This Swiss Man Wants to Fix China's Air Pollution | 100 People With Ideas

Liam Bates doesn't like to call himself an "entrepreneur." He doesn't care about so-called competitors, and his idea of starting a business is a little "unconventional."

His name is Liam Bates — Li Mu in Chinese — and he now makes air quality detectors in China.

Two years of running a company have, oddly enough, given him the most regular routine of his 28 years. Before that, he was very good at having fun:

Bates is Swiss and grew up at the foot of the Alps. Obsessed with Shaolin kung fu, he came to China at 16 during a summer vacation to study under a master, and has come back every year since whenever he could.

One college summer, he circled the names of the two smallest county towns in Anhui province on a map — Aimin and Yunle — and went straight there. For two months he slept in a sleeping bag on the concrete floor of a local villager's two-story house.

When that trip ended, he and a friend rode motorcycles from Lhasa all the way to Shanghai and filmed a documentary, Ten Thousand Miles. Along the way gangsters robbed him, and a truck hit him and broke his leg. Before the leg had healed, he went on crutches to the "Chinese Bridge" Chinese-language competition for university students worldwide — and took first place.

The adventure stories he told at the competition got him invited onto As Far As You Can Go, a show on China's Travel Channel, which took him to villages in China and to remote tribes in South America. He traveled much of the world and wrote a book in Chinese, "Play" Is Serious Business.

Now Bates rents a courtyard house in a hutong inside Beijing's Second Ring Road, where he runs a team of a dozen or so people making everything to do with air quality: air purifiers, air quality detectors and the rest. Like any Chinese hardware founder, he spends his days working through product design, visiting factories and getting the products into stores.

He rarely roams far these days, but Bates thinks what he does now is, at bottom, the same as his old reckless adventures: challenge yourself, explore the unknown — and this time it means something as well.

He is happy with where the company stands: a dozen or so people, growing naturally and working by sound logic — hit a problem, solve it; sell enough product to keep the company alive first, then get bigger.

He doesn't quite understand the "startup wave" that has swept China these past few years. He doesn't like to call himself an "entrepreneur," doesn't care about so-called competitors, and his idea of starting a business is a little unconventional.

He started the company for his family — and to see Chinese factories along the way

Two years ago the woman who is now Bates's wife moved to China from Canada, and Beijing's bad air brought her asthma back.

Bates decided he had to buy an air purifier, but not blindly. So he borrowed the purifiers then on the market from friends — Philips, Blueair, IQAir — turned his home into a small test lab and measured how well each one cleaned the air. His conclusion: these big foreign brands were expensive and didn't work very well.

"The problem is actually simple: those things weren't designed for the Chinese market and environment, whether in airflow or anything else. This kind of product isn't complicated — it's a motor plus a filter — but the filters and motors they picked may not deliver a particularly good result. Adjust those things a little and the performance improves a lot."

Bates, who had never worked on products or technology, suddenly wanted to build an air purifier that worked well and sold cheap — the same way he had once wanted martial arts, Chinese, adventure. He had a private motive too: this was his chance to see Chinese factories.

"I really wanted to see Chinese factories. China is the so-called factory of the world, but I'd never been inside one. I felt that was a hole in my understanding of China. In theory, if I want to be an expert on China, I should understand this — I should know what manufacturing actually is."

He tracked down a friend he'd met on a university exchange at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and the two decided to go into Chinese factories themselves to learn how air purifiers are made. They knew nothing about making them, so to get people talking they made up a "story" about a multinational company scouting China.

Bates and his friend listed the 10 factories they most wanted to work with, ranked from most to least desirable, and started calling from the bottom of the list. Here is how they learned the whole production process without being found out:

"For instance, we'd walk in and say we were some multinational company — I'm Swiss, my friend is Chinese, so there, we're multinational. (Laughs) Then we'd say we had a colleague in charge of the product who was away on a business trip in the US, so sorry, neither of us really understands manufacturing, could you walk us through roughly what the product design and production process looks like."

The "story" sounded reasonable enough, and the first factory gave Bates a rough outline: production starts with design, then you design the mold, and the mold takes about 60 days to make, and so on. They carried what they'd learned to the next factory and used it to draw out more.

"Then we'd go to the second-to-last factory on the list and run the same routine: we have a colleague in the US in charge of the product, we don't really understand it, and we know that after design usually comes the mold, and production takes about 60 days — we'd repeat back what we'd learned at the first factory. After four or five factories like that, you basically get it."

OxyBox, the company's first air purifier, came out of Bates and his partner learning the basic production process this way. Bates also has a "two-month learning theory."

"The majors we studied in college didn't actually take that long to learn — freshman year is basically just messing around. So I figure at 80 hours a week you can fully grasp any field in about two months, even physics."

The air quality detector sold much better

But Bates's air purifier didn't sell all that well in China. The detector built to go with it, the Laser Egg, was the one that took off.

This Wi-Fi-connected detector has an LED screen, can sit anywhere, and measures the particulates in the air. Its good looks and its 499-yuan price also helped it in the market. Two years after launch, the Laser Egg has become the most important source of revenue for Bates's company.

It's called the Laser Egg because the detector works by firing a laser. When the laser hits a particle it scatters, and the angle and intensity of that scattering are used to work out what the particle is like. Reading those characteristics depends on calibration values — a frame of reference.

