The Founders Alex Zhu and Luyu Yang met while working as Directors of Product at eBaoTech, an insurtech company in Shanghai. Luyu Yang was a serial founder before teaming up with Alex. According to his LinkedIn, he founded 2 companies. He also co-founded one consultancy, before all that co-founded one while studying at Central South University in Changsha, Hunan, China. Alex Zhu is a designer by trade, working as a designer for Chinapages, Cisco WebEx, and SAP before meeting Luyu. After briefly coming back at SAP, Alex becomes enamored by the idea of the future of education and MOOCs around 2012. He tells longtime friend Luyu about the concept, and they get to work- founding Cicada Education in Shanghai. Humble Beginnings The idea was to make a platform for short-form educational videos. After raising $250,000 from China Rock Capital Management and a quick sprint of six months. The team had difficulty finding traction trying to make engaging educational content that can fit with the expectations of a 3 to 5-minute video. The problem: educators had trouble adjusting their lesson plans in bite-sized chunks. The videos took too long to make, and the target demographic of teens didn’t engage anyways. One time on a train in Mountain View. Alex observed young people recording themselves with the front-facing camera, some were lip-syncing. This got the gears going, they realized that it was tough to create functional, short videos. A problem they encountered with Cicada. Around 2014, Vine showed that many content creators had to resort to custom video creation stacks to create high-quality videos. Musical.ly’s founders posed a question after going through their iterations… What if music could democratize high-quality short video creation? They decided to take whatever money they had left and put it to what is now known as Musical.ly.
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