A Swiss entrepreneur's story in Beijing

Editor’s note: This year marks the 40th anniversary of China’s reform and opening-up, and huge changes have been made in Beijing, capital of China, over the past 40 years. We have invited 40 foreign experts to participate in a series of interviews named “New Era, New Insight” jointly hosted by GMW.cn（The official website of Guangming Daily） and the Information Office of Beijing Municipality and share their “Beijing Stories”.

Hello everyone. I'm Jeff and comes from Switzerland and am Beijing more than five years And I used to work for the Swiss embassy and now work for my own company called Interns in Beijing. First time I came to Beijing was in 2012. I came to visit a friend that was working here and I really liked it.

So one year later I came back here as an exchange student at the Tsinghua university and I graduated the bachelor from Tsinghua . And from there I went to work at the Swiss embassy and they worked there for more than a year

And after that or during that time better say. I started my own company called Interns in Beijing which is now the largest platform for experts in Beijing. Beijing has a really good environment for startups I would say. There's a lot of people here a lot of people doing their own startups

So you can learn a lot from different people. I think this was a good motivation. So I establishing good networking here would help me to build the whole company. So I think it was the basics work here. I didn't even consider another city.

I think it was more coincidence during my time at the embassy I was always going out with people from other embassies in the same age as me. And international people so we started to go out every Thursday and have some gatherings some networking events

And eventually we started to have a We chat account to grow our company more get more attention, and from there we started doing this. And because a lot of people that were actually in interns Beijing events, they were interns, so we started to connect the companies with the people. And therefore it started there all with natural growth that I would say.

There's a lot of occasions where I met people that helped me in our own events puddles in networking events from organized by other organizations. So huge examples that I can say is that during some networking events I met actually my coworkers. Some colleagues and partners that helped me develop the company to the stage that we are at so it's very good to go to such events to meet people that have the same idea the same vision as yourself in order to grow together.

There's one of my partner's called Tim who I met at such an event, and he is now helping me really developing their company to a really large stage. Also he is very helpful when it comes to Chinese. My Chinese is quite okay but still when I after talking Chinese with business then it's not so easy to get along. So he's helping me there he has good connections so he's helping me to to get new customers as well. With interns in Beijing we are really a large entity for almost 30000 people following us and most of them being foreigners actually. So we helped them by showing them where they could work how they can make it develop a career in china.