After graduating from UC San Diego with a BS in Mathematics in 2006, Siqi Chen moved to San Francisco with the goal to create something extraordinary — although at the time, he didn’t know exactly what it was going to be.

While working for companies like Veoh and Powerset in product management and software engineering, Siqi discovered an opportunity to capitalize on an emerging market in social media. When Facebook Platform was initially launched in May 2007, developers were able to make headway in the market by means of creating apps and games that were engaging and amusing to users. Siqi Chen and Friends for Sale co-founder, Alex Le, then took the real life dilemma of finding a date and solved it through social gaming.

Friends for Sale is a profitable social game on Facebook where facebookers buy and sell friends to make profit with virtual currency. With this virtual money, users can buy other game players who are more expensive, poke them, give them gifts, and even nickname them. Click here to read more about the Friends for Sale game: Siqi Chen is Selling Your Friends to the Highest Bidder.

A Short Clip of My Conversation with Siqi Chen
Trouble Viewing? Visit: Watch Siqi Chen, Friends for Sale

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PROFILE

STATS
Companies Founded:
1. FluidPlay – 2006
Title: Founder

2. Serious Business (makers of Friends for Sale)
Title: CEO & Founder
Fundraised: $4M
Investor: LightSpeed Venture Partners
Highest Numbers of Employees: 32
Sold To: Zynga, February 2010

PERSONAL INFORMATION
Hometown: Dalian, Liaoning, China
Currently Resides: San Francisco, CA
Age: 26
Bachelors of Science:
Mathematics, University of California, San Diego
Favorite Book: How to Get Rich by Felix Dennis
Role Models: Steve Jobs, Richard Branson and Dennis Felix

Favorite Quote: “It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.” – Theodore Roosevelt in “The Man in the Arena”

Siqi’s: Linkedin | Twitter | Facebook

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THE INTERVIEW – (Full Interview Transcription)

Kim Ngo: Hi, Siqi. Thanks for meeting with me today. Your company
Serious Business is the maker of Friends for Sale.  To be honest, I was really engaged with your Facebook app for a while, but then I fell off.

Siqi Chen: Why did you fall off?

Kim Ngo: It was fun and cool in the beginning, but there was no real life value for me. Friends for Sale virtually allowed me to buy and sell my friends. Yes, I made profit with virtual currency, but I just didn’t see the real world value in it.

Siqi Chen: Interesting. Did you play with people you didn’t know?

Kim Ngo: No, only with friends.

Siqi Chen: Friends for Sale is a social game that allows you to buy people (within and outside of your network) and make them your pets with virtual currency. The more virtual currency you earn, the more you can do. You can buy more pets and potentially get a return on your investment if they get purchased. You can make money as a shrewd pet investor or as a hot commodity! Friends for Sale allows you to engage with friends and meet people outside of your friends list.

For a social game, Friends for Sale retains users extraordinarily well, relatively speaking. And the reason for this is because a lot of people play to meet new people.

Facebook is all about connecting and interacting with your friends, which by design, makes it very hard to meet new people. When Facebook Platform originally came out, we realized it could also be used to connect people across different social graphs. On Friends for Sale, not only do you buy your friends, but you can also buy and get bought by people you don’t know. As this happens, people start forming new relationships.

Kim Ngo: So Friends for Sale is a dating app in disguise?

Siqi Chen: Definitely. When we designed it, we thought of it as a stealth-dating site. We explicitly wanted to make a dating site without calling it one. Friends for Sale is a social app, and people are more likely to tell their friends about a social app or game than a dating site. Nobody wants to tell their friend that they’re on a dating site. When we called Friends for Sale a game instead of a dating site, it became a lot more palatable.

It’s a game you play with your friends, but it also happens to be an easy way to meet new people; Facebook users really latch onto that. Not only do you meet new people, but you can also see who the hottest person (generally the most expensive person) is. Our features allow people to form new relationships. Users stick around for the people, not the actual game.

Kim Ngo: What’s your pitch for Friends for Sale?

