#13 Pony Ma HuaTeng 马化腾 (Tencent Holdings Limited)

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
From Value Invest Asia, this is The Asian Mavericks. We explore the hidden stories of successful founders, business leaders and investors in Asia. Here's your host, Stanley Lim.

**Stanley Lim** (0:12)
Hello, welcome to another episode of The Asian Mavericks. This month, we decided to try something different. This is because we have been running our Asian Mavericks show for about a year now, and we do get requests from you guys on which company or founders to cover. The problem is maybe some founders are just less open to having an interview, or maybe just harder to get hold of in general. So yet some of them are still highly requested by you. So this month, we decided to break tradition a little bit and feature a founder without actually interviewing him. So we want to share the story of the main co-founder of Tencent Holdings, Mr. Pony Ma, Ma Hua Teng. Today, Tencent Holdings is one of the largest tech company in China, and they hold that title together with the Alibaba Group. And it is the company behind the popular chat app WeChat, and also contributed a lot to the digitization of the Chinese economy. But this company actually doesn't have that long a history. It is founded in 1998 with just a couple of friends led by Pony Ma, and the story is extremely fascinating. So Pony Ma was actually born in Hainan in 1971 He grew up in his younger days in the island of Hainan, and then he moved to Shenzhen for his secondary school.
He does have a sister who is about four years older, and his parents are government officials.
At a very, very young age, he has very high interest in science, and the parents really encourage that. Like they would subscribe to scientific magazine for him, or even buying equipment that he need when he has some interest in some science project.
And what is fascinating about the timing of his birth is actually that he grew up in the perfect timing of the beginning of China opening up, right? And this is just at the start where China is opening up, and that genesis start from Shenzhen, the city of Shenzhen. So by 1986, Pony Ma Hua was about 14, 15 years old.
He was, there's a story that he loved astronomy, and he really wanted to buy one telescope. But the problem is that telescope cost about 700 renminbi at that time. And his parents are not high paying, high society entrepreneurs or anything. They were government officials, and at that time, that was about four months of their salary. So naturally, his parents have to refuse him. But then he wrote in the diary that his dad has basically killed his ambition of being a great scientist in the future. When his mom saw that in his diary, and they have a discussion together with his father, and they end up deciding to get him that telescope anyway. So you can see that he has very, very supportive parents spending four months of your salary on your teenage son interest. I'm not sure that many parents would actually do that.
If you ask me, I myself would have a problem doing that. And especially when you wouldn't know that if your teenage son has that interest going to be for long, or it's just a phase that is going through. But of course Pony Ma was not just any average teenager. He still has that interest till today and often used astronomy as an example in many of his talks.
But if you research a little bit about say tech in China or just the tech space in general, you will notice that Pony Ma is actually have a very, very low profile, especially if you compare it with Jack Ma. And not many people know his story, not even in China.
But today, based on his stake in Tencent Holdings, he's worth at least maybe US dollars, about 40 billion. And that's definitely considered as one of the richest men and most influential person in the technological space. So how is this billionaire really like? And how did he and his team grew Tencent to be this massive company today? It was so big and successful that even Facebook, right, led by Mark Zuckerberg, and Mark Zuckerberg has openly stated that they need to learn more from Tencent and they have actually been copying some of Tencent's playbook in recent years. So this very fascinating, having a US tech firm trying to copy a Chinese tech firm. So as our story continue up to say, now it's 1989, Pony Ma has just entered university and he become one of the first generation of Shenzhen immigrant who earned his bachelor degree in computer science in the Shenzhen University. And that was, which was a pretty new course at that time. So during his university days, he was considered quite a cheeky and mischievous hacker.