When Irishman Ken Carroll was nearly broke and struggling to turn his newly-founded English school into a good business, it was neither his background in philosophy nor his years of experience as a teacher that got him through.
It was stubbornness.
"I didn't want to go back home and admit I had not succeeded," Carroll recalls about being in Shanghai in the mid-1990s.
Luckily the hardships became a thing of the past and he turned a profit, enough to fund further start-ups. Now, 13 years later, the Dubliner has become a serial entrepreneur, with big revenues and worldwide media attention.
Enthusiasm, drive and persistence have made this "liberal capitalist", as Carroll calls himself, a language and website entrepreneur.
The reason for Carroll's international attention is ChinesePod, one of the most significant examples of making new media into good business. This Shanghai-based online Mandarin venture boasts a quarter of a million visitors a month and there have been 20 million downloads of the lessons, since they started.
Carroll, who never studied Mandarin, lives in Shanghai with his wife, from Taiwan Province, and their 8-year-old daughter. He co-hosts the basic level lessons at ChinesePod, together with native Mandarin speaker Jenny Zhu.
Sporting a black leather jacket and a goatee, Carroll might not look the part of a typical computer expert, but the Irishman has turned fuzzy terms like Web 2.0, viral marketing and language acquisition into cool cash.
ChinesePod immediately hit the news after its launch with coverage from international media like the Guardian, the Financial Times and NBC. It was one of Time magazine's top 10 podcasts of last year.
A brief tour around the ChinesePod office, located in an old factory building in Shanghai's Huangpi Road, offers a stroll down memory lane. Here the basic recording studio is where things were initially kept very simple.
"We literally started out by recording three podcasts and posting them on our website," he says.
Despite the simple start three years ago and public curiosity over whether or not Web 2.0 would be more than a fad, Carroll did not doubt for a minute that he had a success on his hands.
At home in the new state-of-the-art recording studios, Carroll says ChinesePod now has 40 employees and has seen 300 percent year-on-year growth.
"I think the immense international attention ChinesePod received is partly linked to the emergence of China on the world stage and partly spurred by the curiosity about Web 2.0. People really wanted to see if it could work."
The hype around new media also means that Carroll spends some of his time at Shanghai's foreign chambers of commerce telling them about how he has turned Web 2.0 theory into practice.
"Web 2.0 only really means something if it is validated. The key is that it is effective, not that it's squared with Web 2.0 theory."
"The smartest move we made with ChinesePod was probably to rely on viral marketing. By offering valuable, fun and high quality podcasts for free, people would recommend them to others and thereby we would get paying customers to the premium content on the website."
The viral marketing also meant that community leaders on the ChinesePod site volunteer to make it into a social network, as they comment on their own learning process.
Carroll's three businesses, all founded with business partners, revolve around teaching. The one that started it all in 1996, Kaien, is now a chain of traditional English teaching schools in Shanghai.
Praxis Language, the company behind the ChinesePod brand, was founded in 2005, and the recently started O.D.T. (On Demand Training) focuses on learning through mobile phones.
(China Daily December 14, 2007)
