Support CleanTechnica's work through a Substack subscription or on Stripe.
While listening to the technical discussions at XPENG presentations and press conferences, I started to see the people behind the technology. While we can get caught up in the technical details, all the progress that we see comes from human ideas and the hard work of teams of people. Every technology story has a human story behind it. That made me start thinking about how XPENG attracted and developed its people. I started thinking about the facilities I had seen and the people I met, and I started asking questions.
My questions led to a conversation with Zheng Yeqing, Vice President, Chief Council and Chief Compliance Officer for XPENG. In speaking with him, it became readily apparent that he wasn’t the typical corporate lawyer. Before getting his JD from Yale Law School, he earned a Master of Environmental Management (M.E.M.) degree from Yale, and a Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Engineering from Tsinghua University. After Yale, he also spent over a decade working on Wall Street and lived in New Jersey. As a New Yorker focused on clean technology, he was easy to relate to. Along with fellow Yale alum and President Brian Gu, who worked on Wall Street as an investment banker, the New York perspective is not foreign to the leadership of XPENG, making points of reference easy.
