On Valentine’s Day in 2015, two of China’s biggest ride-hailing startups, one backed by the tech giant Alibaba and the other by Tencent, announced they would merge after burning through hundreds of millions of dollars in a price war. Brokering the deal, while managing the egos of combative founders and investors was Bao Fan, the rainmaker of China’s tech industry.
His company, the investment bank China Renaissance, went on to advise and invest in many of China’s most successful tech companies, taking them public in Hong Kong and New York.