Steven Millward · · 1 min readLei Jun: the man who struck gold with Xiaomi (INFOGRAPHIC)
This is not Lei Jun’s first rodeo. Xiaomi’s founder and CEO is a serial entrepreneur – as well as a respected startup mentor and angel investor – who’s proved himself adept at seeing new tech trends and leaping in at exactly the right time.
That’s exactly what Lei, 46, did when he started up smartphone maker Xiaomi in 2010, launching the first phone a year later. Fresh from selling his ecommerce startup to Amazon, Lei saw that phones and the mobile internet would be the next big thing in China – and he wanted to build a homegrown gadget-making empire that would operate differently from any other such brand by selling mostly online, cultivating a passionate base of fans, and then actually listening to suggestions from those loyal supporters.
While Xiaomi is now experiencing growing pains, it’s still China’s biggest unicorn startup.
In this infographic illustrated by Tech in Asia‘s Andre Gunawan, here’s Lei Jun’s journey so far.
Illustrations and infographic by Tech in Asia’s Andre Gunawan.
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Editing by Nivedita Bhattacharjee and Michael Tegos
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