"Calibration matters enormously. Get the calibration wrong and every number is wrong. A lot of products in China right now are calibrated any old way. Calibration can differ from place to place in China: the main pollutant particles in Beijing and in Guangzhou may be completely different, and if you use one frame of reference everywhere, the numbers come out inaccurate."

To keep the calibration accurate, Bates's team has placed sampling devices in major cities around the world.

"We first use the internet of things to work out where a given detector is — Shanghai, Beijing, New York... And we're sampling constantly all over the world. Shanghai has its own calibration parameters, and the moment a device connects, those parameters get pushed to it. We're the first company in the world to do this."

What does he think a company is?

When the question of "business model" came up during the interview, Bates looked a little exasperated. He thinks people misunderstand this, because:

"Product form and business model aren't the most important things. B2B, B2C, B2G, B2F, P2P, whatever — I think a lot of companies don't actually know what they're doing. Why does your company exist? That's a good question. If you can't answer it, your company shouldn't exist. If you tell me your company exists to build some app, I find that pretty hollow. Maybe my thinking is a bit extreme. (Laughs)"

For Bates, the "meaning" behind a company's existence seems to matter more, and his idea of meaning goes beyond a few pieces of hardware. He wants to solve a bigger problem: global environmental pollution.

"Say we sell 10,000 Laser Eggs and 7,000 of those users are online — that is still far more than the government's monitoring stations." They decided to put that data to work, as a visual air quality map. With algorithms built by the technical team, they can then infer the outdoor air quality index from readings taken inside people's homes.

Bates showed me, on his computer, the air quality map the team has already built.

"This is a real-time air quality map of Beijing. We can analyze the air quality at any point in Beijing, instead of the environmental protection bureau's two-hour-old reading from the Agricultural Exhibition Center. With this technology you can now see the air in this courtyard as it was one minute ago. What matters is that it can help us find the sources of pollution."

The method has its limits. How much data you get depends on how many Laser Eggs have sold, and the connection data shows the devices are far denser in the developed cities of China and India. The team fills in the areas with few Laser Eggs using satellite imagery and weather models, hoping in time to pin down exactly where the pollution comes from.

That will certainly be hard. Environmental problems have never been only about where the pollution starts; government policy, the chains of interest behind it and other factors outside technology may well become problems Bates and his team have to face.

He grew up in a family that never sat still

But Bates seems always to have liked hard things. He says the courage started with his parents.

In the 1990s, his mother and father rode bicycles from Hong Kong to Beijing.

Bates says his mother shaped him most. In her twenties she left the US and lived alone in France, working as a shop clerk, a translator, a waitress and a journalist before becoming a freelance writer. When he was ten she brought him a small present from the US, a Native American dreamcatcher, which he hung in his room, and she told him: "You have to chase your own dreams and do what you love."

"I called my mom a few days ago and she said she's really into wine lately and has been studying it nonstop — by now she counts as a professional taster. I think my mom is really something."

Growing up in that, Bates's curiosity, his appetite for knowledge and his nerve were all kept intact. Before I left, he showed me a line his company prints on its notebooks: Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.

He seems to have been living that way all along.

Q = QDaily

A = Liam Bates

Q: You started a company back in high school. What was that about?

A: The company I started then was meant to help foreigners come to China to learn martial arts, because I'd found it really hard myself — whatever website you went to, a martial arts school was all in Chinese, and there was nobody to help you. And the few companies that did offer this took very high margins. Some schools are actually cheap — one or two hundred yuan a month and you can train every day — but once a broker referred you, that could go from a few hundred to several thousand. So I built an online platform, a website, where people could pick the course they wanted to study. My partner was in China and arranged things on that end. It was aimed mainly at Europe and the US.

Q: Have you always been this restless, even as a kid?

A: Yes, that's exactly right. (Laughs) I've been restless since I was little, and whatever I do has to involve a bit of suffering, because only after that pain do you get the happiness or the enjoyment. That's part of why I like doing a startup — because it's really hard, really painful. I think it's like running a marathon, or sport: you don't want to run, but you keep going anyway (and find a sense of achievement in that suffering). I think it's very similar.

Basically, if everyone is doing something, I won't like it. Back then everyone played video games. I'd been around a lot of computer stuff since I was small, and at ten or eleven everyone was playing games. I thought playing games was fine, but making your own game would be really cool. So I started learning code and programming, and wrote a few games myself. I thought they were pretty good, so I tried selling them to my friends. I burned a CD, five dollars each, and nobody bought it — the games were pretty ordinary, honestly, and people didn't think they were worth it. Then I thought, if they won't buy it, somebody in the world must want to. So I built a website myself, put screenshots of the games on it, and let people pay to download them. It was funny at the time — PayPal had just started, and there was no Alipay or anything like that in China yet, so I had to build a site that collected strangers' credit card numbers. Where's a 12-year-old going to get a credit card? So I kept borrowing my parents' credit card to take the money.

Q: How do you define "success"?

A: Whatever your definition of success is, to be a successful person you have to be a different person, one who isn't like everyone else — that's how you stand out. English explains it clearly: it comes down to being outstanding, and if you break "outstanding" apart, it's "stand out" — distinct and excellent. So there are two roads to being different. Most people ask whether they can be No. 1, but I think competing with a crowd for first place is very hard. The other road is to do something completely unlike what anyone else is doing — then there's no competition, and it's easy to stand out.

Cover image from Liam Bates's blog