Meituan
Acquired
Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal
4.7 • 5.2K Ratings
🗓️ 10 March 2021
⏱️ 141 minutes
🧾️ 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.
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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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