Xing Fu Quotes

By the fall of 2017, Mobike was logging 22 million rides per day, almost all of them in China. That is four times the number of global rides Uber was giving each day in 2016, the last time it announced its totals. In the spring of 2018, Mobike was acquired by Wang Xing’s Meituan Dianping for $2.7 billion, just three years after the bike-sharing company’s founding.

Zhou Hongyi was one of the most pugnacious of these entrepreneurs, but dirty tricks and anticompetitive behavior were the norm in the industry. Remember Wang Xing’s Facebook copycat, Xiaonei? After he sold it in 2006, the site reemerged as Renren (“Everyone”) and became the dominant Facebook-esque social network. But by 2008, Renren faced a scrappy challenger in Kaixin001 (kaixin means “happy” in Mandarin). The startup gained traction by initially targeting young urbanites instead of the college students already on Renren. Kaixin001 integrated social networking and gaming with products like “Steal Vegetables,” a Farmville knockoff, but one where people were rewarded not for cooperatively farming but for stealing from each other’s gardens. The startup quickly became the fastest growing social network around.

Wang Xing embodied a philosophy of conquest tracing back to the fourteenth-century emperor Zhu Yuanzhang, the leader of a rebel army who outlasted dozens of competing warlords to found the Ming Dynasty: “Build high walls, store up grain, and bide your time before claiming the throne.” For Wang Xing, venture funding was his grain, a superior product was his wall, and a billion-dollar market would be his throne.