25-year-old genius programmer's startup valued at $250 million after 7 months

Ruan Yubo, a young man born in 1996, has shown extraordinary talent in computer science since childhood. He started self-learning programming at the age of 6 and during his middle school years, he won multiple technology invention awards and patents, including the first prize in the Microsoft Imagine Cup and the championship at the Nuremberg Inventors' Fair in Germany.

At the age of 17, Ruan Yubo founded his own company during high school, focusing on the development of financial education hardware for children. At 21, he established an investment institution in Silicon Valley, USA, specializing in investing in cutting-edge technology fields, managing a fund size of over $60 million. It is worth mentioning that he worked at an investment company founded by the renowned Chinese scientist Zhang Shoucheng and co-founded another investment company.

Despite the fact that entrepreneurship and investment took up a lot of time, Ruan Yubo did not give up on his studies. He successively studied computer science, finance, and economics at Boston University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Stanford University.

Now 25 years old, Ruan Yubo has a new identity — the founder of Parallel Finance. This is a DeFi parachain project built on the Polkadot ecosystem and is regarded as an important participant within that ecosystem.

In November 2021, Parallel Finance received significant strategic financing, with a post-investment valuation reaching $250 million. This investment was led by a well-known venture capital firm, and at that time, Parallel Finance had only been established for 7 months.

Investors believe that Ruan Yubo and his team have built a platform in a short time that makes decentralized finance more accessible to various types of investors and has taken an important step towards penetrating the traditional financial sector. They believe that this project has the potential to achieve the ambitious goal of promoting DeFi to billions of users in the future.

Ruan Yubo is confident about the future of blockchain technology. He believes that blockchain is not only the next generation of the internet but may also become a larger-scale method of social collaboration, leading to significant changes in technological infrastructure. He predicts that in the next decade, most companies may exist in the form of decentralized collaboration or build their own applications on blockchain networks.

In Ruan Yubo's view, blockchain technology will empower users and fundamentally change existing business models. In the traditional model, companies acquire customers and provide services, while the blockchain model allows users to become part of the platform, possessing voting rights and sharing more benefits through smart contracts.

Regarding the challenges faced by blockchain development, Ruan Yubo believes there are mainly two aspects: regulation and technology. He anticipates that this process may take 5 to 10 years, with the financial industry being the most affected. As technological advancements accelerate, other internet industries such as O2O, social networks, and shared mobility will also integrate with blockchain in some form, which is an inevitable trend of social development.

Since starting his business at the age of 17, Ruan Yubo has achieved success while also bearing pressures that few of his peers experience. He admitted that he had considered giving up, especially during his first venture, where he faced not only technical challenges but also issues related to company management and operations. However, as he has progressed, he has felt a strong sense of accomplishment and now fully enjoys the journey.

In his more than 20 years of life, Ruan Yubo believes that the two most fulfilling achievements are entering Stanford University to study and starting a business during high school. The latter gave him a valuable opportunity to engage with the business world early on. He stated that his idol during high school was Steve Jobs, who inspired his entrepreneurial ideas.

In the future, this young entrepreneur will continue to pursue his dreams in the fields of entrepreneurship, investment, and technology, contributing his strength to the development of the Web 3.0 era.