Meituan

The episode frames Meituan as a company that eventually combined services Americans might associate with Groupon, DoorDash, Uber, Yelp, and travel platforms. The hosts call it a super app, while admitting that the label did not explain the business to them before they researched it. Their central question is how a company founded well after Tencent and Alibaba could rise into China's leading technology tier, alongside displacing the older position held by Baidu.

Wang Xing's path begins in Longyan in 1979, shortly after China's reform and opening began. His father ran a cement factory, giving Wang an early view of small-business entrepreneurship rather than a technology-company background. At Tsinghua, where he studied electrical engineering, he joined the early online culture of Chinese bulletin-board systems. The hosts note that several later technology founders, including Pony Ma, Jack Ma, William Ding, and Colin Huang, also appeared in those communities; the episode presents this shared environment as context, not as proof that BBS participation alone caused their success.

Wang went to the University of Delaware for graduate study, but the hosts describe the location as a poor fit for someone eager to build an internet company in 2001–2003. They portray Delaware as strong in engineering and materials industries, yet far from the technology-startup centers Wang wanted to join. When Friendster appeared among students, Wang saw a social-networking model he could bring to China and left school to pursue it.

His first service, Duo Duo You, targeted Chinese college campuses and then tried to help Chinese students studying abroad stay in touch. Both versions failed. The hosts attribute the early difficulty partly to timing: ordinary Chinese consumers had limited access to personal computers, and mobile internet had not yet arrived. That account makes the failures more than a sequence of imperfect clones; the addressable market and the country's access to computing constrained what a social product could become.

After his first social-networking effort, Wang Xing returned to China and worked with former Tsinghua classmates on a service for college students. The hosts describe the timing as the main obstacle: in China at the time, most people did not have PCs and mobile internet had not yet arrived. A later version for Chinese students studying abroad also failed. Rather than treat these attempts as unrelated, the episode presents them as a sequence of experiments with American internet products, each adapted to a Chinese audience and constrained by the market's readiness.

When Facebook emerged, Wang's team created Xiaonei, or On Campus, by copying Facebook almost pixel for pixel, down to its color, text, layout, and even the footer credit. The imitation worked well enough to attract many students and create server costs the founders could not afford. Yet it was difficult to raise money for an openly copied product, and China's venture-capital ecosystem was still relatively undeveloped and cautious. The hosts place this against the early formation of Sequoia China, whose first investments were only beginning around that time.

In October 2006, Wang sold Xiaonei to entrepreneur Joe Chen for $2 million. The hosts describe the sale as a practical decision: the company needed money and might otherwise have died, while Chen could see the possibility of a Chinese Facebook. It later became Renren, raised capital from SoftBank and Masayoshi Son, and went public in New York in 2011 before Facebook. The IPO raised $740 million at a market capitalization near $6 billion. Wang's small exit looks modest in hindsight, but the hosts argue it freed him to pursue a much larger opportunity rather than making the sale an obvious mistake.

Wang next launched Fanfou, a Twitter-like service whose name is a colloquial greeting similar to asking whether someone has eaten. It quickly reached two million users, possibly exceeding Twitter's audience at that moment. Its growth also attracted government attention because users could spread political dissent. The hosts say the service was shut down for perhaps 12 or 18 months, though David is unsure of the duration, and later reopened while Sina Weibo and Tencent entered the microblogging market. They speculate that content moderation may have helped Renren remain available, but explicitly say they did not investigate that possibility. The episode thus links Wang's product experiments to both market timing and China's regulatory environment.

By late 2009, Groupon had become the obvious American internet model to copy. The hosts correct their own recollection: Groupon was the fastest company to reach a $1 billion valuation, not a billion dollars in revenue. Its rapid rise attracted enormous attention, but the business relied on local salespeople persuading merchants to offer deals. Ben highlights the structural problem: merchants often disliked the experience and churned, while every new city required another costly sales operation. Heavy funding could drive revenue, but it did not guarantee profit or a lasting competitive advantage.

In March 2010, Wang and his team incorporated Meituan, a name combining words for beauty and togetherness. Although he had not yet achieved a major win with his string of cloned services, he had built a strong reputation in Chinese technology and venture-capital circles. China's venture market had also matured: Meituan raised $12 million from Sequoia China at launch, then $50 million from Alibaba in early 2011. The hosts emphasize that these amounts were significant at the time, especially the initial Sequoia round. Meituan entered a crowded market with substantial backing and a founder who had repeatedly tested internet business models in China.