“Well, I love you with no regrets and respect the ending of the story,” Mao Kankan wrote his last post to WeChat moments before he ended his life at the age of 35.
Mao Kankan, an entrepreneur who co-founded digital game firm MaJoy, gassed himself at home on Thursday. Huge debt crisis of the company he ran may have motivated him to commit suicide.
Born in 1983, dropped out of high school in 2000, Mao started his own business as chief operating officer and architect of MaJoy in 2004, with an investment of 300 million yuan (about 47 million US dollars).
At that time, young entrepreneurs of 1980s generation attracted widely public attention. In 2006, Mao and other three bosses of start-ups rose to fame after appearing on a CCTV program Dialogue, becoming an entrepreneurial idol for the country's young people.
The idea of MaJoy, which he operates, is to move the online game to offline and build a real view for players. Mao was ambitious but failed in the following two years due to wrong strategy. Excessive stress caused him to suffer from severe depression in that period, according to the report of fangtanchina.com
In 2010, Mao left MaJoy and worked on mobile healthcare and real-time traffic information apps. He entered the electronic sports field after 2013 and later served as the vice president of the GTV gaming channel, where he was responsible for video business.
Mao Kankan interviewed by People Magazine in 2011.
“My character is not for start-up business. I’m not good at management,” Mao said to the Blog Weekly in 2014.
In 2015, Mao set up an electronic sports joint venture with Zhejiang Wanjia Co., and served as its CEO. Although China’s leading companies are investing billions to grow the E-sports market because of its huge audience, Mao’s company was not that lucky.
Failing in raising money, Mao’s company was reported to fall into serious management difficulty and was expected to enter the bankruptcy liquidation procedure last November. At that time, the company owed its employees two monthly salaries.
“Since November 2015, I have collected about 20 million yuan (about 3 million US dollars) of funds to support the operation of the company through mortgaging my own properties. Now I only have a few tens of thousands deposits, and I still have to pay interest on a regular basis,” Mao told the Beijing News.
Li Xiang grieved over Mao's death on China’s twitter-like Weibo.
Many venture capitalists publicly expressed their condolences about Mao’s death on social media. Li Xiang, founder of Autohome, China's premier car-buying portal, grieved over his death on China’s twitter-like Weibo, “He is the most loyal, helpful friend of mine. In running a business, he carries all of the responsibilities that belong to him and those that do not belong to him at all.”
“Every entrepreneur is a hero, no matter whether he is successful.” The words in Mao’s autobiography may be the best interpretation of his whole life.
