The best day of his life should come when Chen Lei went on stage to get his medal for gold at the 1996 International IT Olympics held in Veszprem, Hungary, that year.
After all, he had won top honors for high school students in the world’s most famous informatics competition. Instead, China’s young man felt empty exactly because he was on his way to the podium ahead of many other rivals.
Chen would continue his IT education at Tsinghua University and receive a Ph.D. from Wisconsin-Madison University. Now, in his role as CEO of one of the world’s rapidly increasing consumer Internet companies. He has been appointed as the CEO of Pinduoduo this month. He replaces Colin Huang, the founder, who left the company to do food and life science research.
Taking his days in competition, Chen said while appreciating the way his logical thinking and capacity to remain calm and think clearly under pressure had improved in daily exercise and competitions that he finally decided not to prefer zero-sum sports.
“I discovered afterwards that if you really want a success and, at the same time, keep a pleasant and calm attitude, it is quite crucial to choose the game,” Chen remarked.
“This path gives immense satisfaction when we quit the zero-sum games and when our aim is not to win the competition, but to develop new models, new markets and new universes.”
This can explain why no official celebration or company notices that Pinduo had exceeded Alibaba, the e-commerce giant, by the end of last year, in the number of paying users.
“You must worry about losing at any time if you ever want to win. While the person is motivated to make progress, the subsequent tension and worry eventually leads to individual suffering,” Chen added.
“Instead, we can not only work pleasantly throughout the day if we have the mentality of ‘if we have this, how different value we can provide to the world,’ but can also offer our sleep wonderful anticipations of tomorrow.”
Chen sees tomorrow for Pinduoduo is a world in which new consumer behavior and ‘multi-Dimensional consumer requirements’ are being fully integrated online and offline.
Chen noted that agriculture is one of his “obvious” topics, with rural areas benefiting from a statewide 5G network of deployment and eradication of extreme poverty. GMVs for agricultural products rose to over 270 billion yuan in 2020 as China’s biggest farming platform, linking 12 million farms to customers directly via their markets.
Pinduoduo will develop an agricultural-driven logistic infrastructure platform, which reduces waste, lower costs and speeds up the delivery of farm products, in order to unlock the full potential of the agricultural industry, said Chen.
Duo Duo Grocery, a service for pickups next day, was launched in August 2020 as more people ordered their daily groceries online. Chen established the objective of the company becoming the world’s largest supermarket during the recent fourth quarter conference on performance.
Pinduoduo will continue to invest in agriculture and food-based technologies in order to strengthen the resilience of the food supply chain and will also investigate global investment opportunities in sectors such as food safety and precision agriculture.
