Wang Xing's Thinking and Execution Power at Meituan

2017 - The Second Half of the Internet: Skyward, Grounded, Globalized

• Skyward: True high technology, along with traditional ABC — AI, Big Data, Cloud
• Grounded: Not just being grounded but going underground — merely connecting consumers is not enough; WeChat has already solved this problem; moreover, the barriers to connection are low, and you must delve into all aspects of the industry chain.
• Globalized: Countries are not boundaries; more likely, they are sources, currencies, and cultural habits. For instance, the boundary for Toutiao is language. The competition between China and the U.S. spans five to ten years. Collaboration among enterprises is necessary. Software talent is scarce in Southeast Asia.

2014 - New Business in the Era of Connectivity

	Entertainment	Information	Communication	Business
Web	Browser games, Board games	Portals	Email, IM, VoIP	Qunar
Search	MP3 search		Qunar
Social	Zynga	Twitter, FB	FB	Meilishuo, Sesame Street
Mobile	Mobile games	Toutiao	WeChat	Meituan
IoT	?	Dropcam	?	?

2012 - My Entrepreneurial Story

After graduating from Tsinghua University with an EE degree, I went to the University of Delaware for my PhD. My advisor was not particularly available, and I saw the wave of social media online. In 2004, I gave up my PhD to start a business and contacted two classmates to become partners. We pooled together 300,000 RMB, rented a three-bedroom apartment in Haifeng Garden on Xueqing Road, with each of us having a room and working in the living room. We developed many products.

In August 2004, we launched our first SNS, Duoduo You, and by August 2005, our daily user growth was in double or even single digits, requiring us to invite friends and classmates. The problem was: wanting to target everyone made promotion difficult, leading to low density. The lack of focus stemmed from inexperience; we didn’t know what was important and what wasn’t.

In August 2005, we changed our approach and made three new attempts, one of which launched on December 8, targeting college students, expanding from Tsinghua, Peking University, and Renmin University to other schools. We started with the student festival of the Tsinghua Electronics Department, subsidizing ticket sales, spending 3,000 RMB to acquire about 5,000 users, with a customer acquisition cost of approximately 0.6 to 1 RMB per person. By the end of December, we were still wavering between this and another project. At this time, the team was still three people.

The difficulty of cloning lies in the feeling that you can differentiate yourself slightly; when your understanding of the product is not deep enough, you don’t know why it does what it does, nor do you know which differences are critical. ==Subtle differences can have significant implications.==

Competitors numbered in the dozens, with people in China and around the world cloning FB, such as 5Q, Zhanzuo, etc.

Why did the campus network succeed? Good luck (Tsinghua) and simplicity.

In 2006, we sold to Qianxiang Interactive for possibly 2 million due to financing issues.

1. The investment letter's lock-in period was a pitfall; the other party signed but did not invest. I recommend checking out Venture Hacks and Founders at Work.
2. I didn’t realize how big this could be; I only wanted to raise 1 million USD, but that was far from enough. I needed to meet people with sufficient insight.
3. I probably didn’t meet enough VCs.

After the handover, in 2007, I started working on Hainai and Fanfou. There were several important reasons for leaving:

1. External: In September 2006, FB launched the most significant revision in SNS history: Feed. The importance of Feed can be compared to the search box of search engines. This created new opportunities.
2. Internal: ==Time is always scarcer than money==.

Building a company to a certain level can be achieved through individual or team effort, but to reach a top-tier level, like IBM, Microsoft, Google, or Facebook, requires the enhancement of the entire society and comprehensive national strength. Not everyone can achieve that well, partly due to Tencent.

Tencent's dominance, with QQ and QZone, restricted the development of other mainstays. Some businesses belong to the mainstay, while others are branches; the mainstay provides nutrients to the branches, but mainstays can compete for nutrients with each other.

In July 2009, regulatory issues arose, leading to the shutdown of a batch of Weibo accounts. At this point, waiting indefinitely was not an option; the deadline was six months, after which we had to move on.

In January 2010, we launched Meituan, completing it in 20 days, and it was the earliest to go live. Speed was crucial; LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman once said that if a product version doesn’t embarrass you, it’s because you launched it too late. Additionally, you need to clearly understand the scale of the problem you are solving.

Let’s talk specifics about the market.

Great products can only emerge when there is a massive market and demand. User numbers:

• Billion-level: FB, Google
• Hundred-million-level: BAT, future Meituan
• Ten-million-level: Meituan in 2012

Generally, entrepreneurship either solves a new problem or uses new methods to solve an old problem. If you view market demand abstractly enough, there are only a few types of problems in the world, and many things can be done repeatedly. Marc Andreessen believes that we consider the things we are willing to do or invest in, and if they fail, we try again in three years, six years, or nine years. For example, cash flow and payments are old problems: PayPal in 2009, Square in 2012. Other examples include gaming, information retrieval, and business transactions.

Churchill said: The further back you can see into the past, the further forward you can see into the future. History and futurism are crucial.

Taking Wang Xing's historical perspective as an example: social networking and group buying both belong to the internet, which belongs to IT, and IT encompasses many other things. For instance, three of China's Four Great Inventions are IT-related. What can you do with IT? Generation, transmission, storage, processing, and display of information. For example, in transmission, current fiber optics and mobile communications have established the underlying communication, and now we can only work on upper-layer SNS. From a long-term perspective, IoT is reliable; it’s just a matter of time.

Specifically regarding Meituan's position: E-commerce can be categorized into product e-commerce and service e-commerce. Digitalization is unstoppable, but specific services cannot be replaced by digital means. Meituan is service e-commerce.

Regarding the number of competitors: marathon runners aiming for gold medals do not concern themselves with how many people are competing.