The infrastructure-first founder behind Tencent. Builder of quiet software plumbing that became impossible to replace.
Born in 1971 in Guangdong to a middle-class family, Ma Huateng studied computer science at Shenzhen University.
His early jobs were unglamorous: telecom software, paging systems, network maintenance. What he learned mattered more than ambition.
He learned how networks fail, how scale breaks systems, and why reliability beats flashy features.
In the late 1990s, China’s internet was slow, fragmented, and text-heavy. Internet cafés were everywhere.
Ma noticed something simple:
People weren’t online to consume content. They were online to talk.
Chat wasn’t a feature. It was the killer use-case.
In 1998, Ma and four friends founded Tencent in Shenzhen. Their first product, OICQ (later QQ), was inspired by ICQ.
This wasn’t originality. It was execution:
He copied what worked — then optimized it ruthlessly.
QQ grew from thousands to millions of users. Server costs exploded. Revenue didn’t.
Tencent nearly collapsed. Ma even tried to sell QQ. Everyone said no.
“Chat apps don’t make money.”
That rejection saved the company.
To survive, Tencent experimented. They noticed users cared deeply about status and identity online.
Tencent sold:
Tiny payments. Massive scale.
This became China’s first large-scale digital monetization engine.
Ma internalized one rule early:
Control the relationship. Monetize later.
Tencent kept QQ free, focused on uptime, and avoided aggressive ads. Habits formed. Network effects hardened.
China’s dot-com era was full of dead companies. Tencent survived because: