Nanxi Liu
CEO at Enplug
Nanxi Liu is the co-founder and CEO of Enplug, a Los Angeles technology company that builds the industry-leading software for powering digital displays in malls, restaurants, retail stores and more. The software is most known for its live social media streaming, analytics platform, and interactive content capabilities. Nanxi is also founder and board member of Nanoly Bioscience, which developed a polymer that enables vaccines to survive without refrigeration. Nanoly was awarded NASA’s Top 10 New Tech Companies and Intel’s Top Social Innovation
Who is your hero?
My mother. She’s taught me more about life than anyone in the world.
What’s the single best piece of business advice that helped shape who you are as an entrepreneur today, and why?
The only place success comes before work is in the dictionary. Building a company means that you’ll pull all-nighters, eat ramen for all meals and lose hair. And oftentimes, all three will happen just to land a single client. There will be plenty of mechanical tasks that stretch time out, and until you can afford to hire someone to complete them, you have to do the hard work yourself.
The wonderful flip side is that a decent amount of work that’s related to building a startup is undoubtedly fun. For example, when a potential distribution company in another country flies me out to meet with them, I view that as a vacation. Whether the work is brutal or exhilarating, there always is work to be done to reach success. When there are not enough sales leads, I chain myself to my phone and laptop until we receive more customer sign ups. From my experience, the work always pays off.
What’s the biggest mistake you ever made in your business, and what did you learn from it that others can learn from too?
In college, I decided to build a crowd-sourced caller ID app for smartphones. I spent the first few months building the product rather than researching how many people would actually use it. There were multiple features that I later discovered to be unnecessary. Had I simply created a mockup of the features and asked for feedback, I would have saved a lot of time.