The elsewhere Podcast Is Back with Xing Meng

@Jing Liu

Today's episode is my interview with Xing Meng, partner at 5Y Capital.

Most people know the broad strokes of Meng's story: investment banking, two startups, a few years in tech investing, then a stint at a major tech company — DiDi, where he led the autonomous driving business. Then, in 2024, back to investing again.

By the metric of outcome maximization, Meng's career looks a bit scattered. Around the time we recorded this podcast, Momenta — the second company he invested in while at Shunwei Capital — went public.

The reason he left Shunwei for DiDi in the first place? A pivotal moment on a high-speed train passing Suzhou North Station, where he spotted Momenta's massive logo and suddenly felt he couldn't keep pace with Xudong Cao's growth.

Yet today, his investing career seems to be starting over. So I asked him: does it ever feel frustrating, planting seeds you never get to harvest?

Meng said his life is driven by experience, and by difference. In our edited video, "experience" appears 32 times; "different," 16 times.

There was another unexpected discovery.

I'd always thought of Meng as a Silicon Valley type — sunny, outgoing. But this interview revealed a contrasting side: something rooted in his childhood, in his worldview.

What exactly? I'll leave that as a teaser. I think you'll come away with some new insights.

Finally, an apology... After publishing our interview with Yuan Gong of HSG in mid-April, the elsewhere podcast went quiet for a long stretch. Though our friends may have noticed that elsewhere's written content and events have picked up somewhat. These past few months, we've spent considerable time experimenting with new things.

Which is... probably just an excuse. Please trust us one more time — we will update the podcast regularly.

For the full content, please head to the Xiaoyuzhou app for the complete audio, and Bilibili, WeChat Channels, and other platforms for the full video. As always, here are a few excerpts from our conversation.

The If You Are the One Contestant Who Got All Lights Turned Off

Let's start with an old story.

In 2011, Meng appeared on the North American special of If You Are the One. Unfortunately, all the female contestants turned off their lights for him.

Meng was 25 that year. In retrospect, he thinks the mass rejection may have been because he was too young. The original episode is now nearly impossible to find online, but on Baidu Tieba, some still call him "an extreme sports fanatic." In certain bios of Meng, one line still stands out: "If You Are the One male contestant who got all lights turned off."

Meng said he was pursuing his now-wife at the time, but progress was slow, so he thought of this dramatic way to speed things along.

Meng also said it was quite the experience. He'd never understood why the producers suggested male contestants prepare gifts for the women — until he arrived on set and realized how vast the studio was. Without the gift-giving segment, you could barely make out the women's faces.

This episode is one entry point into understanding Meng: what kind of person thinks to go on If You Are the One?

A Decade in Autonomous Driving

The kind of person who goes on If You Are the One and the kind who dove into autonomous driving over a decade ago may be the same answer.

Meng has deep ties to the autonomous driving industry.

In 2014, during his second startup, he and Xiaodi Hou founded Zhitukeji, the predecessor to TSP. The company later pivoted to autonomous driving.

In 2016, Meng joined Shunwei Capital; the second company he invested in was Momenta, also an intelligent driving company.

In 2019, Meng joined DiDi as COO of the autonomous driving business.

He once told a friend that many people now find autonomous driving deeply unsexy, but over a decade ago, when he first encountered it, it was a cutting-edge field — something like AI today.

What attracted him? Many things, surely. But cutting-edge, different from the rest — that must have been a significant part of it.

Momenta's Big Logo

When Meng joined Shunwei in 2016, the era was not unlike that of our previous guest Yuan Gong at China Growth Capital: China's tech investment was just beginning.

At that point, there weren't many investors looking at tech. Meng used to organize dinners, inviting people over to his place — "one table was enough."

Not long after, he invested in Momenta.

Two or three years later, Meng was on a high-speed train passing Suzhou North Station when he spotted Momenta's massive logo nearby. He felt both thrilled and deflated. In that moment, he suddenly realized the gap in progress between him and Cao was widening.

This was a key moment in his decision to leave investing. He'd already experienced 0-to-1 through two startups; the end of the second one hadn't been a pleasant experience. So this time he wanted to try something different: joining DiDi to lead autonomous driving.

He thought he was embarking on another fresh adventure. But he would come to understand how extraordinarily difficult it is to run a new business inside a large company.

A Whimsical Idea About Unitree

With Unitree's IPO approaching, here's a personal aside — a story about Meng and Unitree.

