March 01, 2021

#278: Xiaoyin Qu, Founder and CEO of Run The World, a Comprehensive Virtual Events Platform for Community Building That Has Raised More than $14M, on Creating a New Media Format, Monetizing Events, and Deepening Human Connection

45 minutes

Xiaoyin Qu is the Founder and CEO of Run The World, a leading virtual events platform for community building. Run The World is the one-stop-shop for experts, creators, community leaders and organizations to host and monetize from interactive online events such as workshops, meetups, summits or shows.

Xiaoyin is a Forbes 30 under 30, Linkedin Top Voice, and Inc. Female Founder 100. Prior to dropping out of Stanford Graduate School of Business to start Run The World, she led product management at Facebook and Instagram. She is an active and well-published product writer and tech influencer, and is running her own product columns in China with 7000+ paid subscribers (Geektime), and working on her new upcoming book. She has been invited to speak at multiple international and national product conferences as well as top universities such as Stanford, UC Berkeley, UT Austin, Claremont Colleges and more. Xiaoyin is a contributor for Forbes China, Hacker Noon, and she runs her own tech columns in 36kr (leading tech media in China), Product Coalition (world's largest free Product Management community), woshiPM (China's leading product management media). She was selected to be a resident for Zhenfund, China's leading angel fund.

Some of the Topics Covered by Xiaoyin Qu in this Episode

What Run The World is and what differentiates them
Coming to the U.S. from China at age 18 for college
Working at Facebook and Instagram as a product manager
Deciding to go to business school at Stanford and then dropping out to start Run The World
Running her first virtual conference and how that led to funding Run The World
Making Run The World a comprehensive event platform
Early customer acquisition and organic growth
Fundraising as a female founder
Xiaoyin's advice for first time founders
Building out a team for Run The World
Determining roles and responsibilities with her co-founder
How the COVID-19 pandemic affected their business as they were in the early stages of growth
Managing a distributed team
The business model for Run The World and how pricing has evolved
How Xiaoyin sees Run The World as a new media format
How they're helping event organizers to create more value for people in order to generate revenue and monetize
Managing feedback
The biggest challenges of growing Run The World
A typical day for Xiaoyin and balancing having team members across the world
How Xiaoyin recharges away from work
Learning how to be a manager
Figuring out what success looks like in areas outside of your expertise
What makes a successful online event
How they're approaching specialization and narrowing down their use cases
What Xiaoyin would do differently looking back
The big vision for Run The World

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By Justin Gordon

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