The panic that built WeChat’s $700 billion super-app
- lastmansurfing
- 3 hours ago
- 1 min read
Four Chinese characters, no meeting invite, and no committee. That was the email reply Allen Zhang received from the CEO.
It was October 2010, and a Canadian startup called Kik had just launched a mobile messaging app. Fifteen days later, it had one million users.
When Zhang found out, it terrified him. He was running a small R&D outpost in Guangzhou, about 90 miles from Tencent’s gleaming headquarters in Shenzhen. Before Tencent acquired Zhang’s company in 2005, he had built Foxmail, a leading email client in China at the time.
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