Du Jun, co-founder of Huobi, quoted the words of Academic Director Fu Qiang after the opening ceremony of the 35th EMBA class at the National University of Singapore: the fundamental meaning of entrepreneurship is to start. He wrote about curiosity, passion, and the courage to restart as the boundary between humanity and artificial intelligence.

Du Jun is an alumnus of the 30th class of this program. He co-founded Huobi in 2013 with Li Lin and others, later extending to Jinse Finance, Node Capital, ChainUp, ABCDE Capital, Vernal Group, and New Fire Technology. His public resume states that he bought Bitcoin through Mt.Gox in 2012, previously worked as a product manager at Tencent, and has been involved in domain names and internet café businesses since 2004. In 2024, he applied for a PhD at the Hong Kong University Business School, claiming to have been an entrepreneur for twenty years and aiming to establish a practical operational framework. In March 2026, he also mentioned plans to launch an institutional trading platform in the second quarter.

Fu Qiang is a professor in the Strategy and Policy Department at the National University Business School, Academic Director of the Chinese EMBA program, and a chair professor. He graduated with a bachelor's degree from Peking University's Guanghua School in 1998 and holds a PhD in economics from Indiana University. He has been teaching at NUS since 2005, researching competition, tournaments, and organizational economics. In interviews and at the opening ceremony, he positioned the program as a "restart" platform for Chinese entrepreneurs and a window to the world, not providing standard answers. The Chinese EMBA has recently entered the QS global top twenty and won the Times Higher Education International Strategy Award. The traditional opening ceremony includes a torch-passing, and previous classes have admitted about 120 students from over ten countries.

The intersection of the two is the restart after a cycle. After the sale of Huobi, Du Jun shifted his identity from exchange operator to family office and compliance technology, with Vernal focusing on cash-generating AI applications while avoiding building large models. Fu Qiang sells macro courses and game theory to founders looking to expand overseas. The "to begin" at the 35th class ceremony was used by Du Jun to answer the question of "why still start a business," rather than to announce new financing terms.

Who is buying, who is selling: what is being bought is the alumni network and the identity update at the opening ceremony, while what is being sold is the self-doubt of "should I do it again?" The event was driven by the speeches at the ceremony, with funds not immediately flowing in and out of token markets, but rather directed towards EMBA tuition, subsequent institutional platforms, and family office projects. The beneficiaries are continuous entrepreneurs who need narrative continuity, while those under pressure are those who view entrepreneurship as a one-time cash-out. The comparison with AI is framed as a difference in courage, rather than a difference in computing power.

Public English documents can verify positions, project positioning, and re-entrepreneurship timelines, but the full verbatim transcript of the ceremony is not available; the "to begin" is based on the account of the parties involved.

Source: Public Information