A Young Hacker Who Grew Up Wild Wants to Sell Skateboards to Office Commuters | 100 People With Ideas

In middle school we all knew boys like this: they drank, smoked, got into fights, worshipped rock music, ran in gangs, and never had any use for homework or exams. Chen Zhengxiang was one of them. The difference was that he could code — and he had ideas, and could build them.

Meet Chen Zhengxiang and your first impression will not be of one of those rumpled, red-eyed "entrepreneurs." He is far too distinctive for that.

His hair stands straight up, cropped clean, and several outsized tattoos run across his body. On his left arm there is an octopus with its arms thrown wide, and beside it a six-character line from the Chinese classics: "When sitting quietly, reflect often on your own faults." Behind each ear he has the Japanese aesthetic term wabi-sabi. On his neck, a pair of flaming red lips you cannot miss.

We planned to interview him in a coffee shop, as we usually do. Chen Zhengxiang suggested we row a boat on Shichahai lake in Beijing instead.

He is 26 this year, and he wants to solve the "last mile" of the white-collar commute with a skateboard. That's right — not an e-bike, not a bicycle, not a unicycle, not a Segway. A skateboard.

A skateboard usually stands within reach of him. It is called Stary, and it is electric. It is not built for skaters; it is built for the office workers who ride the subway to and from work every day, even if they have never stood on a board in their lives.

Stary electric skateboard

Stary looks exactly like an ordinary skateboard, only a little thicker and heavier — 4.6 kilograms. So where are the motor and the battery hidden? Chen Zhengxiang says that of the four PU wheels, only one is the drive wheel, holding the motor, the braking system and the gearbox. That single wheel, he says, can carry three people.

The Stary skateboard has only one drive wheel

The battery sits inside a 13-millimeter deck, padded with wood and shock-absorbing material, so the finished board keeps a skateboard's plain shape. That thin battery carries it 15 kilometers, at a top speed of 30 kilometers an hour.

To keep the board clean-looking, the battery is embedded inside it

Chen Zhengxiang pulled out a 3D-printed Bluetooth remote. Work the thumbwheel and the board brakes, speeds up, slows down. The remote has three speed settings. Riding it comes down to three moves: brake the board with the remote and step on; accelerate with the remote and steer with your feet; slow down, brake, and the board stops.

The remote, which adjusts speed and gear

We tried Stary out in the hutongs around Shichahai. With no skateboarding background at all, it took 10 minutes to pick up the basics and roll along slowly and steadily. We only dared use the lowest of the three settings, but none of it was especially hard.

Chen Zhengxiang says he wants Stary to solve the "last mile" of the commute — the distance between the subway station and your front door. Next to an electric bicycle or an electric scooter, Stary's advantages are plain: it is lighter and easier to handle, and you can carry it onto the subway and into the office.

All through the test ride we kept picturing what it would be like to ride one to work. If the safety problem can be worked out, turning up at the office on a skateboard would feel pretty cool.

Chen Zhengxiang says he hopes young people will commute on electric skateboards

An hour after the interview ended, Chen Zhengxiang posted on WeChat Moments: "Rowing a boat with a girl on Beihai lake in Beijing, and I missed the moment we hit 1 million yuan."

The 1 million yuan was what Stary had raised on Kickstarter, already far past its 620,000-yuan target. Stary had been live for eight days. The project had also picked up coverage from several tech outlets without much effort, which is no small thing for a startup.

The Teenage Hacker Who Grew Up Wild

If he had not learned to program so early, Chen Zhengxiang says, he might still be a small-time hoodlum today.

He grew up in the 1990s, and he was in elementary school just as the campaign to "start computer education with the children" swept the country. His father, an electronics engineer, decided programming had a future and sent him to coding classes early.

From then on, programming opened the door to a new world.

"I was so hooked on computers that my computer teacher handed me the key to the lab and let me come and go as I liked," Chen Zhengxiang recalls. He started with BASIC and moved on to writing simple programs, teaching himself young from magazines like Computer Paper (《电脑报》).

The Y2K bug that broke on the eve of 2000 turned him into a teenage hacker. "Y2K mattered a lot to me. That's when I started thinking hackers were cool."

Hacker Chen Zhengxiang's first "work" was a small virus that stole OICQ accounts — OICQ being QQ's predecessor — which he planted on the computers in internet cafes.

"I built a fake OICQ that looked just like the QQ login box, but when you logged in it showed a failure, when in fact your account had already been stolen." Two days of that could net him a few hundred accounts. He sold them at school for 2 to 5 yuan apiece.

In fifth grade he wrote a second virus, this one destructive: it fired the moment you turned the computer on, threw up 10 windows a second and kept deleting files from the C drive. "More than half the machines in the lab went down." He still sounds a little pleased with himself telling the story now.

His hacking made him a bad student in his teachers' eyes, but it also left him thinking freely. He got online early, and fighting, dating and gaming became the routine of his middle-school life. It was around then, too, that Chen Zhengxiang stumbled on the school library and set out on his own unusual path as a "failing student."

"The library was a mysterious place — from the chronicles of Britain to animal encyclopedias, from 3D Max to Photoshop, from growing flowers to quantum physics …" Reading those books, Chen Zhengxiang says, was like being on drugs; his head blew open all at once. So he negotiated with his teachers, set his own class schedule, and went on teaching himself to program and following his own curiosity instead of listening in class — right up until he "successfully bombed" the high school entrance exam.

