazine.
5Miles was the first time I built a company end-to-end as Founder/CEO in a country that wasn't my own — hiring, fundraising, compliance, local marketing, product, engineering. Every single piece was new.
In 2020 the pandemic locked the world indoors and pushed the creator economy into hyperdrive. That year I co-founded Clapper and serve as Co-founder & Chair. The core team is in fact the same crew I'd built 5Miles with: Edison Chen joined as CEO to run day-to-day operations, and two other 5Miles partners — Wang Chenglong and Lv Yi — came on as co-founders / partners and helped take Clapper from zero.
Clapper has a clear position: a short-video and audio community built for adults, anchored on authentic voices. We don't chase the polished influencer aesthetic and we don't try to clone any existing platform. We focus on the people the mainstream platforms tend to flatten or push aside — blue-collar workers, veterans, farmers, small-town entrepreneurs.
A few years in, Clapper has grown into one of the top 5 social media platforms in the U.S., with a particularly deep base across the South and Midwest. In a content world dominated by algorithms and advertisers, holding a place where real people can speak honestly is — to me personally — the most meaningful thing this company does.
Since 2022 I've been spending more of my time at ByteTrade Lab in Singapore as CEO, focused on frontier research and product incubation in AI, robotics, and Web3. The Lab closed a $40M Series A in 2022 led by SIG Asia, INCE Capital, BAI Capital, and Sky9 Capital.
Our core product line is Olares:
When I'm not building, I write to crystallize what I've learned:
| Year | Title | Publisher |
|---|---|---|
| 2006 | Search Engine Principles and Methods | Publishing House of Electronics Industry |
| 2005 | "Significance Calculation and a New Analysis Method in Searching for New Physics at the LHC" | SMU Physics Preprint |
| 2000 | UNIX Network Administration | Tsinghua University Press |
| 2000 | UNIX Practical Handbook | China Machine Press |
If you're working on AI, agents, robotics, the creator economy, cross-border commerce, or local marketplaces — or if you just want to talk about how a physicist approaches building products — I'd love to hear from you.
Based in Singapore. Frequently in Beijing, Dallas, and the Bay Area.