Cheng Yixiao

Overview

Cheng Yixiao is a Chinese technology entrepreneur and the co-founder of Kuaishou. Born in 1985, he came up through software development and product work, and has held three senior posts at Kuaishou: chief product officer, chief executive officer and chairman.^[1][2]

Education and early career

Cheng graduated from Northeastern University in China in 2007.^[1] After graduating he worked at the Dalian branch of HP.^[1] In 2009 he joined Renren as a software developer, moving from an established hardware and services company into a Chinese consumer internet firm.^[1]

A software developer's job is to turn a product idea into working code: what a screen shows, what happens when a user taps something, how data moves behind it. Someone who has done that work knows what is cheap to build and what is expensive, which is useful preparation for deciding what a product should be.

GIF Kuaishou and the founding of Kuaishou

In 2011 Cheng created GIF Kuaishou, a tool for making and sharing animated GIF images.^[1] A GIF is a small file that plays a short loop of frames; because it is light and easy to pass around, it became a common way to share snippets of video on social platforms. A tool that lets ordinary users produce such images without professional software sits at the meeting point of a technical format and everyday sharing habits.

Cheng went on to co-found Kuaishou with Su Hua, and within the company he took the product side, serving as chief product officer.^[1][2] A chief product officer is the executive responsible for what a product does and how it feels to use — which features exist, how screens are organised, what a first-time user sees — as distinct from sales, finance or general management. Splitting the top of a young company between one founder who runs the business and another who owns the product is a common arrangement, and it is the arrangement Kuaishou had, with Su Hua as chief executive.

From product chief to chief executive and chairman

On 29 October 2021 Cheng succeeded Su Hua as chief executive officer of Kuaishou.^[1] On 29 October 2023 he was appointed chairman.^[1] The two roles are different in kind: a chief executive runs the day-to-day business and answers to the board, while a chairman leads the board itself. Holding both puts strategic decisions and their execution in the same hands.

Kling AI

In 2025 Cheng described Kling AI as a source of breakthroughs in three areas: model capability, product experience and monetization.^[3] The three terms point at different questions. Model capability is what the underlying model can actually do; product experience is whether people find it usable; monetization is whether it can be turned into revenue. Kling AI sits in the revenue line Kuaishou reports as other services, and that line rose 28.0% to RMB6.3 billion in the fourth quarter of 2025, from RMB4.9 billion a year earlier.^[3] In other words, the segment that contains the AI business grew at a point when the company was publicly highlighting it.

Significance

Cheng's public career traces a single line: engineer, then the executive accountable for product shape, then the person running the company and speaking for its AI efforts. Co-founders who stay through that many changes of role are relatively uncommon; the sequence also reflects how a company that began with a small image-making tool has come to present model capability and monetization as the measures that matter.