ZhenSummer Entrepreneurship Scholarship
This summer, University of Toronto 021 Entrepreneurs Group is partnering with ZhenFund to bring a scholarship opportunity to young Canadian entrepreneurs. Below is a letter from a ZhenFund partner, entrusted to all of you:
Hello there, fellow student!
Around this time last year, ZhenFund introduced the ZhenSummer Entrepreneurship Scholarship. Our idea was straightforward. We believed that there were young, talented, and innovative individuals who could potentially become the next great entrepreneurs. However, practicalities often forced them into internships and jobs, trapping them in the cycle of job-seeking and employment. In reality, they could be the creators of work.
Our aim was to provide some financial support to offer an alternative for a summer. We wanted these young individuals to temporarily delay their real-world worries. Rather than rushing into internships and jobs, we encouraged them to gather a few like-minded peers and explore things they were passionate about. We wanted them to experience the joy of creating, to exercise their ability to go from zero to one.
We received numerous high-quality applications from our fellow students, which both delighted us and posed a challenge. Within our budget limits, we wanted to support many teams. After one-on-one discussions with over a hundred students, we selected the first group of six scholarship recipients/teams. These students' ages range from high school to PhD, and their academic backgrounds cover a wide range of fields, from synthetic biology and robotics to artificial intelligence. Some of these projects were still experimental in their own bedrooms, while others had become stars on GitHub. We'll provide brief introductions to these exceptional individuals at the end of this message.
A year has passed, and the world has undergone many changes. Since what some people consider the "arrival day" in the tech world on November 30, 2022, new research papers and products have been released at an unprecedented pace. Even those at the cutting edge of academic research face significant and exhilarating learning pressures. This is even more challenging for entrepreneurs and investors. Unlike previous speculative bubble concepts, this time, in just a few months, billions of users worldwide have experienced unprecedented technological advancements in product experiences. People suddenly realized they were closer to the futuristic worlds described in science fiction.
While some believe that tech giants control computing power and talent resources, we see many opportunities for young people and startups. For example, the first ZhenSummer Scholarship recipient, Zhang Lvmin, as an anime enthusiast, introduced ControlNet. Although he had just graduated from undergraduate studies and started his first year of a Ph.D., he almost single-handedly made waves in Silicon Valley. Similarly, Stanford's Alpaca model, which has attracted global researchers, was created by Zhang Tianyi, who is in his early twenties. A few years ago, he was a "young prodigy" during high school when he interned with ZhenFund. Across the ocean, we've witnessed an 11-person company, Midjourney, create a remarkable product that generated over a billion dollars in revenue in just two years. Toran Richards, a relatively unknown young individual, recently developed AutoGPT, which everyone is talking about. In the past month, we sponsored and participated in hackathons organized by Jike and SegmentFault, where we met over a hundred young teams that, in two or three days, built a rough but functional AI product from scratch. A few years ago, a team that received ZhenFund's investment during a hackathon when they graduated with their undergraduate degrees created an AI assistant that quickly grew to several million users. The curtain has been slowly rising, and this generation of tech heroes will soon take center stage. Right now, they are probably a group of eager and youthful individuals, full of excitement.
As the temperature gradually rises, summer is fast approaching. We are excited to announce the second round of ZhenFund's ZhenSummer Scholarship. This promises to be a bustling summer filled with "emergence." We hope that, by now, you have blurred your vision toward what your heart truly desires. Let's hope none of us fall into complacency or waste this opportunity.
— Liu Yuan, Partner at ZhenFund