Thursday, July 9, 2015

LaunchCMU Silicon Valley Makes Headlines in China

LaunchCMU’s May event in Silicon Valley is making headlines internationally, thanks to a group of Carnegie Mellon Chinese Alumni.

After attending the May 12th event in Silicon Valley, Guang Xiang, class of 2013, and his fellow classmates, including Mingche Su, Pengqi Liu, Xuewei He, and Yanze Song decided to summarize the event and post it online in Chinese.

The group of alumni calls themselves “15213 Makerspace,” says Xiang. “[We’re a] group of CMU Chinese alumni who love innovative and disruptive startup ideas and share the dream of making CMU's cutting-edge research and innovations the talk of the town in every corner of China.”

15213 Makerspace posted information about LaunchCMU on WeChat, the leading social media platform in China. WeChat is a mobile-only application where users can share stories and messages. Knowing that readers prefer Chinese to English, the alumni translated the information. Other media outlets in China began picking up the story quickly.

15213 Makerspace has posted multiple articles on LaunchCMU and the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship on WeChat.

The article received national attention in China and garnered thousands of views in the first several days simply through social sharing. Xiang attributes this to the increasingly entrepreneurial spirit in China. Xiang is in the early stages of building his startup in China.

By: Emma Diehl, ediehl@andrew.cmu.edu