From Angel Fund to Billion‑Dollar Giant: Yang Haoyong’s Ganji.com Journey

This issue of “Programmer Hero Stories” presents the entrepreneurship story of Ganji.com founder Yang Haoyong.

Born in 1974 in Anhui, Yang (English name Mark) admired Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist. He earned a bachelor’s degree in precision instruments from Tianjin University (1996), a master’s in engineering from USTC (1999), and a second master’s in computer science from Yale. Before returning to China, he worked in Juniper Networks’ core development team and founded Tromphi Networks as CEO.

In 2004 Yang returned to Beijing with $100,000 of angel capital and launched a Chinese version of Craigslist called Ganji.com, operated by Beijing Feixiangren Information Technology Co., Ltd., and set up the office in Tsinghua Science Park.

By March 2005 the company had ten people, including three engineers, a UI/page engineer, and a part‑time graduate from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. There was no product manager; the team functioned as full‑stack engineers guided by Yang.

The early product covered categories such as housing, second‑hand goods, dating, and jobs, and the site was hosted on 16 high‑end servers with a Netscaler load balancer. Offline “ground‑push” marketing—leaflet distribution and community events—drove rapid user growth.

In 2006 Ganji formed a strategic partnership with Google China, creating a joint venture (Beijing Guoxiang Information Technology Co.) that operated Google.cn and provided $100,000 monthly support, custom search, and traffic analysis, greatly boosting Ganji’s brand and technology.

The partnership ended in 2008, and the global financial crisis hit. Yang and his co‑founder personally funded salaries to keep the company afloat.

In 2009 LanChi Venture Capital led an $8 million Series A round, followed by a $20 million Series B in 2010 (Nokia Growth Fund) and a $70 million Series C in late 2010 led by Sequoia Capital and others. These funds enabled rapid city‑by‑city expansion and aggressive advertising.

Ganji’s main rival, 58.com, engaged in a fierce “war of traffic” with mutual feature copying and heavy ad spend. After years of competition, the two companies announced a merger on 17 April 2015, with Yang and 58’s founder Yao Jingbo becoming co‑CEOs and co‑chairmen of the combined entity.

Post‑merger, Yang stepped down as co‑CEO in November 2015 to become CEO of Guazi.com, a leading used‑car marketplace, investing $60 million of his own money and positioning Guazi as his next ten‑year venture.

Throughout his career, Yang emphasizes curiosity as the driver of his entrepreneurial decisions, offering a vivid case study of product development, fundraising, competitive strategy, and leadership in China’s internet ecosystem.