Interview with Chen Hao, Founder of MegaEase: From Bank Engineer to Cloud‑Native Entrepreneur

Chen Hao, also known as "Left‑Ear Mouse," is a veteran programmer who left a state‑owned bank in 1998, where he managed network and email systems, to pursue a career in the emerging internet industry despite losing a house allocation.

After struggling through the 1998 internet bubble and the 2008 financial crisis, he took a demoted role at Amazon in 2010, later working at Thomson Reuters, Alibaba, and other firms, before founding MegaEase to provide cloud‑native infrastructure for enterprises.

He describes his early years in Shanghai as challenging, facing repeated interview failures and low‑skill outsourcing work, but he persisted by self‑studying programming, improving his technical abilities, and eventually securing better positions.

In 2002 he moved to Beijing to join a distributed computing platform company, and later chose to join Amazon despite better offers, attracted by its pioneering technologies such as recommendation systems and cloud platforms.

His career focused on distributed, high‑concurrency, high‑availability, and cloud‑native technologies, accumulating deep enterprise‑level architecture experience.

Facing a mid‑career crisis in 2015, he left Alibaba to care for his ailing father, while consulting on technical problems, which led him to recognize a market need for robust infrastructure and inspired the founding of MegaEase in 2016.

MegaEase started as a remote‑first team, emphasizing no‑office work, anti‑overtime, and anti‑over‑competition culture, growing to over 20 members across China.

Chen advocates remote work, self‑managed schedules, and believes that entrepreneurship reduces the pressure of internal competition compared to traditional employment.

He explains the evolution from Cloud 1.0 (resource‑centric services) to the cloud‑native era (micro‑services, containers, API‑centric), emphasizing that applications are inherently cloud‑native.

He notes the rapid growth of cloud‑native adoption in China, with millions of companies using cloud services, but also highlights challenges such as talent shortage, high technical barriers, and lack of standardized architectures.

To lower adoption barriers, MegaEase is developing Easegress, a fast, low‑cost cloud‑native traffic scheduling service, which was open‑sourced in June and planned for donation to the CNCF.

Chen also discusses the broader Chinese software ecosystem, pointing out the lag in foundational software (OS, middleware, databases) compared to abroad, cultural differences in open‑source practices, and the need for patient capital to support long‑term, technology‑heavy ventures.