NIO founder William Li turns career setbacks into lessons for China’s EV industry

William Li, founder, chairman and CEO of NIO Inc, returned to his alma mater Peking University on Thursday, speaking as an alumni representative at the commencement ceremony for the class of 2026. Li graduated from Peking University's sociology department in 1996, making this year the 30th anniversary of his graduation. 

In his speech, Li said he had encountered six major low points since graduation and chose to share three of them with students, framing each as a lesson in entrepreneurial judgment. 

The first lesson: survive the first failure 

The first setback came almost immediately after graduation. In April 1996, months before receiving his degree, Li and two classmates founded Nanji Technology, one of China’s early internet virtual-hosting service providers. 

When his co-founders later left for further studies overseas, Li was left to keep the company running on his own. He recalled sleeping on a conference table after late-night showers and clearing away his bedding before colleagues arrived in the morning. The business eventually failed. 

“That experience earned me valuable ‘entrepreneurship credits,’” Li said, adding that adversity taught him not to become paralysed by short-term gains and losses, but to remain committed to the choices he had made. 

The second lesson: abandon the wrong strategy 

A second turning point came in 2010, when Li was running Yiche.com, the automotive media company he co-founded before creating NIO. 

On New Year’s Day that year, he wrote a letter to the board titled “The Six Mistakes Yiche Made,” concluding that the company’s cross-media conglomerate strategy around the auto sector had been misguided. 

Yiche ultimately decided to spin off its traditional media businesses and refocus on its core internet operations, walking away from a portfolio that had taken years and hundreds of millions of yuan to build. 

For Li, the episode became a lesson in corporate self-correction: leaders must be willing to confront their own mistakes, “to be honest with yourself, and not to deceive yourself.” 

The third lesson: diagnose the real problem 

The third low point was the most recent and, for investors and customers, the most familiar. Li said 2021 had been a peak year for NIO, with the company’s market capitalisation at one stage exceeding $100 billion. 

The reversal came in 2022, as NIO entered a downturn that lasted more than three years. Li said doubts “poured in from all directions,” weighing on team morale and shaking user confidence. 

Crucially, he argued, NIO eventually concluded that its difficulties were not the result of its long-term spending on research and development, charging and battery-swap infrastructure, or its user-service system. Those investments, he said, remain core competitive advantages. 

“The real problem was that our product lineup failed to consistently lead the industry, and our operational efficiency struggled to cope with fierce market competition,” Li said. 

The conclusion, he told graduates, was that escaping a downturn depends less on endurance alone than on correctly identifying the root causes of the crisis. 

After pinpointing those weaknesses, NIO moved to adjust its product experience and strengthen operational management. 

Li said the impact has become visible since the second half of last year, with flagship models selling strongly and the company posting profits for two consecutive quarters, marking what he described as a new stage of development. 

The speech also served as a reminder of Li’s path through China’s internet and automotive sectors. Born in Anhui province in 1974, he minored in law and computer science while studying at Peking University. 

He co-founded Yiche in 2000, served as its chairman and CEO from 2005, and stepped down as chief executive in 2018. In November 2014, he founded NIO, now one of China’s best-known premium electric-vehicle makers. 

For an automotive industry under pressure from price wars, technology spending and investor scrutiny, Li’s message was clear: survival depends not only on confidence in a long-term vision, but on the discipline to admit when the execution is no longer good enough.