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Zoey Zhang

The founder of a fast-rising Chinese tech firm has become known as China’s “crazy boss” after a string of online stunts.
Yu Hao, 39, from Jiangsu province in eastern China, is the founder and CEO of Dreame Technology, a smart home appliance maker best known for high-end robot vacuum cleaners.
Founded in 2017, Dreame has grown rapidly in China’s crowded smart appliance sector.
Public records show the company was once valued at about 45 billion yuan (US$6.6 billion) and it is reportedly aiming for a 150 billion yuan (US$22 billion) valuation by the second half of 2026.

But as Dreame’s business empire has expanded, Yu’s increasingly flamboyant social media presence has become a spectacle in its own right.
In late April, Yu ordered his employees to open accounts across major social media platforms and post about the products, technologies or innovations they worked on.
He also introduced a reward scheme to turn staff into influencers: employees would receive 10,000 yuan for every 10,000 real followers their accounts attracted.
Soon, Dreame’s executives, salespeople and ordinary employees were flooding social media.
One unnamed employee even joked: “In a big company, you have no choice,” while urging colleagues to follow one another’s accounts to “save lives.”

Yu led by example. In a single day, he posted over 70 videos on his personal account, ranging from product and technology explainers to snippets of his daily life.
His relentless online presence drew criticism from fellow tech entrepreneurs.
Liu Jingkang, founder of Insta360, wrote: “Why do I see that man on every platform? He is not even a beautiful female CEO.”
Yu responded on May 12 by posting several artificial intelligence (AI) generated images of himself dressed as a woman, captioned: “The beauty is here.”
In these AI images and videos, he appeared in hanfu and qipao, wearing elaborate traditional Chinese make-up, and was even shown dancing.

Beyond the influencer push, Yu has also drawn attention for a series of remarks that many mainland media outlets and netizens have called “arrogant”.
In one video, he described Elon Musk as his “arch-rival” and claimed he would become the world’s richest person within five years.
He emphasised Dreame’s ambitions beyond home appliances.
Yu said Dreame would overtake Musk and launch two million satellites in the future.
He also said the company would enter the smartphone market and insisted Dreame phones would “surpass Apple” because “Apple no longer innovates”.
He has compared himself with the late Steve Jobs, saying he wants to carry on Jobs’ legacy, build the greatest company in human history and “reinvent the Earth”.

Yu’s behaviour has sharply divided opinion online.
Critics say his attention-seeking remarks and companywide social media push risk wasting corporate resources, draining employees’ time and damaging Dreame’s reputation as a serious technology firm.
Some tech industry observers have also suggested that his offbeat internet stunts may market Dreame while drawing attention away from its actual products and technologies.
Supporters, however, see Yu’s “madness” as part of his rags-to-riches tech legend.
According to Chinese Entrepreneur magazine, Yu was born into a poor family and his father was so deeply in debt at one point they could not afford a refrigerator.
As a child, Yu was introverted, shy and even timid, but intensely competitive. He consistently ranked among the top students in his class.
In 2005, he was admitted to the School of Aerospace Engineering at Tsinghua University, one of China’s most prestigious universities. Two years later, he became one of the country’s earliest developers of quadrotor drones.

In 2015, Yu and his founding team began their start-up journey with just 100,000 yuan (US$15,000), determined to build high-speed digital motors that could rival the world’s best.
The early years were difficult.
Yu said he went through years of depression before securing investment from Xiaomi in 2017, and founding Dreame Technology.
Yu once summed up the company’s ethos: “Either we do not do it, or we do it to become world number one.”
Whatever the verdict on his antics, the entrepreneur nicknamed “crazy boss” has left a distinctive mark on China’s tech industry and social media culture.
As one online observer put it, Yu is “a man constantly testing the boundaries between extreme self-expression, grand ambition and the traffic-driven age.”


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Yu Hao, the founder of the Chinese tech firm Dreame, has been  dubbed “crazy boss” for his eccentric online stunts. Photo: QQ.com

Yu Hao has become well known for a range of eccentric online stunts, some of which are shown above. Photo: QQ.com

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The above image shows a sample of businessman Yu’s social media pages. Photo: QQ.com

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