Meituan

Acquired

Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal

Venturecapital, Ma, Investing, Acquisitions, Startups, Vc, Investment, Business, Technology

4.8 • 2.9K Ratings

🗓️ 10 March 2021

⏱️ 141 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

We dive into the history behind Meituan, the juggernaut Chinese "super-app" which dominates China's services economy, offering consumers everything from food delivery, restaurant reviews, travel booking, bike-sharing, movie ticketing, and countless other entertainment and lifestyle services all at the touch of a button. Already China's 3rd largest tech company by market cap (behind just Tencent and Alibaba), Meituan did $15 billion in net revenue in FY2019 and continues to grow rapidly. What makes it so special, and how were they able to become the market leader in such a competitive space? This story is packed with lessons that apply equally beyond China tech to high-growth company building and investing everywhere.

If you love Acquired and want more, join our LP Community for access to over 50 LP-only episodes, monthly Zoom calls, and live access for big events like emergency pods and book club discussions with authors. We can't wait to see you there. Join here at: https://acquired.fm/lp/

Sponsors:
Vanta: https://bit.ly/acquiredvanta

Statsig: bit.ly/statsigacquired
Modern Treasury: https://bit.ly/acquiredmoderntreasury

The Meituan Playbook is available on our website at https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/meituan

Links:

Meituan's English language walkthrough video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wxgQVjDviQ
The Tech Buzz China podcast: https://www.techbuzzchina.com
GGV's Evolving for the Next Billion podcast: https://nextbn.ggvc.com/podcasts/
Bernard Leong's Analyse Asia: https://analyse.asia

Carve Outs:

Extraterrestrial: https://www.amazon.com/Extraterrestrial-First-Intelligent-Beyond-Earth-ebook/dp/B081TTY4NX/
John Luttig's newsletter: https://luttig.substack.com

Transcript

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0:00.0	You've been a VC in my heart for a long time.
0:03.4	I take offense to that, and awesome, thank you.
0:07.4	Welcome to Season 8, Episode 3 of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies
0:24.6	and the stories and playbooks behind them.
0:27.0	I'm Ben Gilbert, and I'm the co-founder and managing director of Seattle-based Pioneer
0:31.0	Square Labs and our venture fund, PSL Ventures.
0:34.2	And I'm David Rosenthal, and I am an angel investor based in San Francisco.
0:39.5	And we are your hosts.
0:41.5	Ben, you're a bio there, it's a little different this time.
0:45.1	Congratulations, my man.
0:47.2	Thank you, very long Seattle, excited for the future of the Pacific Northwest.
0:50.5	It's very exciting, well-observed, promotion to managing director.
0:55.7	Thank you.
0:56.7	And frankly, it's most exciting just to have a new $100 million early stage fund to invest
1:02.5	in Pacific Northwest entrepreneurs who also might be acquired listeners.
1:06.7	Well, today we were talking about a company that frankly couldn't be further from the Pacific
1:11.0	Northwest.
1:12.0	Well, maybe it could.
1:13.0	I suppose if you're on the east coast of the United States, you might be literally halfway
1:16.0	around the world.
1:17.4	But today, we dive into a Chinese app that started as a group on clone by a founder who
1:23.3	had previously started a Facebook clone and a Twitter clone.
	...

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