Jian Mintong

Entrepreneur, innovator, Shenzhen

Jian Mintong has shares in factories that produce electronic devices for the West. He also invests a great deal of money in home-grown creations, in particular cheap smartphones for Russia and Africa. He has various teams tasked with developing new products. His experiments include a smartwatch and a version of Google Glass. As a lover of old German camera lenses, he has tasked an engineer with developing and building high-end camera lenses in Shenzhen. Jian knows that he needs to be patient, that he will not achieve his goal immediately. He introduced me to the young entrepreneurs’ scene in Shenzhen.

“How do you study at your colleges? Your teacher writes down a word. Does he say, write down a different word? No! You copy the same word. We’re not copying, we’re studying. Do you understand? It’s not copying.”