WU SHICHUN

Wu Shichun did not come up through China's elite tech circles. He was a founder first.

He built KuXun, a travel search engine, back in the earlier days of the Chinese internet, and it was later sold. That experience taught him what a scrappy founder actually goes through.

In 2014 he started Meihua Venture Capital, also known as Plum Ventures, to back companies at the earliest stage. Instead of a few careful bets, he made hundreds.

Over the years Meihua has invested in more than 600 startups, and Wu became one of the best-known angel investors in China.

Meihua Venture Capital is Wu's main vehicle. It writes seed and angel checks, the very first outside money a company gets.

The portfolio is enormous and spread across consumer brands, technology, and media. Wu has been especially drawn to new consumer companies, the food, drink, and lifestyle brands aimed at younger Chinese shoppers.

He is also not shy about hardball moves. In one case he won a large stake in a listed company, Lootom Telcovideo Network, through an auction.

The through-line is volume and conviction, a lot of small early bets on founders he believes in.

Wu Shichun invests in people before products. His famous filter is founders who are hungry and driven, the kind who have something to prove.

He was one of the first Chinese investors to openly say he wanted to back small town youth. He calls them 'the most energetic and creative group of people in this era.' The idea is that a founder who fought their way up from a smaller city through the brutal college entrance exam has grit the pampered ones lack.

He spreads his money across hundreds of companies, betting that a few big winners will pay for all the misses.

Wu's biggest win is not one company, it is a strategy that worked. When he started Meihua in 2014, backing unknown founders from small cities by the hundreds looked reckless.

Elite funds chased graduates of top schools and returnees from Silicon Valley. Wu went the other way.

Building one of China's most active angel operations with more than 600 investments proved his point, that grit and hunger beat pedigree more often than the fancy money wanted to admit. The reputation he built kept getting him into the best early deals.

The flip side of Wu's loud, high-volume style is that it invites trouble. He has been pulled into public disputes, and reports say a chunk of his assets, around 200 million yuan, was frozen amid a legal fight.

Spraying money across 600 companies also means a lot of dead ones, and plenty of founders who took his check and failed. His enthusiasm for new consumer brands ran straight into a brutal downturn in that sector after 2021.

The lesson is that betting on hunger and volume gets you a lot of shots, but it does not protect you from bad markets or messy fights.

Wu Shichun talks about business like a founder, not a financier. His advice to entrepreneurs is to cut the sentimentality.

'Talk less about feelings, talk more about numbers,' he says, meaning obsess over your statements and your progress. He also has a moral streak.

He calls business 'the greatest charity,' arguing that running a healthy company, paying staff on time, and never stiffing your suppliers is a real good. And he is a stubborn optimist about his home market.

In a 2022 letter he told founders to 'stay at the table and don't leave,' because 'China is worth fighting for.'

Wu Shichun is a private man in his personal life and a very public one in his professional one. Reliable details about his family are not something he puts out there.

What he does share is his origin as an outsider who broke into China's tech and finance world without connections. That story is central to how he sees himself.

It is why he keeps betting on founders who, like him, started with no advantages and a lot to prove.

Wu Shichun's real education came from building and running a company, not from a famous MBA. He was an entrepreneur first, founding the travel search site KuXun before he ever wrote an investment check.

That founder experience, learning by doing and failing, is the school he credits. It shapes how he judges the people he backs, because he has sat in their seat.

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