ShaoLan Hsueh was born and raised in Taiwan, the daughter of a calligrapher and a ceramic artist. “I grew up in this environment, in the mud, in the ink, in the paintbrushes,” she says. She didn't immediately take on her parents' artistic legacy: describing herself as an unashamed “geek”, she studied biochemistry at university, wrote some unlikely and bestselling Microsoft user manuals (“I used my imagination and put a lot of my own thoughts in”) and went on to be a first-wave internet entrepreneur, co-founding pAsia, an early internet success story, in 1995. At its peak it had 250 employees.

Hsueh later moved to London and set up a venture capital investment firm in 2005, but her latest project is one directly linked to her family roots among the paint pots and calligraphy brushes. She's developing a kind of shareware for the mind - a groundbreaking method of reading and interpreting Chinese characters for westerners, called “Chineasy”. And she's (so far) funded the project herself from her savings, giving it all away free via her Facebook page and website. “It is a legacy, and something I would like to share,” she says. We meet in Chineasy's tiny Soho office, where beautifully illustrated Chinese characters cover the walls, the papers fluttering gently in the breeze.

The Chineasy phenomenon came to public attention in May this year, when a talk Hsueh had given about her new learning method in February - at TED in California - went online. It's a riveting piece of theatre: she paces the stage and introduces the nine basic characters - including mouth, person, fire - that form the building blocks for reading hundreds more. Hsueh realised she was on to something as soon as she'd given the talk: “A lot of people came up to me afterwards and said they could not believe it - they never thought they could learn Chinese and now they are interested and want to learn.” The talk has been viewed more than 900,000 times.