Sunny Lu is the co-founder and chief commanding officer of VeChain, a blockchain-based platform that focuses on providing supply chain solutions for businesses. ^[1]

Education

Sunny Lu enrolled in Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 1998 and graduated in 2002 with a bachelor's degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering. After graduation, became a Cisco-certified engineer, receiving the Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (CCIE) certification. ^[2][3]

Career

Soon after graduation in 2002, Sunny took a job at Netstar, an IT service company as the Global Network Center (GNC) Manager. This is where he first learned about data tracking and its significance which is later reflected in the use cases of VeChain. After he left Netstar in 2005, he became the IT infrastructure manager at 3M China, a manufacturing and distributing company in February 2006. He then moved on from 3M China in May 2009 to take a job at one of the leading spirits companies, Bacardi as their IT manager in China. In 2010 he left Bacardi to join Louis Vuitton China where he was the chief technology officer as well as the organization and performance (O&P) manager. He was later promoted to the position of chief information officer and the Information Systems and Technology director in June 2014, which he states had an impact on the work he does in the future. ^[2][4][5]

“CIO is acting as a bridge between the technology and the business. So usually I’m doing two things, either I find new technology or I think about what business can benefit from the technology.”

Crypto Career

Sunny Lu first encountered cryptocurrencies when he was offered to trade items for Bitcoin whilst playing a game called World of Warcraft, which he thought was suspicious and didn't take the offer. However, years later around 2013, he became interested in studying Bitcoin after working on a project at Louis Vuitton where he proposed the idea of accepting bitcoin as a form of payment for stores when people traveled abroad. This is where he did a lot of research into the technology behind Bitcoin and was captivated by its capabilities and proposed that it would be a good solution for people who had difficulty carrying large amounts of cash or had credit card limitations. ^[5][6][7]

“I took a study about the theory the technology even I read about the codes it's about like a 110 lines of codes of bitcoin, I was really impressed about the design about you know the simplicity of the coding so i was fascinated about the bitcoin, about the blockchain technology”

After this revelation and new interest in blockchain technology, his position as CIO of Louis Vuitton helped him realise that “the profile missing from the entire blockchain space” was the integration of blockchain technology in businesses to bring back value for both sides of the partnership which was his starting point in creating VeChain. ^[5][6]

VeChain

Sunny Lu founded VeChain in 2015 with the help of Changpeng Zhao, co-founder, and CEO of Binance. VeChain started from a “small idea” that was rooted from Sunny Lu’s job at Louis Vuitton where he worked on a project called “track and trace” that aimed to track all products throughout the entire manufacturing process. He noticed that this was only possible within the premise of a single enterprise and wanted to create a solution to this. His idea was to replicate this project but make it accessible to multiple different entities by assuring trust and security through the use of blockchain technology. This idea was fully put into action when Sunny Lu had the chance to speak with the founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin in late 2015, where he realized the effectiveness and ingenuity of smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain and decided to build VeChain on Ethereum. ^[4][5][6]

Since then, Sunny Lu has led the VeChain team to create an enterprise-friendly blockchain platform, leading to multiple partnerships with various enterprises, and also launched their own public blockchain, VeChainThor, and multiple other applications that build off the blockchain such as VeChain ToolChain. ^[8]