WANG XING

Wang was born in 1979 in Longyan, in China's Fujian province. He studied electronic engineering at Tsinghua University, then went to the University of Delaware for a PhD.

He dropped out with a master's and went home to build companies. In 2005 he and two friends cloned Facebook and launched Xiaonei, an early Chinese social network.

It grew fast, but Wang ran out of money and sold it. The site later became Renren and went public.

In 2007 he built Fanfou, a Chinese Twitter, which regulators shut down over sensitive content. Then in 2010 he founded Meituan.

That one worked.

Meituan is the empire. It started as a Groupon-style daily-deals site in 2010, then swallowed everything nearby.

Today it is a super-app. People use it to order food delivery, book restaurants and hotels, buy movie tickets, and get groceries.

In 2015 it merged with rival Dianping, a Yelp-like review site, to end a brutal price war. Meituan went public in Hong Kong in 2018 and raised about $4.2 billion.

Wang also sits on the board of Li Auto, an electric-car company he backed early.

Wang thinks in decades, not quarters. His favorite idea comes from a book called Finite and Infinite Games.

A finite game is played to win and then it ends. An infinite game is played to keep playing.

Wang runs Meituan as an infinite game, willing to lose money for years to stay in the fight and expand. He is patient about strategy and ruthless about execution.

That combination is why Meituan kept entering brutal, low-margin businesses like food delivery and won them.

Meituan is the win, and the food-delivery war is the proof. When Wang pushed Meituan into delivery, dozens of rivals were burning money on the same idea.

It was called the war of a thousand groupons. Wang outlasted almost all of them.

The 2015 merger with Dianping locked in his lead. Meituan's 2018 Hong Kong IPO raised about $4.2 billion and confirmed it as one of China's most important internet companies.

He turned two failed startups into the experience that built a winner.

The Xiaonei sale still stings. Wang built China's first big Facebook clone in 2005, then ran out of cash and sold it cheap.

The buyer turned it into Renren, which went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011 with a multibillion-dollar valuation. Wang has been open that he sold too early because he could not fund the growth.

The lesson he took was brutal but useful. A great product is not enough if you cannot pay to scale it.

Wang's philosophy is stitched together from books and chess. He has said you should judge people by their past, not their promises, because people rarely change.

He sees himself as a piece in a bigger game, not the master of it. And he believes the goal is to keep playing, not to score one big win.

In business terms, that means build something durable, expand relentlessly, and do not confuse a good quarter with winning.

Wang keeps his family life almost entirely out of public view, which is rare discipline for someone running a company that touches hundreds of millions of lives. What comes through instead is the reader and thinker.

He is nicknamed the poet entrepreneur for a reason. He treats books, especially on strategy and philosophy, as the real window into how he sees the world.

Wang studied electronic engineering at Tsinghua University, one of China's top schools. He then went to the University of Delaware for a PhD in computer engineering.

He dropped out with a master's degree and returned to China to start companies. The unfinished PhD is a common thread among founders.

He wanted to build, not study.

As an Amazon Associate, Netfigo earns from qualifying purchases. Book links above may be affiliate links.