Out- UBERING Uber

How Cheng Wei, Founder Of China'S Didi, Drove The Americans Off The Road In China.

- Brad Stone and Lulu Yilun Chen

At the Beijing offices of the ride-hailing startup Didi, many employees refer to Cheng Wei, the founder and chief executive officer, as laoda, or “big boss.” Others use his English nickname, Will. This summer the world came to know him by another designation: the Uber Slayer, the one entrepreneur who managed to beat back the relentless advance of the richest, most rapacious startup since Bill Gates ran Microsoft. In August, after a multibillion-dollar, year-and-a-half long battle, Uber agreed to sell its business in China and depart the country.

It was a face-saving retreat for Uber, which got a 17.7 percent ownership stake in Didi and $1 billion in cash. But it was a huge victory for Cheng. Eight weeks after the deal, on the fifth floor of the company’s headquarters, he’s careful to sound magnanimous toward his vanquished rival. “Uber is a great company,” he says. “They have the best strategy in China among all the Silicon Valley companies. They are more agile than Google. They aren’t like this in other parts of the world, but in China they’ve learned to show goodwill. They are not like a usual foreign company in China, but more like a startup, full of passion, feeling like they are fighting for themselves.”