Co-founder of HashMatrix, Shawn Pang has combined his entrepreneurial experiences to help AI companies around the world chart their own success stories in a competitive landscape.
A career in entrepreneurship is all about learning lessons.
Most of the time, your current start-up is training you for a future venture; giving you tools, experiences and connections that will all come in handy for that next chapter.
That’s a lesson Shawn Pang, HBA’ 20, is thankful for.
Ever since graduating in the turmoil of 2020, and leaving his consulting job after a few days, Pang has been building start-ups and acquiring the skills, network, and lessons to drive his current venture, HashMatrix.
HashMatrix is a full-stack growth marketing agency that specializes in helping fast-growing companies continue their trajectory. Pang and his team spread across Canada, the U.S., and China, have worked with the likes of ByteDance, Meitu, MiniMax, 01.AI, and a host of fast-growing start-ups like rabbit r1, talkie AI, monica.im, Creatify, FlowGPT, and OpenArt.
It’s fair to say they have been quite busy.
Pang’s story begins at Western University, where he joined forces with Seif Elmolla to form Avocado Core, an adaptive learning platform that could give students customized tests tailored to their skill level.
It was practically artificial intelligence before the term was all the rage.
The platform was particularly well adapted to mathematics, and during their time at the Western Accelerator, Elmolla and Pang were able to get a running model working and implemented across foundational math courses at Western.
However, they weren’t able to figure out a revenue-generating model.
Pang’s entrepreneurial insights secured him a place in the illustrious Next 36 Program, where together with Austin Zheng, HBA ’19, they created Matterverse. After graduating, Pang joined MiraclePlus (formerly Y Combinator China) to continue working on his venture.
Matterverse was a web-based 3D editor with real-time cloud rendering that could help designers, renovators and builders envision spaces. The venture was backed by MiraclePlus, Next Canada, and LD Capital, and worked with top Asian brands LVMH and K11.
However, developing Matterverse proved quite expensive because the editor required a vast amount of GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) power. As Pang and the team continued to refine their venture, they brought down costs significantly, but not enough to be profitable with non-premium brand clients.
Looking back, Pang felt one of the critical issues with the venture was their inability to iterate quickly by taking in customer feedback and adapting.
If we had the same speed of iteration we do now with HashMatrix, things could have been different.
After Matterverse was shelved, Pang had a decision to make: Begin another start-up or try the corporate route.
He did a bit of both, co-founding HashMatrix, while also working for Capital One and then ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, as the social media giant’s first product manager in Canada.
And then HashMatrix took off.
All that work in artificial intelligence and software development had given Pang a series of lessons on what to avoid and what was essential for a strong go-to-market strategy.
He says that’s all about staying in the game.
Pang compares it to playing at the casino: “You can’t run out of chips… you can’t play and make the big bets if you aren’t at the table.”
Throughout his ventures, from Avocado Core to Matterverse and HashMatrix, he felt that an opportunity would come along as long as he continued to learn new things, gather insights, and grow his network within the industry.
All of that was essential to having the credibility and the know-how to fuel HashMatrix’s success.
Over the past two years, Pang and his team have worked with promising AI start-ups, many of them based in China where fierce competition has made AI more accessible and affordable.
However, Pang notes that most Chinese companies are still working on elevating the quality of their products. They, along with AI firms from other Asian counterparts like India, are also hampered by limits to commercialization; what are people willing to pay to access AI to make these ventures sustainable?
One of the values that has driven HashMatrix’s success is how they’ve handled relationships with customers.
“You must truly care about your customers and about what you are building for them,” said Pang.
It’s a great way to build momentum because reputation matters and people can tell if you are passionate about something or if you care about them… if you can help one customer amongst your target group solve a problem really well, it’s much better than helping hundreds of customers solve a non-existent problem.
The importance of managing relationships has been key to Pang’s success as well as he cites the role fellow alumni from Ivey and Western have played in his professional journey.
The power of the network is no secret, but Pang advises fellow founders to remember that the relationship is cyclical. It’s about leveraging resources but also giving back to the network.
“If people reach out to you, you should always give back too. That’s how the ecosystem continues to work,” said Pang.
Since moving to the West Coast to be closer to the action, Pang has taken up paddleboarding as an escape from the fast-paced world of technology.
As he paddles from one beach to another, it is a reflection of Pang’s entrepreneurial journey which has had its fair share of both calm and choppy waters.
But right now, he’s enjoying the breeze and the beautiful views.