In Collaboration With
Former banker, construction worker and programmer Lawrence Hui on launching Cove, a car-sharing app that he hopes will change the way we think about vehicle ownership
He’s the first to admit that he’s a “serial entrepreneur”—but Generation T honouree Lawrence Hui is no flash in the pan. He was in his final year of university when he launched his first business, handling tech projects on behalf of clients by combining self-taught programming know-how with the expertise of other engineering students at his university.
The company disbanded when Hui started his first job—“my major was in quantitative finance so, like a lot of Hong Kong students, I went into a bank”—and for a few years Hui poured his time into his job as a management trainee and then commodities structurer at Standard Chartered by day, taking a Master’s degree in computer science by night. “When I was working at the bank,” he says, “I did a lot of programming work with the developers, trying to understand the practice and how to optimise coding stuff. But I still wanted to create something bigger because working at a bank, you’re still in a bank. The money you make is not for yourself—it’s for the company.”
The idea for car-sharing app Cove didn’t come immediately—and, in fact, while he was figuring out his next steps, Hui took a detour and became, in his words, “a construction worker.” Working on high power cable towers in the New Territories for electric contractor Gearwin Development is, strange as it may sound, how Hui gained the confidence to launch his own tech outfit. “Even though I needed to go to the sites and do building stuff, there were a lot of inefficiencies,” he remembers. “I talked to the owner and said ‘I think I can really do something to help the company’. Even quotations, they were still doing handwritten ones. I was like, ‘Come on, just do a template in Word and print it out!’"
“The company I was working for was not a small company,” says Hui. “It had 200 workers and basically there were admin staff that you call to see if someone is on leave or if someone is coming to the site or how many people are coming. They didn’t have a roster to manage staff. So I created a mobile app—because everyone has a smartphone—just to track everyone and where they are and what jobs they are doing. I think after I successfully created that, I had more confidence in myself in building IT products.” The rest, as they say, is history.
