Cherry Wu

Being a female entrepreneur has its own unique set of challenges and being a female entrepreneur in the very heavily male-dominated game development industry presents a whole new dimension to those challenges.

The founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman, likens entrepreneurship to jumping off a cliff and building an airplane on the way down and my favorite female entrepreneur, Anita Roddick of The Body Shop, said: “Nobody talks of entrepreneurship as survival, but that’s exactly what it is and what nurtures creative thinking.”

In the past four years of launching and growing Kooky Panda here in Beijing. It seems that survival has been a constant theme of the company for its entire life cycle and something that has given me plenty of valuable scar tissue to toughen me up and face future challenges. We raised money right before the economic crisis but not enough and struggled for a long 15 months until we were able to raise more capital to continue the business. During that time we were able to retain staff, grow revenues and have our games played by millions of users around the globe, but every month seemed like the last.

A female friend once told me that she felt like she really became a woman after she’d given birth (which is not to say that you need to give birth to do so, but I can say from experience, it sure does help). Well, I feel that navigating the company through the downturn and ultimately thriving that I finally truly feel like an entrepreneur. While I’m never truly satisfied with where the company is and we still can of course improve, I feel we’ve realized the ability to truly think creatively and survive as Anita Roddick rightly says. We’ve built the airplane on the way down, climbed inside the cockpit and we’re now pulling back on the controls and climbing. For now, I’ve asked my team to keep their seat belts fastened and tray tables stowed as we accelerate to the next level. entrepreneur