Siqi Chen: We have a bunch of ways to describe it, but I think the one I use the most is “Hot or Not with a market economy.” We liked Hot or Not, but it only told you who was hot or who was not. What you want is a fluid supply and demand environment, so we added a market economy to the idea which keeps everything up to date.

Kim Ngo: So how did you come up with the market economy?

Siqi Chen: Funny story—it was an idea my co-founder and I came up with in Las Vegas. I was there for the two-year anniversary of Club Tao. While waiting to get into the club, I was looking at the line which was mostly comprised of middle-aged dudes who had just bought a table. Every guy looked like he was thinking, “This is going to suck; where are all of the girls?” My friend pointed to the other side of the room where there were fifty really hot girls just hanging out.

It was a microcosm of life. Everyone knows it’s awesome to be a hot girl or rich guy. I thought about how we could fuse that into an app, which is how we came up with Friends for Sale. In our app, it’s awesome to be a hot girl because you make money by being bought, and it’s awesome to be a rich guy because you can buy people.

Kim Ngo: Where does Friends for Sale stand in Facebook App rankings?

Siqi Chen: It stands in the top twenty. We were in the top five at one point, but that was two years ago. The competition has definitely increased since then.

Kim Ngo: Can you tell us what the top two apps are, and why you think they are ranked so high?

Siqi Chen: Farmville and Cafeworld are the top two apps by the numbers, because Zynga, the developer of these games, has been more aggressive than anyone in investing in Facebook Apps.

Kim Ngo: Do you think Friends for Sale will ever get back to being a top five app?

Siqi Chen: It depends on how fast we grow. It’s hard to say. But what I can say is that we are bigger than we have ever been. We didn’t go from number five to number twenty because we’re smaller. We’re actually three times larger than when we were in the top five. It’s just that the platform ecosystem has expanded so much, and it takes a lot more traffic to be in the top ten than it did two years ago.

Kim Ngo: Where do you see Friends for Sale going from here? What do you have planned for the future?

Siqi Chen: We’re planning to create more ways to earn money, more ways to spend it, and more ways to meet and interact with friends, new and old.

Kim Ngo: Where do you see the industry of social gaming in five years?

Siqi Chen: Games will be more social, beautiful, and immersive but just as simple and casual as they are today.

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THE MORE PERSONAL INTERVIEW – (Full Interview Transcription)

Kim Ngo: It sounds like you’re really passionate about what you do?

Siqi Chen: I would say so. I feel like I was always meant to do what I do now. I’ve always known I wanted to build things that lots of people would use.

Kim Ngo: What are your hobbies and interests?

Siqi Chen: I tend to play a lot of video games, but my hobbies involve what I do in my job. If I weren’t working, I’d still be doing the same things I do now: building and making cool things that people love.

It’s funny though. I was in a board meeting, and the board told me that I needed to play more video games. So I did. I was spending a lot of my time building the company and not actually playing games. The board felt that the company would benefit if I were to play video games. They recommended everything from Xbox to casual games. I bought a Nintendo DS and started playing more games. It was really educational. As usual, the board was right.

Kim Ngo: What’s your biggest fear?

Siqi Chen: My biggest fear is not living up to the potential that this company and team holds. Considering the many things we’ve done wrong over the past couple of years, one of the things we’ve done right is putting together a great team. Bringing failure to the team is my greatest fear.

Kim Ngo: Tell us about your first taste of success and proudest moment.

Siqi Chen: Shortly after we launched Friends for Sale, the initial reaction was explosive. After a month and a half, we were the largest Ruby on Rails app in the world, despite being just two guys with day jobs.

It was an idea we came up with on our own, and we had all of these theories about why it would work. Ultimately, most of them have proven to be true, which rarely happens when you’re building a web app. It was a combination of a small amount of good judgment and a very large amount of luck. It was very rewarding to see all of these assumptions that were put into the idea come to fruition.

Kim Ngo: What did you guys do to make sure those assumptions were right?

