Xue Manzi

Xue Manzi was born in Beijing in 1953. After a youth marked by China's upheavals, he won a place at the Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and a full scholarship to the University of California, Berkeley. In the United States he built his first capital through real estate.

In the 1990s he co-founded UTStarcom — formed by merging Unitech and Starcom — serving as vice chairman. In a meeting with SoftBank's Masayoshi Son, a single line — "if every person in China buys one, that's 1.2 billion" — won SoftBank's backing; Son invested USD 160 million in total. In March 2000 UTStarcom listed on NASDAQ, the first Chinese private company to do so, at a market cap once above USD 10 billion. It was the source of his first fortune — a USD 250k personal stake that grew to about USD 125 million.

He then became China's first-generation — and widely called China's first — angel investor, backing nearly 100 companies. Cases include investing in Alibaba among the earliest round alongside Masayoshi Son; chairing China's first e-commerce site 8848, where he brought together SoftBank, IDG and Jerry Yang; co-investing with IDG in Cai Wensheng's 265.com (later acquired by Google); and backing Li Xiang's PCPOP, Autohome (NYSE: ATHM) and Li Auto, as well as Xueqiu.

Beyond investing, he is a Weibo opinion leader with millions of followers who launched public-good campaigns such as anti-trafficking and Free Lunch, founded the self-media《蛮子文摘》, and established the China Angel Association. In recent years he turned to blockchain and crypto — founding Manzi Capital to extend his cross-cycle judgement on-chain: founding the AI quant crypto fund Quantum Dream Fund I and strategically backing the on-chain capital platform NovaMarket.