Career at Google
This is already causing protests from both the commercial industry in Europe and the US, as well as in China. suppliers for slashing prices and poor working conditions. Unlike Ma, the English teacher turned Alibaba founder, Huang represents a new generation of Chinese tech entrepreneurs who started their careers at global companies.
At age 12, his extraordinary talent for math earned him a spot at the elite Hangzhou Foreign Language School, where he was classmates with the children of China’s political and social elite. After graduating from Zhejiang University with a degree in computer science, he left China in 2002 to pursue a master’s degree at the University of Wisconsin. Two years after graduating, he returned to help found Google China. He started his first company in 2007, then sold it in 2010 to start a new one that helped businesses promote themselves on sites like Taobao and JD.com. When an ear infection forced him off sick in 2013, he came up with the idea for Pinduoduo. “The goal is not to be cheap, but to make users feel like they got a good deal,” he said.
Huang has kept a low profile, stepping down as PDD’s CEO in 2020 and stepping down from the board in 2021 as Beijing began a crackdown on Chinese tech giants. During that time, PDD — and its net worth — began to decline. But Temu, PDD’s offering outside of China, has bolstered the company’s revenue and sustained growth. After launching in September 2022, the company rose to the top of U.S. app stores, targeting low-cost, unbranded products shipped directly from China to the U.S. PDD reported revenue of about 248 billion yuan last year, up 90 percent from 2022.
