Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…I just love Cheng Wei. He was great. I should say his English isn’t so good and my Chinese is nonexistent, so my partner-in-crime on the story was Lulu Chang, one of my Bloomberg colleagues in Beijing. We went to visit Cheng Wei at Didi’s headquarters. I loved him because he presents his story as a series of small personal humiliations. For example, his very important college entrance exams in high school. He leaves one page blank by accident and gets into a lesser school. In college, he gets a job selling life insurance and he doesn’t sell a single policy. Then he signs up to work at a healthcare company only to find out that it’s a chain of foot massage parlors. And he walks into an Alibaba office in Shanghai, gets a job, meets Wang Gang, his mentor, and really they started on their entrepreneurship path because Wang Gang doesn’t get a promotion. They start kind of brainstorming ideas. Momo actually, it wasn’t their idea. It was something that’s kind of a hack that existed on the app store in China and they sort of realized the power of GPS and the potential to do things like a Hailo in China, a taxi hailing app. Yeah, and then they launch this company called Didi, only to find out that dozens upon dozens of other companies had the exact same idea. Here you’ve got this young kind of whippersnapper in Cheng Wei. Wang Gang, we spoke to on the phone, he very rarely does interviews but sort of flamboyant investor who as just by virtue of small Angel investment in Didi has minted at least a billion dollars. These guys, they had nothing. And 30 is the number of companies that launched. There might have been hundreds that spun up to address this opportunity in Beijing at the beginning of 2012. So the odds were against them but, I think as we’ll talk about, they had some experience in the industry and knew what it took to succeed in China. Brad, I think you pointed out in your book that it was roughly the American equivalent of 100k that he put into Didi as his little Angel investment. A pretty good investment.…

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