Hu Weiwei (胡玮炜) is the co-founder of Mobike, a station-less bike-sharing company. Mobike is now the largest bike-sharing operator in the world, with over 200 million registered users and 25 million daily rides.
She started the company in 2015 alongside Xia Yiping and Wang Xiaofing. Weiwei met Yiping while working as a journalist. At the time, he was working with connected cars for Ford. She arranged an interview with him and never showed up. However, they kept in touch, and she later convinced him to move his focus from cars to bikes.
“Bike-sharing is a Chinese innovation, different from previous technology fads learned from the West,” Weiwei explained in an interview reported by China Daily. “We’ve the scale and experience to help foreign consumers benefit from our innovation.”
She has compared entrepreneurship to journalism, in that “both journalists and entrepreneurs bet on logical thinking to make critical decisions and they are driven by a strong inner desire for breakthroughs,” she explained.
The company had raised almost $1 billion in funding by June 2017 and was acquired by Meituan Dianping in April of 2018 for $2.7 billion. In December 2018, Weiwei stepped down as CEO, stating personal reasons.
Weiwei is a native of Dongyang in the Zhejiang province of China. She graduated from Zhejiang University City College with a degree in journalism before working as a senior reporter at Business Value magazine.
Both Weiwei and Yiping were listed on Fortune’s 40 Under 40 list in 2017.
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