I landed in Minnesota in the summer of 1986 with two suitcases and a scholarship at the Mayer Lutheran High School in Minnesota. After one year, I joined the University of Minnesota and saw my first computer lab glowing through a basement window like a lit aquarium. Nobody in that lab said the word 'Internet' yet. Within ten years I was listing my company on the Nasdaq. I participated in the internet revolution, Web 1.0, Web 2.0, mobile, Web3, blockchain and now AI each arrive as 'the end of business as we know it'. Business as we know it ended five times. Trust never ended once. This chapter is what a practitioner saw from inside the aquarium - and why each revolution made the RuDao constants MORE valuable, not less.

This chapter offers the author's own practice as a living proof of "unity of knowledge and action" (ZhiXingHeYi 知行合一). Thirty years of practice - from Web1.0 to Web4. The technology kept changing; the core of RuShang and RuJiang never did.

1981-1986: King's College, Hong Kong. The Seed Is Planted.

King's College, Hong Kong, is the alma mater of Professor Lau Din-cheuk 劉殿爵, the authoritative English translator of the Analects. As a junior alumnus of Professor DC Lau (Lau Din-cheuk, 劉殿爵), one of the most respected English translators of Chinese classical philosophy, I was exposed to Confucian thought from a young age. Professor Lau devoted much of his scholarly life to introducing the wisdom of Chinese civilization to the English-speaking world through his translations of the Analects (《论语》), Mencius (《孟子》), and the DaoDeJing (《道德经》).

In many ways, Professor Lau translated the Chinese classics for the world. My own journey with RuDao is an attempt to translate their timeless wisdom into the language of modern entrepreneurship, leadership, technology, and digital civilization.

1986: My First Journey to the Other Side of the World - USA

In 1986, at the age of 18, I left Hong Kong for Minnesota, embarking on my first journey beyond Asia. To my new classmates, I was a visitor from a distant and unfamiliar world. Their curiosity often led to memorable questions, including one I have never forgotten: "Did you dig through the earth from Hong Kong and come up in America?"

What began as a humorous conversation became my first lesson in cross-cultural understanding. That year taught me that the world is larger, more diverse, and more interconnected than we imagine. It was the beginning of a lifelong journey between East and West, technology and humanity, competition and cooperation, a journey that would eventually lead to RuDao.

Mayer Lutheran High School - Minnesota: The 1986-1987 school year marked my very first time going abroad, flying halfway around the globe to the United States. I left behind my childhood home across Guilin, China, and Hong Kong. I still vividly remember my mother crying at the Hong Kong Airport departure hall, while my King's College classmates came to cheer and celebrate, as I was the first one in our class to study abroad.

Arriving in America, it was my first time experiencing a Western Christian culture. Living, studying, and playing alongside my American host families, I soon realized I was the only Chinese student in the school-and in the entire small town. The culture shock was profound as I traded Hong Kong's concrete forest of skyscrapers for the wide-open, corn-covered Great Plains of rural Midwest America.

Classwork quickly shaped my thinking. I took religious studies courses, attended daily chapel, and read classic Western literature. At the same time, athletics, fitness, and farm work built my character. As a member of the Mayer Lutheran Crusaders cross-country team, I trained intensely in the gym, wrestling, weight-lifting, basketball camp, and hockey, eventually earning awards in cross-country tournaments. Running across endless corn and alfalfa fields, I learned to bale hay, harvest alfalfa, and work on local dairy farms. This hands-on farm life strengthened my resilience.

We lived in Mayer and New Germany, Minnesota, a region populated mostly by hard-working, Protestant residents of German descent. My host families immersed me deeply in the rhythms of Midwestern farm life, assigning me plenty of chores like baling hay and mowing the lawns for our local church, Zion Lutheran, and its cemetery. Baling heavy square hay bales-averaging 40 to 75 pounds (18 to 34 kg)-in the brutal Minnesota summer was grueling, legendary work. Managing the church and cemetery grounds added another 10 acres of exhausting lawn to mow. Yet, pairing this tiring physical labor with caring for a community cornerstone captured the heart of the region's heritage and taught me the Christian way of hard work before pleasure. I still fondly remember resting after those long days, listening to Garrison Keillor's Minnesota Public Radio show, A Prairie Home Companion. I giggled at its famous sign-off about the fictional town of Lake Wobegon: "where the women are strong, the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average."

Minnesota winters brought entirely new adventures with my host families and classmates. I play-wrestled with the Lindemeier brothers in the backyard snowdrifts and played hockey on our homemade backyard rink, which we built by flooding the lawn and stacking left-over hay bales for walls. We also ventured out across the state for classic winter traditions, cross-country skiing, ice-fishing, and playing pond hockey on the frozen surfaces of local spots like Lake Waconia, the city's scenic Lake of the Isles, and even taking trips up to the frozen shores of Lake Superior.