Around the time Meng was leaving Shunwei, he took particular notice of Xingxing Wang. There was a side episode: a fund backed by Peter Thiel had approached him about launching a program in China, roughly: 20 Under 20, giving financial support to 20 prodigies under 20 each year.

In discussing this, one of the first people who came to mind was Wang.

Before any investment materialized, Meng already had an imagined wedding scene: at the ceremony, a Unitree robot dog would carry the wedding ring he'd prepared up to the stage; and all the cash gifts from guests would become part of his investment in Unitree.

But for various reasons, Thiel's plan never materialized, and he never ended up investing in Unitree.

Incomparable, So That I Can Be Compared

By now you can roughly grasp that Meng is someone with a strong fixation on the special, the different, the path less taken.

So he must invest in special people, his career path must be special, and to propose he would even go on a variety show — clearly, special.

If tracing the cause, Meng said he's thought seriously about it: it's muscle memory developed from a very young age.

He went to the United States at three, returned to China at six, and went back to the United States at 14. In two utterly different environments and cultures, you could say he adapted to both, or to neither.

For instance, when he first returned to China, one source of achievement was "skipping two grades ahead of peers"; by the high school entrance exam, he was so poor at sports he couldn't even out-jump the girls, but his English was excellent.

He realized very early that he was neither the most diligent nor the hardest-working person in the world — only by being "incomparable" could he possibly become comparable.

During the podcast, he read us a quote from DaVinci:

Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works. If it works big, others quickly copy it. Then you do something else. The trick is the doing something else.

The Investor of the Most Eccentrics?

So, someone who believes in being incomparable — what kind of people does he invest in?

In today's VC industry, if one had to slap a label on Meng, it might be: the investor who backs the most eccentric people?

Though he may not fully embrace this himself. But looking at his recent bets — Odin, a muscular man in dresses; Leo, founder of Amen Ring, who's exceptional at growth; and Keyu Tian, a former ByteDance intern — each one is maximum conversation fodder.

Especially Tian. News of his startup just broke. elsewhere has covered Odin and Leo, and we'll soon publish an interview with Tian.

Inside 5Y, they call this category of early-stage investment Roll-out Lab (formerly: 3 Sigma), mainly an incubation program for young founders.

What's interesting, though: whenever we ask Meng about this, he emphasizes that what truly attracts him isn't the story, isn't the drama — it's the substance of what they're doing, and how they act at critical moments.

As for whether that's true — time will tell.

Experience Above All

A friend of Meng's wanted us to ask him: if he could choose anything, what would he want to do?

Meng had three answers:

1. How will academic research for future humanity be conducted?

2. Might he have a chance to participate in the UAE's 2031 plan and Saudi Arabia's 2030 plan?

3. Could he possibly be involved in Tesla's Robotaxi?

These three answers completely expose another trait of Meng's: an insatiable hunger for experience. I counted — in our edited transcript, "experience" appears 32 times.

This partly explains why his winding life has taken the shape it has.

The Old Man in a Hong Kong Tong Lau, the Bus Driver in Hawaii

This was the most unexpected part of the interview for us.

When discussing why he so craves difference, craves freshness, Meng voluntarily brought up that in childhood he experienced his parents' relationship falling apart, and spent long stretches in someone else's garage (he emphasized: a garage with no heat in winter, no toys).

Combined with repeated uprooting between China and the United States, he feels the底色 of his life is drifting.

This insecurity has stayed with him to this day.

When working in investment banking in Hong Kong, walking home at night, passing those tong lau, seeing shirtless old men, he would wonder if he might end up like that someday.

Once on a trip to Hawaii, seeing local bus drivers, he fantasized about whether he'd be happier as one of them — living a cyclical life on an island, without having to respond to more people's attention and expectations.

Who knows how much this insecurity connects to his constant search for freshness.

No End

When Meng returned to investing in 2024, someone once joked: this is like joining the Nationalist army in 1949.

This was a vastly different investment industry from 2016, when he joined Shunwei. Tech investing had long become mainstream; the uniqueness he craved all his life was now hard to find.

Meng, stubbornly attached to this, had to rediscover a distinctive posture. His investments in the young people mentioned earlier are perhaps part of this working-out.

He's 40 this year. This is his third year at 5Y Capital. Given his nature, craving experience, I asked him: how long do you plan to stay this time?

Meng didn't hide it: he won't preset a duration for this chapter. What truly determines how long it lasts is whether he can keep finding new breakthroughs.

But can a person ever tire of seeking experiences?

Meng said: as long as one lives, there is no end.

Full Audio and Video

Cover image: On set