Foreign entrepreneur retraces his successful journey

This is Jay Thornhill. I first moved to China in 2007 when I was 21 years old. And now it has been 12 years and counting.

The idea for the online shopping platform came in the summer of 2015. It was a problem because we had all lived in China for years, but we weren't shopping online. There were all kinds of pain points that were stopping us from enjoying online shopping. We saw the opportunity in it because we knew that we would love a solution to that problem.

It's not very difficult to start a business in China, as far as, you know, creating a business entity and figuring out, you know, how to sell something that people want.

There are a lot of things that we benefited from by simply being here in China. One is the opportunity itself of the market, the need, you know, to satisfy something that foreigners in China wanted. We also benefit from having a great labor pool here. There are a lot of really enthusiastic, hardworking people. And so it was easy for us to build a team and build a team of the kind of people that can help make a business succeed.

Jay Thornhill is co-founder of an online-shopping company.