国双致辞清华附中毕业礼 心系人才培育与发展

My dream never changed. I think information technology will change the world. And when I realized that in China we didn't really have a strong, competitive software company, I decided to build one. It is not easy to pursue your dream and make the dream come true. There is always difficulty or temptation on your way to your final goal. Persistence is very important.

My father wanted me to study mechanism engineering, so I could someday go back to take over his business. So he insists on sending me to study engineering. After I entered Tsinghua University, the first thing I did was to transfer to the computer software department. You can imagine how hard it was, but I was determined to do so and I made that happen. 

In my 3rd year in the college, I earned a chance to be an intern in Microsoft Research Asia for doing nature language computing, which is AI. The opportunity was so hard to get even for a Tsinghua student. I went and worked there for 3 months. I could easily stay there afterwards and got an amazingly good job offer from Microsoft at that moment. But I made up my mind to create my own business. So I refused the job offer from Microsoft, which, from many people's perspective, was a stupid decision. You may ask me why I made that decision. One thing is very clear that to start your own business, you do need a team. There were several classmates in my team then. If I had decided to take the offer and work for Microsoft, these team members would not have waited for me to start a business later and would have definitely worked for other companies or studied for a Master degree. For me, the decision was not a hard one.

You might want to know what I did and which direction I chose for my startup. Let's first get to know our company's name. Our company is named as Gridsum. It is a combination of two words, grid and sum. Grid, as you may know, is grid computing, which make many connected computers work together for some task. Sum is as simple as adding numbers together. Why did I put these two words together? Because I believe this is the future of computing. I am very lucky to be right.

Today, everybody knows the term Big data. What is Big Data? Techniquely, Big Data is a framework. A frame work to solve the limitation of the Moore's law, which says that every 18 months, computing power will double. 

But if you are facing a data processing task that every day, the increasing volume of data speed is faster than the Moore's law. That means you cannot just buy the latest computer hardware to catch up with your continuously increasing data processing task. The only way you can solve this problem is to try to let several computers work together to increase the computing power. It sounds practical but very difficult to implement.

Everybody knows a Chinese proverb, in English, we say: Everybody's business is nobody's business. That often happens exactly in the computing world. Gridsum's concept is pretty easy to understand. Because sum means adding numbers together. If you have many numbers to add, you can always divide them into different groups and later put them together. No matter how you divide, the result won't change. That's the idea behind "Gridsum". Big Data became a buzz word around 2012. My idea occurred almost 10 years before that. It supported us to become successful over the past years. And I'm proud of my original idea. But most importantly, we have insisted on doing so for almost 10 years. Today many people do not have persistence. They constantly doubt themselves and move in different directions by the influence of the outside world. 

Today, information technology develops at an unprecedented speed. When I was your age, I had a mobile phone and I was the only one in my class who had one, though the phone could not browse the internet and no apps could be installed on it. Today, we have all kinds of so-called smart devices and we receive information from them  every minute. We can search for what we want immediately when we have a phone in hand. Somehow we don't really think with our own brain. It's so easy to look for information on the Internet. A lot of people lost their capability to think, reason and hypothesize. You should know that these capabilities are the fundamental for following scientific methods. Only by practicing them frequently can we become smarter and better people. You may think a person like me is already successful. I believed the same when I was your age. 

But today, I am always thinking about what is true success. Is it to make money, become famous, have a lot of power? I've always told our employees that to build a company needs three elements. The first is to make some money so you can live. The second is to build something to influence and change the industry. The third is to become a company which can make significant contribution to the world. I think the purpose and meaning of a company is not that hard to define and explain.

But today, my presentation is about the purpose and meaning of life. I can tell you that every time when I feel I am one more step closer to success and face stronger challenges and difficulties, I never stop. The more I experience, the more I realize that pursuing happiness is even more important than success, money and power. You must try to figure out when, where and how you can find and experience happiness. Different people have different understandings and feelings about happiness. 

I don't think there is any universal standard for happiness. But from my previous experience, I strongly believe that to be disciplined and well educated, to try your best to pursue your dream and expand your potential, and to become a better version of you, are the meaning and purpose of our life. I hope you can be successful and happy in the future and make contribution to the world.