The Youngest Person at That Symposium

By Jing Liu

A year ago, some people probably assumed it was just a shared name with some famous entrepreneur. But by now, everyone knows who this newly minted star founder really is: Xingxing Wang.

At yesterday's private enterprise symposium, the 1990-born founder of Unitree was the youngest person in the room.

Last spring, Waves sat down with Wang at Unitree's Hangzhou headquarters. The company had just closed a 1 billion RMB funding round, and we talked about financing, the robotics industry landscape, AI, and more. But the most memorable part was a story about drawing a butterfly.

More than two decades earlier, Wang — then a kindergartener in Yuyao, Zhejiang — sketched the first drawing of his life: a butterfly. It stunned everyone. He had never taken a single art lesson; the butterfly was just something he'd copied from another picture.

Of course he didn't realize it at the time. Only years later did it dawn on him that he possessed a rare gift for working with his hands. "A single line, a bit of glue — I could get the details just right."

Wang brought this up proactively. But his point wasn't to brag about his talent. It was to talk about his struggles.

The meticulous observation and replication demanded total sensory engagement. As a teenager, Wang often felt "too sensitive." "A lot of [time] was spent on internal battles." He struggled to describe the feeling precisely. "Simply put, it was like OCD."

If he wore an outfit he didn't like, he'd feel physically uncomfortable the entire school day. When he found his parents' cooking mediocre, the five- or six-year-old Wang — too short to reach the stove — would stand on a stool and cook his own way.

Yet Wang knew what he was good at, whether drawing or handicrafts, and this once gave him a flicker of pride. It also cost him something: sensitivity to language.

He said he genuinely tried to learn English, but "the words just wouldn't stick." He pointed to the A4 paper in front of us and said there were even Chinese characters he couldn't immediately write. The result of this lopsided ability: an undergraduate degree from Zhejiang Sci-Tech University; a failed attempt at grad school admission to Zhejiang University due to poor English scores; eventual placement at Shanghai University through调剂.

This made for a stark contrast. In the robotics industry, most founders boast elite engineering pedigrees. Two of Unitree's peers — Peng Zhihui of Agibot and Zhang Wei of LimX Dynamics — graduated from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China and the University of Science and Technology of China respectively, with the latter also pursuing studies in the US. Wang was the exception.

Under a education system with narrow metrics for success, this was something of an embarrassment. Wang said: "As a kid, I kind of felt I had a little cleverness in me, but I didn't get attention, recognition — I was even suppressed."

So during our interview, Wang said something that didn't sound very founder-like: "I've always struggled inside. Constantly looking for a way out, for opportunities, to break out of the cocoon." He expressed the same sentiment several times: "The world really hasn't given me many chances."

A mixture of pride and loneliness saturated Wang's adolescence. Looking back now, he jokes: "But it was fine, I had fun playing by myself."

One Unitree investor told Waves a telling detail: Wang "prefers eating alone" because he finds dining with others a waste of time. This carried an investor's implicit concern: compared to rivals who recruit seasoned industry heavyweights, would Wang's reserved personality become a handicap?

Wang knows he's no social butterfly. He prefers solitude and thinking over drawing energy from human interaction. His reading habits reveal this too: he avoids biographies, and even science fiction — a genre many tech people adopt as a badge of identity — doesn't interest him. He likes books that simply explain science. He recommended The Feynman Lectures on Physics to Waves — a book some consider a dry exposition of physics fundamentals.

At age ten, watching CCTV — the same stage where his robots would later perform repeatedly — Wang first learned about Boston Dynamics and various aircraft. His horizons exploded instantly.

In his second year of grad school, Wang built XDog, a quadruped robot that won second prize at the Shanghai Robotics Design Competition. Looking back, the dog was primitive, capable only of basic movements. A reporter at the time photographed Wang's cramped lab, packed with equipment, with the caption: "Compared to Google and MIT's research environments and their millions or tens of millions in funding, this is worlds apart."

In 2016, Wang decided to start a company. He scraped together 2 million RMB in angel funding — not easily — and founded Unitree.

Interestingly, the two young founders at yesterday's symposium, Wang and Wenfeng Liang, share similar reserved temperaments. On certain questions, they sound alike too.

On talent: Wang said they don't require experience or elite degrees, "not the conventional kind of top-school returnees with big titles, PhDs, or professors." His reasoning was plain: it doesn't help much with what they're doing right now.

On organization: big companies inevitably become bloated and inefficient. That might work in a monopolistic industry, but not in an emerging one. This is why new opportunities tend to favor startups.

On entrepreneurship: Wang believes a founder's moat is nothing more than sustained technological innovation and product improvement. "In this era, you can be eliminated very quickly. And what breaks you usually won't be your peers."

It's hard to say whether this resemblance is coincidence or reflects something about the psychology of a new generation of founders.

It's also where Wang's and Liang's stories converge: someone not widely accepted, persisting with their own methods and values, eventually earning broader recognition.

Near the end of our interview, Wang mentioned a recent annoyance — something like what Faye Wong complained about in her youth: "Too hot, too hot. Too many people reaching out, can't even respond to all the messages."

But he immediately added: "This is still just the starting point."

Image source: IC Photo