They called him The Cloner. Wang Xing (pronounced “Wang Shing”) made his mark on the early Chinese internet as a serial copycat, a bizarre mirror image of the revered serial entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley. In 2003, 2005, 2007, and again in 2010, Wang took America’s hottest startup of the year and copied it for Chinese users.

It all began when he stumbled on the pioneering social network Friendster while pursuing an engineering Ph.D. at the University of Delaware. The concept of a virtual network of friendships instantly clicked with Wang’s background in computer networking, and he dropped out of his doctoral program to return to China to recreate Friendster. On this first project, he chose not to clone Friendster’s exact design. Rather, he and a couple of friends just took the core concept of the digital social network and built their own user interface around it. The result was, in Wang’s words, “ugly,” and the site failed to take off.