Mao Wen and the trouble with a predictable life

A friend needed help with a wardrobe business. Mao Wen had a doctorate, experience at Abbott and, by her own account, a growing impatience with a career whose next decade seemed too easy to imagine. In 2016 she returned to China. A university classmate was building a shared clothing platform. She agreed to help with planning. Before long, she was its chief operating officer.

The business was called Duola Yimeng. It attracted investment, then ran into the difficulties of an immature business model during the retreat of the sharing economy. For Mao, the detour made the workings of a small company visible in a way that a senior position inside a large corporation had not. She could see the whole operation, including where the money went.

There is something wonderfully unceremonious about this entrance into entrepreneurship. No childhood lemonade stand is required. Someone asks a capable friend for help; the help becomes a job; the job changes the questions she asks about work. Today, Mao is co-founder, chairwoman and CEO of Novlead Biotech in Nanjing. The wardrobe venture belongs in that story. It was where an executive began learning to see a business whole.

The degree that sits beside the doctorate

Mao’s academic route began in Beijing. She attended Beijing No. 4 High School and then Peking University. In July 2005, she received her bachelor’s degree in biological science. She went on to the University of Southern California, earning a master’s in regulatory science in May 2010 and a doctorate in neuroscience in May 2011.

The master’s is an interesting companion to the doctorate. One qualification concerns research; the other concerns the rules through which research becomes a product. Her subsequent responsibilities have repeatedly brought those two kinds of work together. At Abbott, where she worked from 2011 to 2016, her remit covered product development and project management. At Novlead, it extends across research, registration, manufacturing and commercialization.

Read that list slowly. Each word introduces a different set of people, decisions and obligations. An experiment, an application, a production line and a customer conversation have different measures of success. Mao’s career has placed her across those boundaries. Her title may fit on a business card; the work underneath it needs considerably more paper.

A company needs people who can stay

Her next chapter took shape around the World Economic Forum, where she held a project leadership role in 2018 and 2019. There she encountered scientist Yu Qin. Their conversations became part of the formation of Novlead. Mao also brought in Cao Guiping, known internationally as Luke Cao, whose experience included commercial work at Johnson & Johnson.

Novlead was incorporated in Nanjing in April 2018. Mao’s own origins were in Beijing, and she had studied and worked in the United States. Nanjing was therefore a choice that needs explaining. Her explanation was practical: several important members of the research team had homes there. Locating the company in the city helped preserve the stability of that team.

The surrounding support mattered too. Nanjing’s Jiangbei area offered premises and assistance for young technology businesses. Mao has described a 4,000-square-meter building with three years of rent relief. For a new company, rent is an unusually reliable visitor: it returns every month whether the work is going well or badly. Three years without it changes the arithmetic of getting started.

The location decision gives the founding story a human scale. A company address is also a collection of other people’s addresses. Moving the business can mean asking employees to move their lives. Mao’s account gives those existing lives a place in the calculation, alongside talent, capital and public support.

Finding the missing engineer

One of the early difficulties was turning research into an engineered product. Mao described looking at the work after months of development and finding it insufficiently finished. The team needed a different kind of expertise. She approached more than 30 people before a recruiter introduced Yuyan Zhang, an engineer with a long career at GE.

Zhang did not immediately agree to join. He initially became a weekend adviser; a full-time appointment followed later. Zhang formally joined Novlead in November 2020. He is now its chief technology officer and an executive director, with responsibility for technology strategy and product development.

Recruiting makes an awkward hero story. The essential action is admitting that somebody else knows something you need. Then comes the decidedly unglamorous work of finding that person, making the case and continuing the conversation. Mao’s search supplies a concrete example of what building a founding team can involve after the founding has technically happened.

Her current counterpart has an engineering education in automation and control theory. Mao’s own training spans biology, neuroscience and regulatory science. The pairing puts different disciplines around the same table. It also makes the company’s development easier to understand as collective work: research, engineering, operations and commerce need people who can argue from different kinds of knowledge.

Novlead’s published culture has a taste for wordplay. Its headings include “NO Ceiling,” “NO Excuse” and “NO Hiding.” Underneath the short names are commitments to execution, honesty, taking risks and tolerating failure. The wording is the company’s account of the environment it wants to create. Beside Mao’s recruiting experience, it raises a practical question that belongs in any growing business: can people acknowledge a limitation early enough to bring in help? Her search for an engineer gives that question a concrete setting. The advertised permission to take risks has to coexist with the obligation to finish the work.

Equality comes with an assignment

Mao has spoken plainly about expectations for women at work. In one account, female engineers wanted a male manager to check their completed projects. She objected to the assumption that responsibility should pass to him. Her position was that respecting women’s professional ambitions includes expecting them to take responsibility for their work.

That position gives substance to a phrase that is otherwise easily worn out: workplace equality. In Mao’s example, equality has an assignment attached. The engineer owns the project. Recognition and accountability arrive together. It is a more demanding proposition than an encouraging slogan on an office wall.

At the March 2024 Women’s Influence Conference in Beijing, she also resisted making gender an oversized explanation for everything a founder experiences. She spoke about persistence and the ability to accommodate other people’s views. When disagreement makes a problem more complicated, she suggested looking for a broader way to resolve it. These were her stated views on leadership, expressed in conversation with founders and investors.

The combination is useful to keep in view: she expects individual responsibility and makes room for differences. Both have consequences for a team. An employee can be accountable for a decision while still needing colleagues whose training and judgment differ from her own. The recruiting story and the engineering anecdote sit comfortably beside each other.

“Long-term thinking and pragmatism are the fundamentals of entrepreneurship.”

Mao Wen, translated from Chinese

The view from another founder’s telephone

Mao’s connection to Nanjing eventually became useful to someone else. He Wei, a university classmate preparing his own venture, received a telephone call from her. She recommended Jiangbei’s support and its environment for technology startups. With her introduction, he visited the area and went on to establish his business there.

It is a small episode with a pleasing echo. Earlier, a classmate’s request had drawn Mao into a young company. Here she was the classmate making an introduction. Professional networks can look abstract in a diagram, all nodes and connecting lines. In this case the connection was a person calling another person with a specific suggestion about where to start.

Her public roles have broadened too. She is a member of Nanjing’s 15th municipal political consultative committee and an entrepreneurship mentor at Nanjing University. In 2023, she received Deloitte China’s Female Tech Entrepreneur Award. Those activities place her alongside students, other founders and civic institutions as well as her own employees.

What happens after the invitation abroad

International expansion is now a recurring part of her work. At the 2024 MEDICA exhibition in Düsseldorf, Novlead was one of five winners in a startup competition. The company described conversations with international counterparts and potential partners. Mao’s remarks linked innovation with a global outlook. The occasion offered visibility; the work of building a dependable operation would continue after the exhibition closed.

In a June 2026 interview during the World Economic Forum’s summer meeting, she described the current challenge as becoming an organization able to do international business consistently. Her explanation was specific: supply chains, production, quality control, maintenance and local commercial operations. Reaching another country brings obligations that cannot be handled by an announcement alone.

Novlead submitted a Hong Kong listing application in February 2026. That filing was an application, with the accompanying disclosures and draft documents, rather than a completed listing. In April, Peking University advertised Mao as a guest for its entrepreneurship course, inviting her to discuss the path from overseas study and corporate employment to building a business in China.

The route gives students plenty to examine: three degrees, a corporate career, a clothing startup, a team assembled across disciplines, a city selected partly because colleagues already lived there. Mao once disliked being able to see the next ten years too clearly. Her present job offers a considerably busier view. Somewhere between the introduction and the maintenance contract, there is always another piece of the company to make work.