Siqi Chen: We got lucky. We did the best we could in thinking about how people are currently meeting new people and fused this into an app about buying and selling. What would people want to do with this app? We thought about how it’s a funny idea to buy your friends, but we also asked ourselves why people want to own anything in the first place. We needed to allow people to do things to someone they owned that they couldn’t have done otherwise in the real world.

Kim Ngo: So one day you were like, “Alexander (the co-founder of Serious Business), let’s leave our jobs and create this app?”

Siqi Chen: In May 2007, I built a game called Mafia. Though it wasn’t an extraordinary success, it attracted 100,000 users, which is pretty good on the web. It was barely existent on Facebook, but through advertising, I was making a good chunk of cash on the side—about the same amount as my salary.

One day, I decided I should make something viral. I was talking to Alexander Le about it, and we came up with Friends for Sale. We spent ten nights building and designing it before it was launched. About a month later, we had one million users.

Kim Ngo: What do you think you do better than your competitors?

Siqi Chen: There are things I know we do very well, but I wouldn’t say I definitely know there are things we do better. There are things we understand very well, like data driven and iterative development and metrics. We are an extremely data focused company. We have a very good team, and we understand product design and sociability. We make games that allow you to interact with other people, which is something I think we do better than other companies.

Kim Ngo: What do you enjoy most and least about being a CEO?

Siqi Chen: That’s a tough one. My favorite and least favorite parts of being a CEO are in the management of the people—the hiring and firing of employees. It’s never pleasant to fire somebody, and it’s always rewarding to hire somebody extremely talented.

Kim Ngo: What was your toughest experience in building Friends for Sale?

Siqi Chen: A month after we launched, I had already quit my job, and I was the only full time employee at Friends for Sale. At the time, it was the largest Ruby on Rails site in the world. We were getting 10 million views a day. It was nuts! The site was barely up because with only one person, it’s very hard to scale a site that size, especially if you’ve never done it before. I was only getting about two to three hours of sleep a night. It was just awful!

Eventually, we migrated to a different hosting center, got better hardware, and fixed some of the architecture. Things definitely improved around January, but the whole month of December was rough.

Kim Ngo: Was there a point where you felt like you couldn’t do it anymore? Did you ever want to give up?

Siqi Chen: No, I felt like I didn’t have a choice. This thing had a life of its own with hundreds of thousands of users. I had to make it work. I knew of other sites that were a thousand times bigger that worked, so I knew that running Friends for Sale was doable. But it was something that I had never done before, and we had to build everything from scratch.

Kim Ngo: What does it take to succeed in your field?

Siqi Chen: I think it’s a combination of ego, drive, and innate design that makes an entrepreneur successful. Another thing that works for me is that I am technical so I’m able to understand what’s possible and what’s not possible. I can also talk to our engineers. In fact, I’m on the line with our engineers probably an hour each day and I actually do write code—that’s definitely a plus. I’m also really product oriented.

Kim Ngo: What motivates you?

Siqi: Chen: I wasn’t especially hardworking in high school or college, but I’ve always known what I wanted to do. I had this feeling of knowing what I wanted to do and that I would make it happen.

Kim Ngo: Why were you so sure you could make it happen?

Siqi Chen: Because I was able to see and hear about other people who have done it – I felt if other people could do it, then there’s no reason I couldn’t.

Kim Ngo: What inspires you? And what makes you happiest? Is it money or a sense of accomplishment?

Siqi Chen: It is building things that have a lasting impact in this world — things that are beautiful and useful. Things that fuse form and function into something that affects people’s lives on an everyday level.

Kim Ngo: So this is why you moved to Silicon Valley?

Siqi Chen: Yes. Moving to Silicon Valley allowed me to meet people that I needed to in order to do what I wanted to do. And that proved to be absolutely true. Moving here was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

Kim Ngo: What advice would you give to the young aspiring entrepreneurs who want to start something?

Siqi Chen: Stop reading, stop watching videos, and just do something.