How Pinduoduo founder Colin Huang went from factory worker's son to China's youngest self-made billionaire
Meteoric rise of social commerce company Pinduoduo in China’s trillion-dollar e-commerce market has taken many by surprise
Ringing the opening bell on Wall Street to mark the public trading debut of your company would be a dream come true for most entrepreneurs - but not for Colin Huang.
His mainland Chinese social commerce company Pinduoduo started trading on the Nasdaq last month, making Huang China’s youngest self made billionaire with a net worth of US$9.89 billion, according to Bloomberg's billionaire index. Huang, founder and chief executive of the company, wasn’t there for the opening bell though.
In fact, he did not even travel to New York to witness the historic moment, choosing to stay in Shanghai with investors and customers to participate in a simultaneous remote bell-ringing ceremony.
“We wanted to let more of our customers take part in ringing the bell, but it might have been a bit of a hassle to arrange visas for all of them to travel to the US. Isn’t it better that consumers, investors, all of us, myself included, be here [in Shanghai]?” Huang told mainland Chinese media on the day, adding that he prefers to avoid long-haul travel to prevent the recurrence of an ear infection.
Huang, an ex-Google employee, is a serial entrepreneur. Pinduoduo, now worth some US$21.1 billion, is the 38 year-old’s fourth company, after a string of successful previous ventures.
The idea for Pinduoduo, which melds the social aspect of sharing and messaging together with online group-buying, came to Huang when he observed how China’s high penetration of mobile devices was changing the way people lived, including enabling them to make payments via mobile devices, he said in a recent video interview with Tencent News.