His score was only good enough for the local vocational high school, so Chen Zhengxiang decided to drop out instead. "I could see the jobs my middle-school classmates were headed for, and the paths they were on, and I didn't want those jobs. I felt I was different."

By then he had already taught himself 3D Max modeling, Flash animation and simple graphic design. Websites hired him to make banners and Flash animations, and an hour or two of work paid one or two hundred yuan.

"Making money was absurdly easy," he recalls.

Besides Flash animation, he took any short-term work that paid: website banners, cutting hair, even cooking at a takeout stall. "I wasn't any good at cooking either, so people like me are the reason takeout tastes bad," he says, laughing.

After a stretch of odd jobs, Chen Zhengxiang decided he should get a job at a proper company. It was 2006. He shouldered a bag, put 1,000 yuan in his pocket, bought a one-way ticket to Shanghai and left on his own.

Blundering Into the Maker Scene

In Shanghai nobody would even take his resume, so he had to knock on doors himself. After a good deal of trying, a company called Aodisitong hired him. It had entered the virtual reality market early, and its main customers were in the military.

Chen Zhengxiang stayed five years. He started as an "after-sales engineer" who did nothing but write emails to customers, moved into a presales sales job, and was later promoted to project engineer, trying his hand at every kind of role along the way.

In his free time he liked to tinker with small gadgets, and now and then with the circuit boards his father had taught him about as a child. In 2011 he found Shanghai's XinCheJian online, a hangout for hardware "makers," and it turned his hobby into his next opening: there he met the DFrobot team.

DFrobot mainly sold makers robot kits, sensors, 3D printers and the like. At the time it had a hardware team but no software team, so Chen Zhengxiang proposed building programming software that someone with no background could learn — letting more people without a computer science education drive hardware however they wanted — and selling it together with the hardware. That is why he quit his job and joined DFrobot, to run the first project he ever led: Mind+.

Put simply, Mind+ is a free tool that turns lines of code into blocks you can see. Even if you cannot program, you can write a working program by dragging the blocks around.

Mind+ made Chen Zhengxiang a small name in the maker world. In 2013 several outlets interviewed him, and some called him "Chen Zhengxiang, the unruly maker." The project did not last much longer, though, because he says he wanted to do something else. In 2014, after he left Mind+, DFrobot open-sourced it and put it on the code-hosting service GitHub.

"After leaving [DFrobot] I thought for a long time about what to do. I simply wanted to build a simple tech company." For a while he made the rounds of maker competitions and hackathons across the country, looking for ideas.

At the 2014 Maker Faire in Shenzhen, Chen Zhengxiang and a few friends ran a stall selling magic props, "just to make some drinking money," he says.

Not Just a Skateboard: He Wants Stary to Be a Brand, and China's Coolest Tech Company

In the end his startup idea came out of an everyday hobby. Chen Zhengxiang had been skateboarding for three or four years before he began work on Stary, which is part of why he moved into short-distance transportation.

Plenty of people have said they would solve the "last mile." So far nobody on the market has actually done it.

In 2001 the American inventor Dean Kamen worked with the medical device maker Johnson & Johnson to develop the iBOT, a self-balancing powered wheelchair for people with disabilities and the elderly. A year later the iBOT was reworked for able-bodied riders as a self-balancing electric vehicle, named Segway.

As the first mover in the short-distance market, Segway set off a wave of excitement when it went on sale, and won orders from the US government and some large companies. But it never became a successful means of transportation: in its first six years it sold only 30,000 units. This April, Segway was bought by the Chinese company Ninebot — the second time it had changed hands.

After Segway, short-distance products of every kind came crowding in, and with them sub-categories: two-wheel and single-wheel scooters, electric bicycles, electric skateboards. None of them has caught on at scale yet, and how much of a success Chen Zhengxiang's skateboard can be in this small market is hard to say.

As Chen Zhengxiang sees it, the Stary board is only one of the products he intends to make. What he wants to build is a very cool Chinese tech company.

"China simply doesn't have any interesting tech companies. Companies like OPPO, Haier and Hisense come across as cheap and practical, and people born in the 1990s aren't going to like that. In the future China will definitely produce a company that becomes a huge, era-defining company, one that turns up in every corner of daily life."

So his Stary is not just a skateboard company. It is a "cool" brand for young people. Like him.

"The Stary brand is a lot like me. It stands for rebellion, for not wanting to look like everyone else, for not wanting to meet only people's most basic needs. But it is also a very professional tech company, making transportation that is cool and a pleasure to use."

Besides "cool," the tech company Chen Zhengxiang has in mind has to be reliable. Saying this, he picked up his Stary board and slammed it against a rock at the side of the path. People resting in the park turned to look. The board, battery and motor inside, came away without a mark.

From "maker" to "entrepreneur," from software to hardware, Chen Zhengxiang has had to face more that is unexpected and more that is serious.

"Hardware iterates slowly and it costs a lot. Every stage is an enormous challenge. In software, everything depends on how smart you are. In hardware, most of it depends on how well you can negotiate, and that puts a lot of limits on you," he says. "Almost everything is a trap. I used to think motors were simple — just buy one, right? But making one spin at maximum efficiency is a highly specialized field. And the supply chain is a whole discipline of its own. One of my partners does nothing but supply chain."

Still, success or not, being able to make a genuinely interesting product says something in itself. Doesn't it?