William Du

William Du (杜知恒) is the co-founder and CEO of Xiaosu Technology (小宿科技), an AI infrastructure company building what he calls the "information superhighway" for agents . He joined the company full-time in Q3 2024, when it still had minimal AI revenue, and has since scaled it to over $25 million ARR with break-even PNL as of June 2025 .

Du's career spans unusual territory. He started at Baidu in 2013 as part of its mobile search PMO team, then spent roughly a decade in hedge funds—first at Hillhouse managing global gaming and entertainment investments, then as a founding employee of Sequoia China's hedge fund, and later as a family office CIO . As he described it in a 十字路口Crossing interview, his moves have been "dual-wheel driven" by interest and rationality, with the shift to entrepreneurship feeling "inevitable" after years of operating in "a similar entrepreneurial state" in public markets .

His co-founder at Xiaosu, Yu Chen of Yunqi Capital, first met Du over coffee in Beijing more than ten years ago and recalls him as "sharp" then and now, though "much more steady" after the intervening years . Du himself has said that the biggest change in moving from investor to founder was shedding the "arrogance" of the portfolio review chair: "I realized how shallow I was as an investor... I now have real reverence for business" .