Han Xiao is an AI expert who has set up his own IT firm in Berlin. Born in China, he has a keen eye for what it takes to succeed in the German capital.
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00:00Even though I know that every country kind of wants their immigrants to be deeply attached
00:07to their culture, but to be honest, it's not very easy.
00:20Hi my name is Han, I'm the founder and CEO of Gina AI.
00:23So we provide the search foundation here and allowing businesses and developers to build
00:27multi-modal applications.
00:31So at Gina AI, we call ourselves OpenAI for Search, but our model is not general purpose.
00:37You can only use this model to do search.
00:40Search your data, search your pictures, search your videos, audios, and so on.
00:45For example, if you think about e-commerce company, they have a lot of article, fashion
00:50article data in their database.
00:52So each article has their price, name, description, size, and so on.
00:58For example, if you want to search for a picture, so first thing is you need to pre-label each
01:05image.
01:06If you ask AI to do this, it becomes very fast, very efficient, right?
01:12It takes about like 0.1 second.
01:22Basically we provide our AI models as an API so that developers can call our service,
01:28but it probably takes you one week to do that, to make it work.
01:33But if you call our API, and then we charge for it, right?
01:37So you can immediately use it in one second.
01:42So Gina AI was founded in 2020.
01:45And the reason that we choose to set our headquarter in Berlin, in Germany, is because we want
01:51to build an international business that focuses on commercial open source software companies.
01:57And there are plenty of talents here in Berlin, in Germany, that work on open source, work
02:03on the AI engineering.
02:05And also it is a pretty affordable city, right, compared to other cities in Europe and also
02:11in the U.S.
02:13I think in Germany, it has a pretty stable and neutral business environment, which allows
02:20the startups to grow more in the autonomous way.
02:25So it doesn't give a lot of help to the startups, let's say.
02:29But it also doesn't block you, right?
02:31So it's kind of like, okay, so you just self-govern yourself.
02:37I have been here for like quite a while, like 15 years since then.
02:43Let's say culturally, I'm not 100% match to the local culture.
02:48Berlin is not a traditional German city.
02:51You don't have kind of a very dominated German culture here, which is also very nice, especially
03:02for international people to live and work here.
03:06Even though I know that every country kind of wants their immigrants to be deeply attached
03:11to their culture.
03:12But to be honest, it's not very easy.
03:16It's not very easy to build friendship, right?
03:21Like, you know, you cannot really easily build friendship with a German.
03:29It is affordable, much affordable than other cities.
03:33And also very, let's say, culturally being very open, because you'll see a lot of like,
03:39you know, international people here.
03:43And the culture is definitely one of the most open culture in Europe.
03:49It's not a cheap city anymore.
03:52In Beijing, in China, in my hometown, it is cold, it is very crowded, but at least the
03:59weather is kind of like, you can enjoy a lot of sunshine in the wintertime.
04:04Even though Berlin has a lot of like a local, authentic Chinese restaurant, but compared
04:11to, let's say, compared to US, compared to China, this is still like, it's still very basic.
04:23I do some sport, like every morning I do some swimming.
04:28Like I usually get up early, you know, at 6 or 6.30, and then do some swimming for one
04:36hour or so.
04:37I like to just randomly draw a point on Google map, and then drive to there.
04:43Yes.
04:45So this is what I do like most, because first of all, I like driving, driving is very fun.
04:50If I drive like far enough, then I can, you know, drive to the sun, right?
04:57So I can drive to the place where there are a lot of sunshine, even though it is gloomy
05:02and cloudy right now, but if I drive far enough, I can, you know, left the cloud behind.
05:10Certain work-life balance is very important.
05:13As I said, you know, as a startup founder, usually you cannot put work-life balance as
05:19a first place, right?
05:20So it's usually like a kind of in the fourth or fifth in the, in the least.
05:27So my suggestion to the future CEO and founders is, first of all, work on the real problem.
05:33Don't create a problem and then solve it.
05:36The second suggestion is to prevent overhiring at any circumstances, right?
05:43Don't hire, don't make the team bigger than you can manage.