Through this lifestyle, I experienced the Lutheran philosophy of "hard work before pleasure"-a practical living out of Martin Luther's concept of "The Calling" (Beruf). In this community, secular farm work was a religious duty and a way to serve God. It perfectly mirrored the spirit of worldly asceticism, where economic diligence and self-discipline are signs of faith, and personal pleasure is set aside for a higher purpose. This faith-driven resilience is precisely what communities supporting Mayer Lutheran High School continue to build today.

My time at Mayer Lutheran laid the foundational groundwork for my later thesis study of Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In my RuDao book, I merge this Western Protestant view with the Eastern Ru-Shang (Confucian-Merchant) principle of righteousness and profit coexisting (义利合一), demonstrating how faith, ethics, and economic diligence unite across different cultures.

To this day, I hold warm memories of daily chapel, Sunday church services, and Bible study in English, Hebrew, and Latin. I recall reading great works like Beowulf, Shakespeare, Hemingway, S. E. Hinton's The Outsiders, and Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. One of my brightest youthful memories remains touring with our school orchestra all the way from Minnesota down to Houston, Texas.

I am deeply grateful for Mayer Lutheran's academic guidance and spiritual mentorship. These gifts have stayed with me across decades, and I am proud to pay tribute to my alma mater, my host families, and my MLHS friends and classmates in this book.

1987-1991: University of Minnesota and the Dawn of Web 0.9

Following my time at Mayer Lutheran, I attended the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities, where I pursued a Mechanical-Industrial Engineering major paired with dual minors in Computer Science and Business Management, graduating in 1991.

It was during this monumental transition at the turn of the decade that the architecture of the modern digital landscape first began to take shape. Following Tim Berners-Lee's initial 1989 CERN proposal, I was fortunate to be among the absolute earliest technophiles to dive deep into the raw HTTP v0.9 protocol documentation. Poring over those original technical manuals gave me a deep understanding of stateless hypertext transfers over TCP/IP. This early architectural clarity proved invaluable, allowing me to quickly master the emergence of the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) specification when it debuted in 1993, and providing the precise structural mechanics needed to engineer pioneering web-to-database connections directly with SQL backends.

My journey in Minnesota also paved the way for my family. My brother, Victor Tong (唐滔), enrolled at the University of Minnesota in 1989, joining me on campus. Embracing our family's shared spirit of dedication, he excelled deeply in his academic pursuits, officially graduating with Cum Laude honors in 1993 with a Bachelor of Science in Physics. His hard work and leadership culminated in winning the prestigious Student Commencement Speaker Award. Standing before his fellow graduates as the UMN Class of 1993 graduation speaker, he delivered a moving commencement address inspired by the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.-a proud milestone that beautifully bridged my parents' engineering heritage with the Protestant values of hard work and social responsibility.

Following his graduation, Victor and I both entered the corporate ranks of Andersen Consulting, a premier global IT consulting heavyweight that later rebranded as Accenture. This was a highly prestigious launchpad for our careers, allowing us to combine our technical IT background with high-stakes enterprise systems for America's top Fortune 500 corporations. Operating under the direct supervision of Managing Director Michael Gaard, we spearheaded complex IT system integration and corporate consulting projects for powerhouse Midwestern clients, including U.S. Bank (USBank.com), Northwest Airlines, Best Buy, and Target (Target.com). This intensive corporate exposure served as our practical introduction to the engine of modern American commerce, providing the precise operational discipline that would later fuel our own international ventures.

1993-2000: From Minnesota Ice to Nasdaq DotCom Boom Web+ ColdFusion

The years following the 1993 birth of CGI up through 2000 opened up an exciting new chapter of internet startup entrepreneurship, building dot-com web applications, and serving local client connections. Between 1993 and 1995, my brother Victor and I worked closely with Andy Mullin, Charles Wilson's CultureShock, and the visionary Minneapolis developer brothers JJ and Jeremy Allaire. Together, we were deeply immersed in early web applications middleware development-pioneering the integration of front-end web browser applications with back-end CGI database servers and navigating the absolute technical frontiers of web-to-database connectivity.

During this dawn of commercial web development, Minneapolis became a prominent regional hub for CF middleware innovation. The Allaire brothers famously engineered early database-to-web connectors right here in the Twin Cities, founding Allaire Corporation in Minnesota in 1995. They pioneered the first database-driven web-content servers under the product name Cold Fusion (initially spelled with a space). Using these newly emerging web-to-database development environments with CGI and SQL connections, I witnessed firsthand as they set the stage for monumental success. With the breakthrough release of version 4.0 in 1998, the space was officially dropped, changing the product name permanently to ColdFusion. By this time, the platform was rapidly expanding into a global powerhouse, capturing a booming generation of hundreds of thousands of web developers worldwide.

