William Li

The question no one answered #

When William Li (李斌) asked one hundred senior executives at NIO (蔚来) how many of them had bought a company car, only twenty to thirty percent raised their hands. Over the following six months, many of those who kept their hands down — including the chief financial officer — resigned. William called the moment NIO’s darkest. It was not the financial crisis that nearly killed his company. It was learning that the people charged with building it did not believe in what they were building.

I should go back to the users, because the people still willing to buy your car at such a time are your real source of spiritual strength.

The cattle trader’s grandson #

The road to William’s village in Anhui’s Dabie Mountains (大别山) was unpaved until he was ten. His grandfather traded cattle — walking livestock to market, reading buyers, calculating margins in his head. The lessons William absorbed had nothing to do with automobiles: how to assess a counterparty’s conviction, how to endure a long walk when the outcome is uncertain, how to know when the price is right.

William’s parents worked in a nearby city, leaving him with his grandparents — one of millions of liushou ertong (留守儿童, “left-behind children”) raised by elderly relatives in rural China. The arrangement produced a fierce independence. When his parents decided he should attend vocational school rather than academic high school — a pragmatic choice for a family without means — William went on a hunger strike. He refused to eat until they relented. The stubbornness was not adolescent rebellion. It was the first evidence of a pattern that would define his career: when the path others choose for you is wrong, stop eating until they change it.

The hunger strike worked. William entered Taihu County’s academic track and emerged as the top liberal arts student, winning admission to Peking University (北京大学) — the most prestigious university in China. A cattle trader’s grandson from a village without a paved road, studying sociology in Beijing. The distance between those two coordinates would take most people a lifetime to cross. William crossed it before he was twenty.

Fifty jobs and a billion-dollar exit #

At Peking University, William took more than fifty part-time jobs — not to survive, but to understand how things worked. Each job was a small experiment in commerce: what people need, what they will pay for, how effort converts to income. Before finishing his degree, he had co-founded his first company.

In 2000, William launched Bitauto (易车), an automotive media and transaction services platform. The timing was prescient. China’s car market was about to explode, and the internet was about to become the place where Chinese consumers researched their purchases. Bitauto grew into the country’s leading automotive services platform and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2010 — William’s first billion-dollar exit.

Success at Bitauto gave William something more dangerous than wealth: the conviction that he understood what Chinese consumers wanted from their cars. In November 2014, he invested his entire personal fortune — $150 million from the Bitauto sale — into a new company called NIO. He chartered eight planes to fly investors and friends to a product launch. He spent eighty million renminbi on a single NIO Day event for five thousand users. The pre-crisis William operated with the confidence of a man who had never been wrong about a big bet.

The confidence was about to be tested in a way no amount of money could prepare for.

When the room stopped believing #

The values seminar in the second quarter of 2019 was supposed to be a routine exercise in corporate culture. William asked his executive team to demonstrate their belief in NIO’s product by purchasing one themselves. The show of hands — barely a quarter of the room — exposed a truth that no earnings report could: the people running NIO did not trust what NIO made.

The defections that followed were methodical. The CFO resigned on October 30, the same day a viral WeChat article by Coollabs (酷玩实验室) named William the most miserable person of 2019. Senior leaders who had joined when the stock was at ten dollars saw no reason to remain at one dollar and nineteen cents. Employees who stayed noticed William aging at a speed visible to the naked eye. His Weibo posts dropped from more than three hundred a year to eight. The man who had chartered planes and staged spectacles had gone quiet.

The silence was not retreat. It was the sound of a founder recalculating.

By late 2019, NIO had burned through cumulative losses of twenty-six billion renminbi. Three battery fires in three months had triggered a recall of 4,803 vehicles. Two deals totalling fifteen billion renminbi in promised rescue capital — with Beijing Yizhuang (北京亦庄) and Huzhou Wuxing (湖州吴兴) — had collapsed after the safety incidents. Hillhouse Capital, one of NIO’s earliest backers and among China’s most respected investment firms, divested its position entirely. One of its founding EP9 owners — a personal friend — had walked away.

William responded by going deeper. In September 2019, he pledged his Bitauto shares — the same assets he had liquidated to found NIO five years earlier — to fund one hundred million dollars in emergency convertible notes. It was not a strategic move. It was the only move left for a founder who could not ask others to believe what he was not willing to back himself.

