The founder of DHgate grew up in rural northern China eating plain white rice. Now she runs a global e-commerce empire across 230 countries - and she told us the thing she chased her whole life turned out to be the wrong thing.
The secret to a great life, according to a self-made Chinese billionaire who built one of the world's largest e-commerce companies, has nothing to do with status, wealth, or titles. It's inner peace - and she didn't find it until her 50s. We sat down with Diane Wang, 57, the founder of DHgate, in Beijing to ask her about her biggest regrets and how she went from walking an hour to school in rural northern China to running a marketplace that connects two million Chinese manufacturers to nearly 100 million buyers around the world. Her answer to what actually makes life good stopped us.
"No matter how successful you are, you may still feel something like a hole in your heart," she told us. "Some anxiety never go away."
Diane is the founder of DHgate, a cross-border e-commerce marketplace she likes to call "the Asian Silk Road - we don't have camels, but we have internet." Twenty years after launching it, the platform reaches more than 230 countries and connects over two million manufacturers in China to nearly 100 million small business buyers globally. Before that, she co-founded Joyo.com, one of the first B2C e-commerce platforms in China, which Amazon acquired in 2004. By every metric the world uses to measure a life, she has won.
And yet she told us, plainly, that the thing she'd been chasing her whole life was the wrong thing.
The First Mountain Is The Lie We All Climb
Diane has a name for the trap most ambitious people fall into. She calls it the first mountain.
"In the past, I only see the first mountain, which is the material world," she said. "Everybody we chase for the status, the wealth, the titles, achievements, etc. - until someday I realize that is an endless game."
Pull quote: "No matter how successful you are, you may still feel something like a hole in your heart. Some anxiety never go away."
That realization came around seven or eight years ago, when she was about 50. Up until then, she had been operating on a setting most high-performers will recognize: I'm not enough. I need to work harder. She called it perfectionism. Underneath, she said, was a quieter, more corrosive sentence she'd been running for decades.
"I always feel I'm not good enough. I'm not good enough - until one day I realize that's the limitation."
The shift, she told us, came when she stopped chasing outward and started looking inward. She began asking different questions. Are there any greater power? Is there sustainable satisfaction over there? "With that tiny question, I started to explore the answers along the way."
Now, she says, the second half of life is the better half. "Maybe 80 years old, there's still something fabulous will happen."
Why Chasing Success And Chasing Happiness Are Not The Same Thing
We asked her the question we ask almost everyone we interview: could you be just as happy with a lot less? She answered without hesitating.
"Yeah, definitely."
She believes most people get the order backwards. We tell ourselves: when I have this, I'll feel that way. When I get the promotion, when I hit the number, when I'm finally successful - then I'll be happy.
"That's wrong," she said. "On the contrary - that's become first. So stay in a good status, being first. And then you can have."
Translation: feel good first. Build the inner peace first. The success follows because you're a different person showing up to do the work. "If you feel good, you actually attract people, good people, and good things around you."
It was one of the cleanest articulations of something we've heard from many of our older guests in different words: chasing success and chasing happiness are not the same project. You can be very materially successful and not happy. You can be very happy and not materially successful. Diane's edge is that she's been on both sides of that equation - and she's telling you which one matters.
The Plane She Hoped Would Never Land
The most vulnerable moment of our conversation came when we asked her about a failure.
She told us about the early days of DHgate, when an investor she had already shaken hands with - a deal essentially signed - went cold on her. She sensed something was off, called him, and learned he was pulling out. The funding was critical. Without it, they couldn't launch the website. She and her husband were looking at selling their car, selling their house.
She was on a flight to Beijing when she got the news.
"I remember when I was in the plan to fly to Beijing - I wish the plan can never land. Because I don't know how to face my employees, how to face issues over there."
Pull quote: "I wish the plane could never land. Because I don't know how to face my employees."
What got her through, she said, was a single word.
"The magic word is accept. Once you accept, immediately there's a 'what solutions, what action items, what I can do next' - and that becomes positive if you take action."
She contrasted it with the other path - the one most people take. "If we ask a lot of why - 'why they treat me like this, why this is so unfair' - we put ourself into that victim area. So it will let you go down and down."
How To Know When To Leave A "Good Job"
Before DHgate, before Joyo, before any of it, Diane was a teacher at Tsinghua University. Then a senior manager at Microsoft and Cisco. By any reasonable measure, she had the life people work for decades to build.
So how did she know it was time to walk away?
She told us about a moment at the bank job she'd taken before all of this - the one her friends and teachers had pushed her toward because it was "good." About a year in, she looked at her boss and asked herself a question on a piece of paper.
"If I become the CEO in 30 years, will I be happy?"
The answer was no.
That's the test she still uses. And she's noticed the pattern in everyone else, too: most people already know the answer. They just don't trust it.
"A lot of people are interested in life, but not committed," she told us. "They're interested in the idea of what life might look like if they were more creative, or they dove into that passion. But being committed to it - it's doing the work when nobody's watching you. It's actually taking action."
She broke it down into three steps anyone can use:
First, talk to your heart and find your aspiration. Second, decide if you actually believe it. Third, decide if you're going to take action on it.
"And that's make life different."
When we asked how she handled the judgment - friends, family, peers all telling her she was crazy to leave a stable career - she told us the answer was simple, because the answer was coming from the right place.
"If that answer coming from your heart, the answer is so simple, so clear, you don't need to have any struggle on it. But once the answer come from your mind, from the logic, it's a lot of calculation, a lot of struggle back and forth."
She has never struggled with the leap, she said, no matter how many people called her crazy. "That's not difficult for me."
What 39 Years With The Same Man Taught Her About Love
Diane met her husband in university. He was her first boyfriend. They've been together 39 years, married for 32. We asked her - the way we ask all our long-married guests - what the secret is.
She gave us the most beautiful one-liner of the day.
"He recognized me through his eyes. I recognized him through my heart."
The first day of university, he saw her in the bike shed. Love at first sight, she said - for him. He wasn't her type. But over time, she started to see him from her heart.
The reason it lasted, she told us, is that they never tried to see each other on the surface. Not family background. Not titles. Not money. They saw each other underneath all of that. And then they did the harder thing, which most couples don't.
"We support each other and give each other a space to grow. We never think about change the others."
When we asked her to define love, she didn't reach for anything poetic. She said the simplest thing.
"You don't want any return. You just allow the others to become themselves. You are always there. You are there. Your heart are there. So they can feel this warm. Just like honey."
The One Piece Of Advice She Wrote Down For You
At the end of the interview, we handed Diane a journal and asked her to write down one piece of advice for anyone who reads this.
She wrote it in Mandarin first, then read it back to us in English.
"Remember - talk to your heart and follow your passion. And along the way, always ask fundamental questions to understand who you really are. And live it out."
It's the simplest thing she said all day. It's also the thing she said most of us never actually do, because we've never learned how.
"In order to find the truth of yourself, we need to learn how to quiet yourself," she told us. "There's many different ways for people to find that stillness - meditation, journaling, putting yourself into nature. But this stillness is so important to let us see clearly from the chaos what's the key."
The chaos isn't going anywhere. The notifications, the opinions, the scroll, the next mountain. The work, she's saying, is to get quiet enough to hear yourself underneath all of it - and then to actually trust what you hear.
Most people never do.
Diane Wang did. And she built a global company, a 39-year marriage, and an inner life she said is the best of all of them - in that order, eventually, but she'd swap them around if she could do it again.
The first mountain is the wrong mountain. She climbed it anyway, like most of us will. But she's the rare person who came back down to tell us what she found at the top.
A hole. And then, on the second one, peace.
