A 29-year-old Chinese woman becomes the new director of Starbucks

Coffee giant Starbucks recently announced that 29-year-old Chinese entrepreneur Shi Zongwei has joined the company's board of directors and will serve on the nomination and corporate governance committee, according to Forbes magazine and other media reports.

Shi Zongwei is the co-founder and CEO of social media startup Hearsay Social and the author of the New York Times bestseller Facebook Times. In addition to Starbucks directors, she also has many dazzling titles, such as Fortune magazine's "Top female Entrepreneur of the year", Fast Company magazine "IT Technology most influential person", Bloomberg BusinessWeek "2011 youngest Entrepreneur" and so on.

The "post-80s" with many titles

"Shi Zongwei is a technology leader who will bring fresh perspective to our strong and forward-looking board," said Howard Schultz, chairman of Starbucks. "We are extremely excited about the social media technical knowledge and creativity that Shi Zongwei will bring to our company. We will continue to expand our network contacts and interactions with customers, partners and the community. "

Starbucks has been committed to selling high-quality coffee since 1971. Today, its stores all over the world, has become the world's largest boutique coffee retailer.

"I am very excited to join the board of directors of the most valued and enviable company in the world, and I look forward to contributing to the next stage of the company's growth." Shi Zongwei said.

When it comes to why he joined Starbucks' board, Shi Zongwei said he was a huge fan of Starbucks a long time ago. When the Starbucks board found her, she was very excited, not only because the Starbucks brand was respected, but also because it had invested heavily in social networks.

Starbucks knows Shi Zongwei because it is a customer of Shi Zongwei.

In 2009, Shi Zongwei and his classmates at Stanford University founded Hearsay Social. This is a social media management platform, the main business is to develop social network-based applications to help companies manage their social media pages, find and attract customers. Shi Zongwei hopes to use this company to usher in a new era in the software industry, and the appointment from the Starbucks board of directors is an affirmation of this dream.

This is the first time Shi Zongwei has been appointed as a director of a listed company. She said she had not considered whether joining the Starbucks board would benefit her company. As to whether she will accept board appointments from other listed companies, Shi Zongwei told Fortune magazine that she does believe that boards of directors of listed companies need to attract more women and young people.

Shi Zongwei is the co-founder and CEO of Hearsay Social and the author of the New York Times bestseller Facebook Times. In addition to Starbucks directors, Shi Zongwei has many dazzling titles. In October 2011, Shi Zongwei was named one of the "strongest female entrepreneurs of the year" by Fortune magazine and one of the "most influential people in IT technology" by Fast Company magazine. Bloomberg BusinessWeek called her "one of the youngest entrepreneurs in 2011." In addition, she was invited to serve as a guest at many international conferences as a social media expert.

"did the right thing at the right time."

Shi Zongwei was born in Hong Kong on January 11, 1982. In 1986, at the age of 4, she moved to the United States with her parents and grew up in Illinois. Since then, she studied computer science at Stanford University and received a master's degree in Internet studies at the School of Internet Studies at the University of Oxford in 2005.

After graduation, Shi Zongwei worked for Microsoft and Google, and joined Salesforce.com, a customer relationship management software service provider, in 2006, responsible for the cooperation between the company and Facebook.

Gradually, Shi Zongwei realized that nowadays, many people work from home while looking after their personal business. For them, work is play. This has changed the way Shi Zongwei thinks about network applications.

After understanding the value of the customer relationship management system, Shi Zongwei wants to embed this value into social media. Soon after, she met her Stanford classmate Todd Perry, a software engineer at Facebook, who co-developed Facebook's first business program, faceconnector, hoping to see more, better, and more lasting business relationships.

In 2007, after faceconnector was released, American education publisher Prentiss Hall approached Shi Zongwei to write a book about Facebook and Twitter.

In May of that year, Shi Zongwei returned to Hong Kong to visit his grandmother. When he was eating wonton at a noodle restaurant, he heard two men at the next table discussing Facebook in Cantonese. Shi Zongwei realized that social media has become a tool to help people manage relationships.

Facebook Times was released in March 2009. Today, the book has been translated into nine languages and has become a textbook for Harvard Business School. In response, Shi Zongwei said: "I was shocked by the news. I feel lucky to have done the right thing at the right time. "

Conquer venture capital with personal charm

The Facebook era resonates with some business experts who are trying to understand what social networks mean to business, which is why Shi Zongwei started his own business.

In Shi Zongwei's view, successful companies will go where their customers are. They communicate with customers and potential customers in ways that they like.

Working at Salesforce.com taught Shi Zongwei about sales and marketing, and cultivated her intuition: to create something new in the new era of the Internet.

In 2009, after leaving Salesforce.com, Shi Zongwei found her Stanford classmate, cloud computing expert Steve Garrett, who co-founded Hearsay Social in San Francisco. The young company soon gathered elites from the top companies in the global IT industry.

In 2010, Shi Zongwei and venture capital Sequoia Capital discussed financing plans and finally won trust with their charisma. Brian Suchell of Sequoia Capital said: "We negotiate with more than 1000 entrepreneurs every year, but only a dozen have agreed. Shi Zongwei left a deep impression on us, and we signed the contract a day later. "

In just a few months, the number of customers increased fivefold

Suchell said that Shi Zongwei is a "three-sided hand." First of all, she has a degree in computer science from Stanford University. Second, she wrote a best-selling book that defines social marketing and is now one of the hot keynote speakers at major conferences. Third, she is an excellent CEO of a fast-growing company. "

Hearsay Social was founded in 2009 and was not announced until February 2011. The reason for keeping a secret and low profile for a long time is that Shi Zongwei hopes that the team can focus on the product in order to better cooperate with customers.

So far, Hearsay Social has received a $21 million capital injection, increasing the number of customers fivefold in just a few months.

It seems that Shi Zongwei has firmly occupied a piece of territory in the IT world. What makes her company unique?

Hearsay Social's target customers are the top companies in the global IT industry, committed to helping these enterprises clear the communication barriers encountered on the Internet, and finally achieve free communication with consumers.

Workaholic "the pleasure of sin"

Shi Zongwei told Fortune that he is a workaholic who works "100 hours" a week.

Sherry Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, said: "the most important career decision you can make is to choose your partner." Shi Zongwei believes that her husband has given her a lot of support in her career.

On October 1, 2011, Shi Zongwei married her doctor boyfriend. From October 3 to 5, 2011, she "escaped" from her honeymoon to attend Fortune magazine's "Top Women Summit" in California.

Shi Zongwei also founded the non-profit organization "good cause and effect" and became its consultant. She recruited many college and graduate volunteers majoring in computer science in famous universities in the United States to design educational software, and at the same time raised funds from major enterprises and institutions so that these students could make use of the summer vacation to teach children in poor and backward countries and regions to learn computers and reduce illiteracy through the use of computer software.

Shi Zongwei said she had "evil fun" to play Facebook games. "my favorite is Jewelry 4: blitzkrieg, and I get high marks every week. This is something I am proud of. "

As for her life, Shi Zongwei once wrote that when she came to the United States 25 years ago, her poor immigrant family had "nothing but hopes and dreams"; "in my life, I saw every problem as an opportunity and had no choice." For women who want to enter the technology field, Shi Zongwei's advice is: "learn how to program."