I’m nervous and shaking.

Is it because of me or is it cold here?

Are you cold? No?

This is not cold.

That is cold.

It’s Great Wall in snow.

I was there for five years.

I am not on the Great Wall for five years.

I was in Beijing for five years,

developing games and IT softwares.

And during the time as a software developer,

you got to drink a lot of coffees.

And the problem was

there was not a lot of interesting coffee shops in Beijing,

so I ended up ordering coffees

on line, off the Internet,

and I started roasting it myself.

So…The more I roast coffee,

the more I learn about coffee.

But not just the taste itself,

also the business, the profitability,

and I realize entire value change

from farmers to consumers

are just very very interesting.

So I decided to drop IT

and start something new about coffee.

I didn’t get tired of IT,

I got sick of Beijing a little bit.

Of course after staying there for five years

so I went back to Hong Kong.

I’m from Hong Kong,

and I visited a lot of coffee shops in Hong Kong

talking to owners.

I came to Taiwan and did the same thing.

Then I immediately fall in love with

the coffee culture here in Taiwan.

You can walk into a café in Taiwan

with a laptop and you sit down, and you know,

put your laptop on your desk

and try to work and start working.

Then, a cat will come and sit on your laptop.

Right?

And maybe just sleeps on it, right?

Isn’t it cute?

You never gonna see something like that in Hong Kong.

Because you just cannot have pets in restaurants.

So…

that is not the reason why I started my business here,

not because of those cats, right?

I started it here because of the fact that

people really loves coffee here.

People cares about coffee,

therefore a lot of coffee fanatics

here in Taiwan.

And there is a niche market you can tap into,

if you do it right.

So with that in mind,

that I start to have some visions

of what my business should be.

I want to build a coffee brand,

and technically selling coffee

have two groups of consumers.

One is you have a normal consumer

that drinks coffee everyday.

Then you have coffee fanatics,

coffee geeks.

For the normal consumers it’s easy.

You just make something good,

make it convenient,

make it cheap, make it affordable

and then sell it to them.

It’s all about marketing and branding.

Or maybe just like

Tobie observed it, you know,

you have a girl, right? a coffee girl,

waving coffee then you can sell it to them.

But for the coffee geeks,

the geeks are harder.

But the good thing about us is that

the geeks care so much about coffee that

they will listen to whatever you got to say.

So that would become a very powerful tool

if you can try to get to them.

So with that in mind,

I went back to Hong Kong

and then I started pulling things out

in the garage and putting things together.

I start doing all this geeky,

engineering, you know,

tinkering stuffs.

I think that’s the reason why

I don’t have a girlfriend.

Then I built this.

That is a computer controlled coffee roaster.

It’s a prototype.

It looks really ugly by the way

but it roasted coffee from

from this

to

this.

All fully automatically.

Yeah that’s it. Thank you.

So automation is key.

Automation means consistency.

Without automation, you cannot scale.

And nobody can achieve automation

without spending a lot of money

on industrial - equipment.

So, this is where that

IT concept comes into play.

In a traditional IT system,

if you have a problem,

you scale it out,

you break it down into small pieces,

you give it out smaller and cheaper servers.

and this is what makes Google,

and this is what makes Facebook.

Yet another common practice in IT is

you crowd-source a problem.

You set a goal,

you set a format for information exchange,

then you let your audience participate

in finding solutions.

Now, that is a idea of Wikipedia

it’s basically what it is about.

It’s a platform.

So now I have a question about coffee.

I mean what is the best blend for

coffees for American people.

What is the best for Japanese

and what tastes the best for

northern Taiwanese. Right?

I don’t think there should be a single person

or a single brand

that can come out and answer that question.

Because we simply don’t know.

But if there is a platform,

then I’m sure there will be interesting results.

So instead of pushing products,

pushing tastes to my consumers,

what I’m trying to do is

I’m building a platform

on which

coffee fans around the world

could participate in defining the product

and share with each other.

It is really a fair thing to do because

you know I’m just one company,

I mean I don’t have the best tongue.

I have a good tongue,

but I surely don’t have a access to

all the great coffees out there, right?

So why not just give them the hardware,

I mean sell them to the hardware,

I’m still trying to make a living.

Why not just sell them the hardware?

The roasting machines, the coffee machines,

which all automatic consistent and affordable.

And they are all connected to the community

and let them customize the product.

So,

Taiwan is a perfect place to start this project,

because

there is a mature coffee culture here,

and all these

different kinds of models in this sector.

I mean from the traders to city café

to professional coffee houses to.. you know.

whatever take away coffees.

If you drop something here,

you can go west or you can east.

Plus the fact that 85 degree café,

85℃ just went IPO last month

and that gives investors a lot of room

to imagine what could happen

if you make it a successful case in Taiwan.

So this is why I am here, right?

I hope you enjoy my little story

about my transition

from IT industry to coffee.

Some call it interesting,

some call it stupid.

But whatever it called it,

try the coffee,

the coffee is in your pocket,

and you know

I cannot tell you how good it is

because I’m not supposed to advertise here.

But it is really good.

Thank you.