Wang Xing was born in Longyan, Fujian Province in 1979. His father, Wang Miao, was the boss of a well-known cement factory at the time and was worth hundreds of millions. It can be said that Wang Xing is a veritable "second generation rich".
The prosperous life did not make Wang Xing like other "rich second generation" who live a life of eating, laziness, learning and lack of skills, and living a life of indulgence in consumption and extravagant spending. . On the contrary, he has been what his parents call "other people's children" since he was a child. Not only is he a typical good student, he was recommended to Tsinghua University from Longyan No. 1 Middle School in Fujian, where he studied in the Department of Electronic Engineering. During his time at Tsinghua University, he not only had excellent grades, but also actively participated in extracurricular activities. He joined the dance team of the Tsinghua Student Art Troupe and danced a traditional folk dance called "Huangtuhuang". He was bare-chested, with a breast drum tied to his chest and a pair of coarse trousers. It expresses the Chinese people's love for the loess land and dances wildly on the loess land, bursting out high fighting spirit and optimistic spirit.
After graduating from Tsinghua University with a scholarship in 2001, Wang Xing chose to go to the United States for further study, studying for a doctorate in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Delaware. But in early 2004, 25-year-old Wang Xing chose to give up his PhD and decided to return to China to start a business. In his words, “At that time, I had nothing but ideas and courage. I went to the United States after finishing my undergraduate degree, except for The classmates had no social connections, so when they came back, they found a college classmate and a high school classmate, and the three of them started working in the dark."
Wang Xing started his own business first. The project is called "Duoduoyou". This is a typical social website. You need to register and then fill in some personal information and nicknames. Users can make more friends through this website. The core idea of ??this project is to use friends to Meet friends. In fact, SNS (Social Networking Service) websites like this follow the small world theory. Although the world is large and there are many people, in fact, any two people can be connected through the relationship of six friends.
After that, Wang Xing started working on his second project "Youzitu", which is a highly targeted service website. When Wang Xing was studying abroad, he deeply felt that foreign digital technology was very developed. Since his parents were not used to surfing the Internet, Youzitu allowed overseas travelers to send digital photos to China and pay by credit card. Youzitu was responsible for sending the pictures Print it out and send it to their parents.
Although the two websites Duoduoyou and Youzitu have attracted a certain number of users, they have never found a stable profit point, and both ended in failure.
He learned a lot of experience and lessons from his first two entrepreneurial failures. Wang Xing, who returned from abroad, always believed that SNS still had a lot of room for development. This time, he chose to focus on a market segment: university campus SNS. In 2005, Wang Xing learned and studied the successful experience of Facebook, combined the previous experiences and lessons of Duoduyou and Youzitu, and combined with the national conditions of his country, founded "Xiaonei.com". In just three months after its launch, Xiaonei.com attracted 30,000 users, growing very rapidly.
After Xiaonei.com was acquired, Wang Xing publicly quoted a famous speech by former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Express his attitude:
"This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."
Experience After another entrepreneurial failure, Wang Xing started his new entrepreneurial project and founded Fanfou on May 12, 2007. This time he learned from American Twitter and made a localized one. Twitter.
The name Fanfou has a historical allusion, that is, "Lian Po is old, can he still eat?", and later extended to the Chinese people's greeting "Have you eaten today?" ". At first, they looked through the dictionary for almost a week and couldn't think of a name for the website. All the good domain names were registered. Later, one person came up with an idea and wrote a program based on the combination of initials and vowels. He checked the domain name registration while running on the server, and finally chose Fanfou.com. No one has registered this domain name, and it only costs 60 yuan per year.
Although the prospects of this project are very good, after a few months, the website still has not improved. Instead, Sina Weibo, which was launched two years later and also imitated Twitter, quickly became popular. All over China. In fact, Fanfou is not without development prospects, because with the release of the iPhone by Steve Jobs, the advent of the mobile Internet era and the popularity of smartphones, more and more users like to publish instant messages on their mobile phones. This is also the reason why Weibo has become so popular. . But Wang Xing had been working on Fanfou.com for several months. When he saw the slow development, he lost patience. He put it aside to grow naturally, and turned around to build a new website "Hainei.com".
Hainei.com is positioned as a social networking site for white-collar workers. Hainei.com provides personal space, mini blog, photo album, group, radio station, alumni directory, friend buying and selling, and movie reviews. Serve. But he never found the breakthrough point of this website, and was finally succeeded by Kaixin.com relying on small games. That was when people were busy stealing food and grabbing parking spaces on Kaixin.com in their spare time, and had a lot of fun.
After the failure of Hainei.com, Wang Xing looked back and saw that Fanfou.com was developing well, so he picked it up and started it again. In the first half of 2009, Fanfou successfully exceeded one million users. However, due to lax content control, the IP was closed and disabled a few months later.
Because he didn’t know when Fanfou.com would be operational again, Wang Xing began to look for new projects, browsing various websites every day to learn and watch the latest products. This time he set his sights on Groupon in the United States.
Groupon is a group buying website, which was one of the more popular new models in the United States at the time. Groupon is a homonym for coupon, which means coupon. After studying Groupon, Wang Xing felt that there should be a huge market demand in China, because at that time many small businesses with a sales radius of no more than a few kilometers could not find a suitable place to promote, and the group buying promotion method could help them bring in Transactions are completely consumed based on results, and according to various statistics, this is a market worth nearly 100 billion.
In March 2010, Meituan.com was officially launched, which quickly attracted the attention of other people in the industry.
There were many group buying websites launched in the same month, such as Wowo Tuan, LaShou.com, 24Quan.com, etc. According to statistics, between 2010 and 2011, the number of group buying websites surged to 5,000, and the competition was quite fierce. This period was also called It's called the "Battle of Thousand Regiments". During this period, many group buying websites spent money on advertising. Although many colleagues and investors also suggested that Wang Xing conduct vigorous publicity, he withstood the pressure and made the decision not to spend money on advertising. This decision also allowed Meituan to seize cash flow and have a more obvious advantage in the subsequent competition. As LaShou.com failed to go public, Meituan acquired most of the 24 Coupon team, and other group buying competitors declined due to financial problems, Meituan won the final victory in the Thousand Group War, quickly and steadily occupied the market, and occupied accounting for more than half of the market share in the group buying industry.
Later, Meituan received investment from Sequoia Capital and Alibaba, and developed even more rapidly. It continued to expand its service content and launched Meituan Takeout, Meituan Group travel, Meituan hotels, Meituan taxis, bicycle sharing and other businesses. Wang Xing is committed to building Meituan into the best "life service e-commerce platform" with everything to eat, drink and play. He hopes to have the opportunity to build Meituan to the level of Alibaba and Tencent. On September 20, 2018, Meituan was officially listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
Now Wang Xing is worth 220 billion, and he is an undoubted successful person. However, there are voices from the outside world that question Wang Xing, saying that he imitates Facebook, clones Twitter, and copies Groupon and other companies. Although we praise his indomitable spirit, time and time again He started his own business, but he failed so many times. Is it because of his lack of ability? Is he trying his luck?
No matter how the outside world evaluates Wang Xing, he is someone worth learning from. He always spends a long time thinking about doing things. Wang Xing believes that if a person wants to be TOP, he must understand the word TOP:
TOP=talent opportunity patience
This person needs to be talented, talented, have the right opportunities, and have long-term patience.
END