This momentum culminated in January 1999 when Allaire Corporation launched a highly successful Initial Public Offering (IPO) on the Nasdaq under the ticker ALLR. The platform's immense value led to the Macromedia Era in March 2001, when Macromedia absorbed and merged with Allaire Corporation in a transaction valued at approximately $360 million. Following the acquisition, the software became known as Macromedia ColdFusion, and co-founder Jeremy Allaire stepped into the corporate leadership role of Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for Macromedia. The software's lineage reached its definitive modern state during the Adobe Era in December 2005, when tech giant Adobe Systems acquired Macromedia for $3.4 billion in stock, transitioning the product family permanently to Adobe ColdFusion.

Jeremy Allaire went on to co-found Circle (Circle.com) in 2013, launching the premier digital dollar stablecoin USDC in 2018. This second tech empire reached its ultimate milestone in June 2025, when Circle Internet Group executed a massive, historic Initial Public Offering under the ticker CRCL. After pricing at $31 per share and raising $1.05 billion, the stock exploded by nearly 250% on its debut, rocketing its valuation to $18 billion. By late 2026, driven by institutional adoption and its expanded agentic AI tech stack, Circle's market capitalization surged past $22 billion. I personally reached out to congratulate Jeremy Allaire on this phenomenal achievement-a staggering, full-circle evolution from our humble beginnings in 1993, when we all shared a tiny, free office space in Minneapolis, purely driven by raw tech passion and the spirit of innovation.

Inspired by this mid-90s boom, Victor Tong carved out his own path by developing a highly competitive, cross-operating-system alternative database middleware server named WebPlus.com (Web+), it offered a fast, robust alternative engine for commercial web apps, and WebPlusShop, which remains a popular e-commerce storefront platform across the United States today.

The Web1.0 Era: The Trial of a Nasdaq Listing

In 2000, I co-founded Pacificnet, which listed on Nasdaq. In that dot-com bubble era, many companies attracted investment with hype and fabricated numbers. We insisted on real world ecommerce application, cross-border payment solutions, internet workflow automation technology patents and customer relation management CRM solutions.

1999-2000: The Pacificnet Ecommerce Nasdaq Listing

The years between 1999 and 2000 marked a historic transition for our entrepreneurial journey, as Pacificnet evolved from a Minneapolis startup into a premier cross-border e-commerce CRM portal bridging the United States and Hong Kong.

I owe an immense debt of gratitude to my cousin-in-law, Andrew "Andy" Mullin, and the wonderful Mullin family. Andy, who began serving as the Mayor of Wayzata, Minnesota in 2025, played a pivotal role in my early career. He welcomed me into his competitive young business hockey team, introducing me to the unique camaraderie of Minnesota's corporate ice leagues, and graciously brought me into his extensive family gatherings within prominent Minneapolis business circles. I am incredibly proud of Andy for becoming such a trusted business and political leader for the City of Wayzata.

It was through Andy's robust network that I met his close friend Ted Farrell at Haskells, a venerable Twin Cities institution. They became one of our very first internet web design clients when we helped design the Haskells.com e-commerce website-the first-of-its-kind wine e-commerce platform in town! As our relationship grew into deep mutual trust, the leadership at Haskell's transitioned from clients to believers, becoming one of the earliest angel investors in my first internet enterprise, Pacificnet.

Pacificnet started its roots in Minneapolis before strategically moving its core operations to Hong Kong to capture the booming international trade highway. That early foundation of trust, local networking, and collaborative capital eventually propelled Pacificnet all the way to a successful public listing on the Nasdaq stock exchange in June 2000.

To Andy Mullin, the Mullin family, and the Farrell family, whose trust, friendship, and early support made possible some of the first steps of an entrepreneurial journey that continues to this day. Long before others could see what might be built, you offered your trust, your support, and your belief. Mr. Mullin gave us his invaluable contributions of time, effort, and early funding in our founding days in the dawn of Web 1.0. It remains a powerful, real-world lesson in how strong personal ethics, local networks, and mutual respect build truly sustainable global enterprises. Those early acts of confidence became part of the foundation upon which everything that followed was built.

The Web2.0 Era: The Discipline of Listed-Company Governance

Afterward I served as independent director of several listed companies, converting the righteousness-profit discernment into governance principles. Across cycles of volatility, integrity and compliance proved the best protection.

The lesson: the core of corporate governance is not the institutions themselves but the values behind them.

The Web3 and AI Era: Advocating the RuShang-Type Blockchain Entrepreneur

As co-founder of the Hong Kong Blockchain Association, I promoted the ideal of the "RuShang-type blockchain entrepreneur." In universities I taught AI ethics, using Confucian wisdom to "translate" technological problems.

The lesson: the best algorithm is not the fastest one, but the one that best understands fairness and benevolence. The blockchain can record transactions - it cannot record the human conscience. "Without trust, no standing." 民无信不立。

Thirty Years, One Summary

A Closing Word: The RuJiang's Path Advances Daily

The RuShang is the inner discipline; the RuJiang, the outer practice. The RuJiang's path does not depend on a perfect start - it depends on advancing every day. Technologies iterate and renew, but the essence of business remains the exchange of trust and value between people - and the Confucian wisdom of 2,500 years still carries real power today.