Duke (Yuandong) Zhang

My path to tech started in my family's foreign trade business, where I saw firsthand how small and medium enterprises struggle with scattered data, outdated processes, and decisions driven by tribal knowledge instead of structured intelligence.

This drove me to go deeper. I was commissioned by a manufacturing export company to rebuild their digital infrastructure from the ground up. I spent the first two weeks on-site — interviewing the CEO, managers, and assembly-line workers — to understand what the business actually needed. What I found was that their document management, quoting workflows, and client tracking were too old, too slow, and too scattered.

Over five months, I applied an agile framework with weekly sprint cycles to architect and deliver a full-stack ERP/CRM system — now serving 50+ clients and 300+ active SKUs in production, with 99.9% uptime. That experience shaped my conviction: millions of businesses need not another Salesforce, but an AI-native system that truly understands their operations.