From starting as a grassroots employee to becoming the head of a technology company, the career path of Sui Haifeng is undoubtedly enviable. However, as the saying goes, "There are no shortcuts to success." How did Sui Haifeng reach where he is today, and what kind of career plans does he have? Moreover, what advice does he have for future entrepreneurs and young professionals entering the workforce?
Entrepreneurship and the Founding of NetLinker
Sui Haifeng, a graduate of Beijing University of Science and Technology with a doctorate in engineering, has a diverse and impressive career. Early in his career, he worked at UnionPay Electronic Payment Co., Ltd., and LianDong YouXi Technology Co., Ltd., where he served as the Product Director and General Manager of Product Innovation at Beijing UnionPay Business Co., Ltd. He later became the Deputy Secretary of the Party Committee, Director, and Vice President of Tiancheng Holdings Co., Ltd. In April 2017, he founded NetLinker and served as CEO.
NetLinker is a high-tech company focused on payment technology R&D and digital solutions for merchants, primarily providing mobile payment infrastructure services to small and medium-sized banks, including city commercial banks, rural commercial banks, and rural credit cooperatives. Since its establishment in 2017, NetLinker has grown rapidly and its annual revenue has surpassed hundreds of millions of RMB. Despite the challenges brought about by the pandemic, Sui Haifeng attributes the company’s success to the significant growth in the merchant acquiring market for small and medium-sized banks.
The Reason for Starting His Own Business
Sui Haifeng reveals that the primary motivation for starting his own business was to solve the problem of survival. Before becoming an entrepreneur, he was an executive at a listed company, but the business division he was in was unable to continue operations due to national policies. This presented him with a dilemma: What would he do next? What business should he start?
At that time, the acquiring business was transitioning from a card-based model to a bill-based model, and Sui Haifeng recognized that small and medium-sized financial institutions would become the main players in the emerging regional acquiring market.
With years of experience in the payments industry, Sui Haifeng saw a business opportunity in this transition. He explained that in the era of bank card payments, acquiring business was mainly dominated by large banks and third-party payment institutions, as the requirements for acquirers were quite high. However, with the shift toward barcode payments, the acquiring rules became simpler, and the barriers to entry for small and medium-sized banks were significantly reduced.
At that time, there were two main entrepreneurial paths in the acquiring field: one was to directly engage in aggregation payment services and expand and serve merchants, while the other was to provide payment acquisition technology and merchant digital solutions to small and medium-sized banks, helping them serve their merchants. Sui Haifeng chose the latter, based on two factors: limited funds and financing capabilities, and the fact that his team was a technology-driven company.
The Challenges of Business Stability
The acquiring business system is fundamentally based on information calculation and data processing, so the key to NetLinker's system is its ability to process data efficiently.
NetLinker's business primarily involves private deployments at the bank end and SaaS services deployed on the public cloud, with the database being the underlying support for these operations. As the business grew, NetLinker used various database systems, including ElasticSearch, Oracle, MySQL, Redis, MongoDB, and StarRocks. Managing and maintaining such a large number of databases placed significant pressure on the company, especially as data volumes continued to grow, potentially jeopardizing the stable operation of the business.
In the early stages, the company faced a system crisis due to underestimating the volume of incoming transactions. When thousands, and eventually tens of thousands, of users accessed the system, it quickly faced risks to business continuity. Fortunately, the company responded quickly and resolved the issues without severe consequences. With continuous innovation, NetLinker now has a large-scale, distributed payment system that supports high performance, concurrency, and availability.
Upgrading to OceanBase
NetLinker's self-developed core acquiring system initially used Oracle and MySQL databases. These centralized databases had certain limitations, particularly in terms of capacity. With the continuous growth of data, expanding the databases became difficult, especially with MySQL, where issues like sharding were highly complex and invasive.
As a result, NetLinker decided to gradually replace them with distributed databases. Another reason for the upgrade was to simplify operations and reduce the pressure caused by the independent management of over a hundred systems.
After evaluating several domestic distributed databases, NetLinker chose OceanBase, which met all of its needs. OceanBase’s native cloud and on-premises versions fit well with the company’s requirements. Since migrating some MySQL databases to OceanBase, the company has seen several benefits, such as on-demand scalability and simplified management, reducing the workload for operations staff.
Pragmatism for Long-term Success
Looking back at his entrepreneurial journey, Sui Haifeng believes that one of the main reasons for NetLinker's success is its adherence to doing what it is good at and can execute effectively. Understanding “who the customers are, where they are, and what they need” is crucial.
He emphasizes that entrepreneurship, especially in the early stages, requires pragmatism. "Return to the core business, understand your business thoroughly, and provide solid solutions to your customers. Storytelling and ideals can stay in your heart."
Sui Haifeng also advises young professionals to be focused in their career, especially in the first five years. "Frequent job-hopping can prevent you from building a structured and systematic knowledge base, which can be detrimental to your future growth," he says.
In the 35-40 age range, Sui Haifeng believes many people reach mid-to-senior levels or become experts. If conditions are right, this can be an ideal time for entrepreneurship. However, he warns, "Entrepreneurship comes with responsibility. If you fail, everyone loses—investors, clients, and employees."
Three Key Pieces of Advice for DBAs
Keep Passion for Technology: Sui Haifeng stresses that besides mastering necessary database knowledge, a DBA must have a passion for technology. Since database technology doesn’t evolve as quickly as application development technologies, it’s important for DBAs to continuously research and stay engaged with technological advancements.
Balance Innovation and Business Stability: A good DBA not only needs creativity but also the ability to balance innovation with ensuring business stability. New technologies should be introduced in a way that does not disrupt ongoing operations.
Integrate Business with Technology: A DBA should understand the company’s business needs and the data behind it. For example, in the payment industry, understanding which data is sensitive, which is cold or hot, and how tables relate to each other is crucial. A good DBA can recommend actions based on this understanding, such as which data to encrypt or how long it needs to be retained.
Sui Haifeng’s experience reflects the importance of hard work, pragmatism, and continuous learning—qualities that will resonate with many young professionals and future entrepreneurs.
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