At the iAsk (很想问) conference in December 2019, William posed the question publicly: “Am I delusional?” The question was not rhetorical. It was the honest reckoning of a man whose company had filed a going-concern notice with the SEC, whose cash reserves had fallen to 863 million renminbi — weeks from insolvency — and whose analysts at Bernstein had set a target price of ninety cents, below the NYSE’s delisting threshold.

Then William made a decision that changed everything. Not the nineteenth call. That came later. First came the underground.

Churchill’s underground #

William later described the turning point through an analogy to Winston Churchill descending into the London Underground during the Blitz — leaving Parliament to listen to ordinary people when the institutions above ground had failed him.

In July and August 2019, while executives were resigning and investors were selling, William visited NIO owners in Harbin (哈尔滨), Hohhot (呼和浩特), Taiyuan (太原), Nanchang (南昌), Guiyang (贵阳), Kunming (昆明), and Nanning (南宁). Not Beijing. Not Shanghai. Not the cities where investors lived and deals were made. The second- and third-tier cities where NIO owners faced something William had not anticipated: social punishment for their loyalty.

He found owners whose friendships had ended over their purchase. People who endured mockery from colleagues for buying a car from a company the market had written off. One owner in Hunan would eventually drive forty-five purchase conversions personally. Another in Shanghai spent two to three million renminbi of personal money on taxi-screen advertisements across twelve thousand vehicles — without telling NIO.

“I should go back to the users,” William said later, “because the people who are still willing to buy your car at such a time are your real source of spiritual strength.”

The users who bought NIO when buying NIO required social courage were not customers. They were co-founders of the company’s second life. William discovered that the conviction he had lost in the executive boardroom still existed — in cities no investor would visit, among people no analyst would survey.

“After meeting the customers, I truly felt that what we were going through was really nothing compared to that.”

The nineteenth attempt #

On January 8, 2020, William sent a New Year’s greeting message via WeChat to the chairman of Anhui State-owned Capital (安徽省属国有资本). It was the nineteenth attempt to reach a rescue partner. Eighteen cities and investors had already said no.

The message took less than a minute to write. The eighteen that came before it had taken two years.

Joy Capital mediated the connection. A meeting was arranged. Within one hundred days, the Hefei municipal government signed a framework agreement. By April 29, seven billion renminbi in investment was secured — from Hefei City Construction Investment, CMG-SDIC, and Anhui Emerging Industry Investment. The city that said yes was in William’s home province, less than three hundred kilometres from the village where his grandfather had traded cattle.

The contrast between the nineteenth call and the eighteen before it contains the lesson William’s story teaches. The rejections were not failures of persuasion. They were the necessary cost of reaching the one partner whose judgment was not governed by the same fear that had driven Hillhouse to sell and Bernstein to set a target below delisting. The founder who survived was not the one who made a better pitch. He was the one who, after eighteen refusals, still had something to say on the nineteenth.

That something came from Harbin and Hohhot and Kunming — from the users who had staked their social standing on a car most people thought would never be serviced again. William carried their conviction into the message. Not financial projections. Not strategic frameworks. The knowledge, earned in second-tier cities, that what he had built mattered to people who had nothing to gain from saying so.

The founder who counts in tens of thousands #

The William who emerged from the crisis was not the William who had entered it. The pre-crisis founder chartered eight planes for product launches and spent eighty million renminbi on a single event. The post-crisis founder counted cash in units of ten thousand renminbi — roughly fifteen hundred dollars — at nightly sessions where he and co-founder Qin Lihong (秦力洪) triaged three priorities: keep cars shipping, pay salaries, settle suppliers. A company of nearly ten thousand people, managed in increments smaller than a month’s rent in Shanghai.

William took pay cuts exceeding twenty percent alongside his senior leadership. He spoke less. He posted less. He acknowledged in 2023: “When we’re doing well, we can make bad decisions, and when we’re not doing well, it’s easier to make good decisions.”

In January 2026, the one millionth NIO vehicle rolled off the production line in Hefei — the city that said yes when eighteen said no. In the darkest weeks of 2019, the question was whether NIO could deliver one thousand cars to survive another quarter. The answer, built across six years, is one million.

The arc from most miserable to most valuable closed in fourteen months — from a stock price of $1.19 to a market capitalisation exceeding one hundred billion dollars, larger than BMW. But the deeper transformation was not financial. It was the education of a founder who learned that the institutions which profited from his rise would abandon him at the nadir, and that the people who chose his product with social courage would not. The cattle trader’s grandson, who once went on a hunger strike because the path chosen for him was wrong, discovered that the path worth taking runs through the cities no investor will visit, among the customers no analyst will count.

Last updated: March 15, 2026