Renren

"Wang Xing’s first breakout entrepreneurship project was Xiaonei, a social networking service (SNS) website for college students, similar to Facebook. Before creating Xiaonei, Wang Xing and his team had explored and abandoned nearly ten projects, one every two months on average. Xiaonei was founded in 2005, but due to Wang Xing’s lack of experience and inadequate financing, the funding chain broke. In this situation, Xiaonei was sold to Chen Yizhou’s Oak Pacific Interactive in 2006, becoming the foundation for what would later become Renren."

"More typically, every venture he undertakes leads the wave of imitation in China’s internet scene. Renren, akin to Facebook, led the campus SNS wave; Fanfou, similar to Twitter, led the microblogging trend; Meituan, similar to Groupon, pioneered the group buying wave. His grasp of American internet trends is very accurate, and when transplanted to the Chinese internet, the products he made were outstanding. There is a lot of replication of foreign websites in the Chinese internet, many people only jump in when they see someone doing it successfully. Discovering an opportunity first once may be luck, but Wang Xing being the first every time is quite intriguing."