Pinduoduo's new CEO Chen Lei revealed the secret: the teenager won the Championship Olympiad and graduated from a famous school, returned to China and started a business with Huang Zheng for 13 years

Text | ai Finance and Economics Agency Liu Xueer

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A letter from Huang Zheng blew up the original cto, the new CEO Chen Lei, who lived behind the scenes.

Combing Through Chen Lei's background, it was found that he had three obvious labels: elite background, technical man, and little brother who had followed Huang Zheng for many years to start a business.

First of all, looking at the elite background, Tsinghua University graduated from computer science, and then went to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, one of the top three public universities in the United States, for further study, and also won gold medals in the World Olympic Information Competition.

As one of the five university discipline competitions in science, the Olympiad of Informatics is conducive to cultivating children's programming thinking from an early age, and also screens out some Internet leaders. For example, Sogou CEO Wang Xiaochuan and Meituan Vice President Bao Ta have all won the Olympiad of Informatics to guarantee Tsinghua, and Wei Xiaoliang, vice president of Facebook Engineering, has also won a silver medal.

Chen Lei's technical background is also very distinct, and public information shows that he has published research results in the field of data science and machine learning in international conferences and journals such as the ACM SIGMOD conference and the VLDB conference.

In one of the few public appearances, Chen Lei also showed himself as a technical man. For example, in an interview with Yiou Network in June 2018, he repeatedly emphasized the difference between AI, especially Pinduoduo's "distributed AI". He believes that the algorithm of traditional e-commerce lies in labeling users, but Pinduoduo's algorithm pays more attention to the psychology and behavior of users after seeing goods, such as interacting with friends and sharing, rather than just clicking and shopping.

Among the second-generation successors of the comprehensive e-commerce giant, Xu Lei, CEO of JD Retail, is from marketing, Ali CEO Daniel Zhang is from finance, and Pinduoduo has found a successor from a technical background, which may be able to give the company another style.

As one of the founding team members of Pinduoduo, Chen Lei started a business with Huang Zheng very early. Since 2007, Chen Lei has returned to China to work as a R&D architecture engineer at Ouku.com, which is Huang Zheng's first entrepreneurial project.

Ouku network is a b2c website that sells electronic products, Huang Zheng feels that he can't fight Liu Qiangdong, and in 2010, he sold Ouku to Lanting Jishi. Later, Huang Zheng founded Leqi, an e-commerce agency operation company, and incubated the Dream Quest Game Project in 2013, while Chen Lei served as a senior R&D architecture engineer and chief technology officer of Xinyoudi Company since 2010.

Ai Finance and Economics did not find the relationship between Xinyoudi Company and Huang Zheng, but Tianyan's investigation showed that Chen Lei was a director of Shanghai Dream Information Technology Company, which showed that he also followed Huang Zheng all the way when making games. In 2015, Huang Zheng began to toss new projects to spell good goods, Chen Lei served as the technical leader, and since 2016, Chen Lei has served as Pinduoduo cto.

Chen Lei's fate with Huang Zheng may not stop there, Tianyancha data shows that Chen Lei has interned at Google, Yahoo, and IBM during his time in the United States, and Huang Zheng has also worked at Google in the United States. If you count from Chen Lei's joining Huang Zheng's entrepreneurial project in 2007, the fate of the two has lasted at least 13 years.

Chen Lei's business career is not only more than Pinduoduo. According to Tianyan, Chen Lei served as a legal person in 6 enterprises, was a shareholder of 4 enterprises, and served as an executive in 11 enterprises.