Wokai Adventures

29 and counting...

Casey

Day 2 in our countdown taught me one lesson, I am not cut out for project management!

I spent the day at the developers office working with them on additions and changes to the front-end of our website. And boy are there a lot of tweeks and additions that we have to make...350 and growing... In the scheme of our web development, which probably included tens of thousands of minor features and developments, these are just the finishing touches. But, as we have learned on every project from our business plan onwards, it's the final details that take the longest and are the most tedious.

So, today my job was to be on the developers like white on rice (excuse the China microfinance pun) to make sure that we hit our Sunday goal for Alpha testing. I will spend two more days this week working out of their offices...and then we should have a fully functioning website! While it can be tedious it's an exciting task.

Another highlight for the day was a long brainstorming call with Courtney, planning for our launch and all of the other elements that need to converge for Wokai to take off.

On slot for tomorrow is our second Investment Committee meeting and the first day for our new COO, Naomi.

30 days to go...

Casey

Today not only marked the first day of September, but also the first day in our 30 day countdown of Wokia's final month pre-beta launch.  This is going to be the most intense month so far at Wokai. Over the next 30 days we have to: 1. Bug-test and prep stage 1 of the website for live Beta testing, 2. Raise funds to make it through the next 1, 3 and 6 months, and, 3. Sign our Field Partner contract, train and get our first partner online.

From the way today went, what is to come over the next month looks promising. I started my day at Hou Hai, a central lake in Beijing, meeting with Ben Marino, a freelance journalist who is doing a report on Wokai for the China Economic Review, China’s most read English language magazine.

After we finished the interview, Liz, our new intern who just graduated from UVA Law School, and I took the bus back to our office down the road. It turns out that, unbeknown-st to me, it was the best day so far to have a rising lawyer. Zhang Sheng, our Director of Field Partnerships, informed us that he had reached a stalemate with the Director of our first Field Partner on the terms of our contract. The Director wanted to insert language into the contract that our lawyers at MOFO do not believe we should compromise on. So we’re stuck…

We spent the morning debating legalese and how we could finesse the situation to put the pieces together and make it work for everyone. It was a really fun, collaborative process to engage in that kind of duologue, and more importantly, as our Field Partnerships start going live, it’s exciting to watch Zhang Sheng coming into his own. He has been working with us for the past ten months and over that time he has become proficient in MFI evaluation, contracts, html, English, accounting, finance, and negotiation. He has been a pillar of Wokai since he started. It is exciting to be at the point where he has grown into his role so well that I go to him for advice on how we should handle our partnerships. We will have to see what our Investment Committee has to say, but we left the discussion with the feeling that there are certain terms that we can’t accept, even if that means that we go ahead and launch with the partner that we had planned on working with second, and not work with the one considered to be the “best MFI in China”.

I ended the day with website testing. About two weeks ago we met with our developers and agreed that the site had to be ready for testing by this Saturday. That meant that in less than 20 days, our developers had to complete two months of development work. They are pounding through the site. Literally as I was going through the site today, looking for missing features, I was watching Ran Xin and Li Guang unveiling new functions in the site. All together I found almost 450 parts of the site that still need to be completed or tweaked, but given the speed that they have been working at over the past two weeks, we just might make it.

The next month is going to be exiting. In 2 days we’ll have a new COO, in 6 days we’ll have an almost completed testable site, in 15 days we will have a contract signed and start training, in 16 days we’ll have George, our favorite Wokai staff returning from a stint back in Great Britain, and in 30 days I return to the US for our launch and an online social marketplace conference at Stanford.