In 1997, Wang Xing was recommended from Longyan No. 1 Middle School to the Department of Electronic Engineering of Tsinghua University, majoring in radio. He graduated from Tsinghua University in 2001.

In 2003, he gave up his studies in the United States and returned to China to start his own business, Xiaonei.com, which was acquired by Thousand Oaks Group in 2006;

In 2007, he founded Fanfou.com;

In 2010, he founded group buying Website Meituan.com.

After graduation, he received a full scholarship and went to the University of Delaware in the United States to study under Gao Guangrong, the first mainland scholar to receive a doctorate in computer science from MIT.

At 9 pm on April 20, 2011, I was waiting for Wang Xing at the Subway store in Wudaokou, Zhongguancun, Beijing. He hurried over, and after sitting down, he hurriedly ordered a sandwich and ate it in two bites. "Subway" is translated from "Subway". Just like the subway that flies through the city every day, this sandwich chain from the United States is also a standard feature of fast-paced urban life. It provides simple sandwiches to busy white-collar workers who have no time to care about delicious food and just want to fill their stomachs, as well as entrepreneurs like Wang Xing.

This interview will end at 11 o'clock. Within two hours, Wang Xing answered a phone call for 40 minutes. I interviewed him for the first time on March 17, and he answered 8 calls. Compared with the entrepreneurs I interviewed in the past, Wang Xing is still in the start-up stage. Not only does he reply to reporters' text messages for interviews by himself; he also makes sure not to miss every phone call.

Currently, this young entrepreneur sleeps five or six hours a day. When he goes on a business trip to other places, he basically has to go back and forth in the same day, so he can’t waste any time. His mother once came to Beijing to take care of her son's life. She often prepared meals, but his son didn't come back until 12 o'clock in the evening. Sometimes she wakes up and finds that Wang Xing is still working online at three or four in the morning. She was very worried about her son's health: "Longyan people have the habit of drinking soup, but he has been neglecting it for a long time. He is career-oriented, not enjoyment-oriented, and can't stop."

At this moment, Wang Xing must race against time.

Wang Xing was born in 1979. This 32-year-old young man has an 8-year entrepreneurial history. In 2003, he interrupted his studies at the University of Delaware in the United States and returned to China to start his own business. In his hands, Xiaonei.com, Fanfou.com, Meituan.com, etc. were born one after another. Just as Meituan led the group buying trend, the first two ventures also led the trend of campus SNS and Weibo respectively.

He has an unusually precise vision. Mu Yan, the first president of the Tsinghua Science and Technology Entrepreneurs Association and the vice president of Baihe.com, believes that Wang Xing is more suitable to be an angel investor or VC because he is extraordinarily sharp and capable. Let him quickly determine which model is more promising. But on the other hand, he suffered repeated setbacks. Xiaonei.com failed in financing and the capital chain was broken, so it was sold to Chen Yizhou, chairman of Qianoak Interactive Group. After Chen Yizhou took over, he raised US$430 million from SoftBank Masayoshi Son. Fanfou.com was closed on July 7, 2009 due to some sensitive issues and was not opened until 505 days later. By then, the world had changed drastically and Sina Weibo was booming.

After that, he founded Meituan and became one of the leaders in the popular group buying industry. It announced that sales in 2010 reached 230 million yuan, and this year's target is 1.6 billion yuan. This is just like the high-profile speech during the Great Leap Forward era, and it is not just rhetoric in the eyes of the outside world. The existing role model is in the United States: As the originator of group buying websites, Groupon was founded in November 2008. In 2009, its revenue was US$30 million. By 2010, this figure had become US$760 million. Last year, there were rumors that Google would spend $6 billion to acquire Groupon, but it did not materialize in the end. The latest news about this company is that it has launched an IPO with a valuation of US$15 billion to US$25 billion.

Wang Xing happened to be the first person to introduce Groupon to China - he used it as a template to found Meituan. Since then, thousands of group buying websites have sprung up like mushrooms after a rain. This "thousand-group war" is reminiscent of the video industry in previous years. After video, group buying is the clearest Internet business model. Compared with the high threshold of video, which requires hundreds of millions of yuan to burn bandwidth and copyright, the threshold for group buying is almost non-existent. At the same time, it is a very rare business model on the Internet with prepaid and visible cash flow. You can imagine how entrepreneurs and investors got drunk on this glass of "group buying" wine.

Like video websites, group buying is also facing a brutal reshuffle. In the eyes of many Internet observers, only three or four large national group buying websites may be left, such as Meituan, Lashou.com and Groupon, which has entered China.

Wang Xing must work non-stop, must always maintain his advantage, and laugh until the end. After all, this is the brightest prospect since he started his business.

In the winter of 2003, Wang Xing asked his doctoral supervisor for a long leave and returned to China to start his own business. Previously, he wrote an email to his partners Wang Huiwen, Lai Binqiang and others, describing the development and prospects of SNS in the United States. The six-dimensional space theory was popular at the time, which posited that you could get to know any stranger through up to six people. Wang Xing did the math and found that he could really find the president through six people. This theory also became the basis for his SNS.

Wang Xing’s return to China became the tipping point for this group of partners to start a business together.

"Everyone has vague entrepreneurial ideas in their minds. It's a matter of time. If it doesn't explode, it may happen a few years later." Lai Binqiang said. At that time, Wang Xing and his tutor took a long leave, which was not considered a complete withdrawal from school. Wang Huiwen, who studied at Tsinghua University with Wang Xing, dropped out of school completely.

Wang Xing’s father supported him with 300,000 yuan, and Lai Binqiang and Wang Huiwen also borrowed more than 100,000 yuan each. These three young people, who "didn't study honestly, looked for jobs, and messed around all day long," rented a 138-square-meter house with three bedrooms and one living room in Haifengyuan near Tsinghua University and started their business. There are six tables set up in the living room of about thirty square meters, one for each person, working face to face. Each person has a bedroom and sleeps on a folding bed worth more than 100 yuan each. There is no heating in the room. In winter, there is only a small heater, which is not very useful. Wang Huiwen said: "The memories of Haifengyuan are all cold in Lai Binqiang's heart."

Except for the winter, which was a bit difficult, they lived a happy life. According to Wang Huiwen, they were "typical The proletariat has nothing to lose and a very good mentality.” They work until one or two o'clock every night, get up at eight or nine in the morning, and go straight to work without brushing their teeth. When they are hungry at noon, they brush their teeth and have lunch. One day every weekend they go hiking, and the other day they discuss what they are doing. .

They have tried more than a dozen projects, including the SNS website "Duoduyou". At that time, their understanding of SNS was still based on the theory of six-dimensional space, which was rather dogmatic and did not have a deep understanding of social platforms. The mood was high and exciting at the beginning, but after doing more than a dozen projects, it became a bit low. "The most difficult thing is confusion. There is a vague direction in my mind, but no matter how hard I try, nothing happens. I know there is a mine there, but I can't dig it out here or there," Lai Binqiang said. In the dead of night, he was lying in bed thinking about starting a business, and he was a little anxious.

The user growth figures of Duoduoyou were not ideal. They realized that Duoduoyou did not make any distinction between groups of people. It seemed to be very tolerant, but in fact it could not include anything. So they turned to discussing campus SNS. They started talking about it every once in a while. After a discussion, the ideas gradually became clear.

On February 4, 2004, Facebook was established. No one knew that this humble website, open to registration only for Harvard students, would later have such a huge impact.

In the summer of 2005, Wang Xing discovered the existence of Facebook. When they discussed the topic of campus SNS again, they decided to imitate Facebook and build an on-campus SNS.

Classic college student entrepreneurs