Enplug’s CEO, Nanxi Liu, was the May featured keynote speaker for Startup Grind in Santa Clarita, California. Startup Grind Powered by Google for Entrepreneurs, is a global startup community designed to educate, inspire, and connect entrepreneurs.
May is Startup Grind’s Female Founder Month.As an advocate for women in tech, Nanxi volunteers and mentors many young women pursuing STEM. Nanxi was honored to be asked to be the speaker for the Santa Clarita event, held on May 22, 2018. The event was sold out.
The organizer, James McKinney, interviewed Nanxi onstage about her background, how Enplug was able to disrupt the digital signage industry, and how she won an Emmy.
Nanxi, who previously was CEO of a biotech company before co-founding Enplug, explained that she saw a massive opportunity to evolve the digital signage market when she first learned about the industry. She noticed that it was hugely difficult to set up a network of digital signage screens and hard to have lots of engaging, automated content like social media. As a result, she was determined to make digital signage accessible to all businesses and usable by anyone from the marketing manager to the IT director.
During the Q&A, Nanxi shared her unique vision for Enplug. Focused on bringing the next generation of software to digital displays in businesses everywhere, Enplug built the first real App Market for digital signage. Instead of only templates to show content on screens like traditional companies in the industry, Enplug built customizable apps that integrated with existing online content that would automatically update with the latest content. For example, Enplug’s Social Media Collage creates beautiful photo collages from the latest Tweets and Instagram photos with the hashtag of your choice. Enplug’s growing App Market includes apps that range from showing live sports scores to sales dashboards.
Although Enplug serves many Fortune 500 companies now, the company started its business initially with a customer base of small mom-and-pop shops. Nanxi shared that as people learned more about Enplug’s unique and easy-to-use interface, more and more companies with large numbers of displays began switching to Enplug. She is particularly excited about Enplug’s growing use in internal communications.
Asked what involvements she has outside of Enplug, Nanxi shared her commitment to community work. She is actively involved in several non-profits including sitting on the Board of Directors of the National Foster Youth Institute and the Board of Directors for Tiger Scholarship Foundation.
Nanxi described that she is most proud of the team she and her co-founders built, stating that for any position, Enplug always searches for only the best of the best to join. She explains that when you have a team of smart, skilled, passionate, and highly motivated people, it becomes reflected in the quality of your product. And in a competitive market, Nanxi said she will not settle for anything less than ensuring Enplug is the best digital signage software.