In fifth grade, Yingqi Wang wired his family's doorbell to a radio. The household was briefly confused. He was delighted. Decades later he is still connecting things that were never meant to sit apart - only now those things are project tracking, documentation, testing, and continuous delivery, stitched into a single platform called ONES.
Wang was born in 1983 and grew up chasing logic. He won a silver medal in a national mathematics olympiad while still in elementary school, and by the fifth grade he was writing programs on his father's computer. As a middle schooler he treated a Wenqu Star electronic dictionary - a device his classmates used to study English - as his first personal development machine. The through-line was never the gadget. It was the itch to make separate systems talk to each other.
"My passion came from a love of mathematics and logical thinking," he has said, describing computer science as "a typical growth of logical ability." That framing matters, because it explains why he never treated software as a series of clever tricks. He treated it as structure - the discipline of getting many moving parts to cooperate.
Hunan University, and a pavilion named humility
Wang entered Hunan University's computer science program in 2000. A faculty advisor remembered him as "smart, handsome, flexible-minded, and always wearing a confident smile." He lived in Dorm 17, installed computers at the local computer market for pocket money, and sold classmates' English study notes. The entrepreneurial instinct arrived early and never left; it simply got bigger.
The campus left marks that he still talks about. He studied at the historic Yuelu Academy, and remembers early mornings "around five or six, when the Lushan Temple bells would ring," birds calling and breakfast smoke rising from the dining hall. He often mentions the campus's Zibei Pavilion - literally the "humility pavilion" - as a daily reminder to stay modest. For a founder who now speaks openly about surpassing global incumbents, the pairing of ambition and humility is not an accident.
I'm not just a code-writer or programmer, but a combination of engineer, programmer, and manager.
Seven years at Kingsoft
After graduating in 2004, Wang joined Kingsoft, the Chinese software house behind the WPS office suite and a well-known antivirus product. He stayed for seven years, moving from engineer to technology director by his late twenties. He worked through major versions of WPS and watched software development evolve from what he calls "individual heroism" into something far more collaborative and complex - many hands, many tools, and a growing need for coordination.
That observation became the seed of a career. The problem he would eventually build a company around was not a missing feature. It was the friction of teams trying to build together while their tools refused to.
100 million users, and a hard lesson
In 2010, as the mobile internet wave crested, Wang left to found Zhengdian Technology. The team shipped the first version of the Zhengdian Alarm Clock on Symbian and Android within two months, and picked up millions of users within months more. The app's calendar and clock products eventually reached over 100 million cumulative users.
By most measures that is a triumph. Wang files it under education. Growth outran everything else, and a durable business model never materialized. He is unusually candid about why.
I didn't think through monetization strategies. I was more like a product manager than a qualified CEO.
Rather than treat the outcome as a defeat, he treated it as a gap in his own thinking - and went looking for the missing piece.
A year on the other side of the table
In 2014 Wang took an unusual detour: he became an entrepreneur-in-residence at Morningside Venture Capital, a US-dollar fund. Sitting in on investment decisions and meeting a stream of startups, he began to reason about commercial value the way an investor does. He has described the period as a deliberate attempt to "swap seats" and reflect on his own instincts. When he emerged, he had the piece his first company lacked: a hard-nosed sense of where durable value actually comes from.
ONES: the unglamorous bet
In 2015 Wang founded ONES. The premise was drawn straight from his own scar tissue: engineers and technical managers were drowning in disconnected tools, juggling separate systems for planning, tracking, documentation, and testing, with no clear view of what was actually happening. ONES set out to be the connected toolchain - project management, knowledge base, test management, and CI/CD integration in one platform, spanning the full arc from requirement to release.
It was not the fashionable choice. While peers chased consumer apps, Wang picked one of the least glamorous corners of enterprise software. His edge was proximity to the pain.
I deeply understand engineers' and technical managers' struggles.
The bet found its moment. R&D management and developer productivity shifted from an overlooked afterthought into one of the hottest sectors in enterprise software. ONES grew through product depth and through acquisitions - the Git collaboration tool Tower in 2020, and Weizhinet Notes in 2022 - and raised roughly $100 million or more across rounds from investors including GIC, Source Code Capital, Morningside, and SoftBank China. Its customers came to include large enterprises such as Xiaomi and China Telecom.
Wang has never hidden the size of his ambition. Asked about Atlassian, the maker of Jira and Confluence, he did not hedge:
I'm confident we can surpass them and create China's best enterprise R&D management platform.
The three words on the wall
Ask Wang how he runs a company and the answer is compact: curiosity, courage, and responsibility. Curiosity feeds the ability to keep learning. Courage turns thinking into action. Responsibility keeps the whole thing honest. He talks about them not as slogans but as the traits that sustain enthusiasm over the long grind of building.
His advice to younger builders is equally plain, and it doubles as a description of his own path. "Find an industry you genuinely love," he says. "This matters more than proximity to home, salary, or social circles." He took the advice himself. In 2022, Fortune's Chinese edition named him to its "40 Under 40" list of business elites - recognition for a founder who chose the difficult, durable problem over the easy, viral one.
The doorbell-and-radio kid grew up, but the impulse is unchanged. He is still connecting things that shouldn't be separate. The scale is just larger now - entire engineering teams, across the full length of how software gets made.