Photo of Hua Su

Internet & web

Hua Su

His company emphasizes socializing through short videos

Year Honored
2017

Region
China

Su Hua emerged as a central figure of the internet on account of his product Kuai. This top graduate from Tsinghua University was once employed at Google and Baidu. According to Su Hua, he started coding at the age of 12 via Subor Learning Machine. Not until early 2016 did Su Hua stop writing code.

Born into an ordinary family in the mountainous area in the west of Hunan Province, Su Hua was academically outstanding as a child. Even though Su Hua went to play video games in the Internet café, he still got admitted into the School of Software of Tsinghua University in 2000 with a score of over 100 above the key university score limit.

After receiving his bachelor's and master's degree, Su Hua had no intention in continuing his study as a PhD. Later Su went to work at Google in Silicon Valley and switched straight to Baidu, which further strengthened his capabilities in AI application. 

In 2013, Su Hua founded Kuai and took the post of CEO. Each midnight, Su would go to the machine room and configure parameters personally. As CEO, Su stressed the importance of product conciseness. Even now, Kuai keeps certain tabs: Following, Trending, and Nearby.

In June 2014, Kuai’s daily active users reached 200,000, which increased by 20 times within half a year. At the time, Su shifted his strategic emphasis from short video community to short video socializing. Su Hua recalled that at the time when users grew at the fastest speed, he had to go to China Mobile to increase corporate bandwidth three times a month.

Su Hua said that in 2017 when the user base was already extremely huge, his company still stayed on high growth trajectories with daily active users increasing from less than 40 million to over 100 million. He said “I hope to continue to connect people via the power of technology and enhance each individual’s happiness. Up to now, Kuai has become a recording tool for this year but I hope I can continue this for 100 years.”