Markets Magazine

Searching for the Next Jack Ma

Fan Bao and his ‘Alpha Team’ of investment bankers are scouring China's startup scene to uncover a new wave of technology giants.

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By William Mellor and Lulu Yilun Chen

May 11, 2015 at 9:01 PM UTC

This article is for subscribers only.

Fresh off his success as a lead adviser on last year’s $2.05 billion initial public offering of online retailer JD.com, Fan Bao was secretly dreaming of merging China’s two Uber-style taxi apps into a $6 billion behemoth. It was part of his quest to unearth China’s next big tech thing.

The problem was the dueling founders, Dexter Lu and Cheng Wei, and their equally competitive billionaire backers, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its June issue. “These guys were entrepreneurial gladiators who never shied from a fight,” Bao says, reclining in a high-backed leather armchair in the Beijing headquarters of China Renaissance, the boutique investment bank he formed in 2004. “But they were killing each other. I wanted them to make peace, not war.”