The Age of Entrepreneurship

The Age of Entrepreneurship is a new novel by Fu Yao, author of the bestselling business-war novel Win and Lose. Set against the mobile internet wave, it tells how an ordinary man's life is changed by a single idea. Guo Xinnian, a Hong Kong native and racing enthusiast, is driving through a tunnel when he has an accident while sending a text message. Crawling out of the wrecked car, he excitedly shouts out his idea for "changing the world"—putting the walkie-talkie onto the mobile phone. He promptly quits his job and heads north to Beijing to begin a hard entrepreneurial journey: finding partners, writing code, meeting investors at Garage Coffee, and turning the idea into a product through repeated rejections and doubts. As mobile technology advances rapidly and the internet landscape is overturned, he stumbles onto the wave; user numbers surge, he becomes a mobile internet star overnight, and is thrust into the eye of the storm. The three internet giants each try every trick to seize the mobile entrance, all hoping for a ticket to the future mobile market; entrepreneurs, investors, giants, and telecom operators scheme openly and secretly at the same table, and Guo Xinnian is like a small mouse running at the front, with a pack of hounds sprinting behind. Drawing on real events and behind-the-scenes stories from the internet startup world, the author weaves business models, financing rules, product logic, and business-war tactics into the plot, and also writes of entrepreneurs' emotions and costs. The story is purely fictional, yet the shadow of that era of mass entrepreneurship is visible everywhere.