The Harbinger - China Tech & VC Podcast

Today we have the pleasure of interviewing Howard Chao, an active cross-border investor and advisor to entrepreneurs. Howard began his career as a corporate lawyer with O’Melveny & Myers, helped found the firm’s offices in Tokyo, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Beijing, practiced law for many years as a cross-border investment specialist, and was chair of O’Melveny & Myers’ Asia practice. In the past six years, Howard has moved to the principal side of investing, and now makes angel and other VC investments in earlier stage companies through his personal vehicle, Doon Capital. Howard invests primarily in startups located in the US and China, including fintech, mobility, agtech, foodtech, and other verticals. Howard shares his perspective on a number of topics, including: the development of Chinese trade and investment flows since the 1990s, the progression of VC investment into China beginning in the mid-2000s, Chinese outbound capital, the role of CFIUS in monitoring Chinese investment into US companies, and the beginnings of not only a trade war, but potentially an economic cold war between China and the US, and what this can mean for investors and founders. Link to write-up here: https://www.theharbingerchina.com/blog/china-us-investment-and-how-it-evolved-with-howard-chao-founding-partner

Rapid fire Q&A with Tina He and Adam Bao. Covers China VC trends and opportunities across consumer internet, education, enterprise, AI, China US, and more. Full transcription at: http://www.theharbingerchina.com/blog/where-are-the-most-promising-vc-investment-opportunities-in-china TL;DR

We recently visited the Xiaomi office to chat with Donovan Sung, Director of Product Management and Marketing at Xiaomi Global. Over the past few years, Donovan has led not only product development, but also helped build the global team at Xiaomi responsible for launching in dozens of new markets around the world and turning Xiaomi into a truly global brand. We discuss Xiaomi’s global product and business strategy, how this varies by market (e.g. China vs. developing markets vs. developed markets), key channels and partners, and how Xiaomi has been able to achieve incredible international success in such a short period of time.

The Harbinger recently spoke with Sandy Diao, Head of Global Growth for Indiegogo, a leading crowdfunding platform that has raised over $1b for makers. In this interview, Sandy shares her insights on how Indiegogo differentiates in building up a suite of services that addresses the entire lifecycle for hardware companies, how to leverage Indiegogo for product tests and pre-sales, and the role of Shenzhen and Chinese manufacturing in accelerating price, product, and business model innovation.

The Harbinger recently spoke with Ayden Ye, Co-Founder & CEO of VeeR, which connects creators and users of VR content though a combination of social-following and algorithm-based recommendation. In this interview, Ayden shared his insights on the rapidly changing landscape of VR, and the unique position of Veer that allows it to participate in the entire lifecycle of VR content creation and consumption.

Today we are joined by Alan Jiang, Head of Southeast Asian business for ofo, the world’s leading station-free bike sharing company. Alan oversees the company’s strategy and operations in Southeast Asia. Previously, Alan worked at Uber for four years, helping to launch Uber’s business in China, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Indonesia. Today, Alan starts by first sharing his story at Uber, before transitioning to ofo. Alan tells us more about how bike sharing is drastically different from ride sharing, and the impact that companies like ofo have on cities where these programs are located. Alan also talks about ofo’s global strategy, particularly in Southeast Asia.

The Harbinger recently interviewed Dr. Fan Ling, founder and CEO of Tezign. Tezign is a Sequoia-backed startup that creates platform-based design and creative talent solutions. In this interview Dr. Fan shares insights on what led him to start his company, the unique cloud-based solution Tezign offers and the role of AI, different trends in the “On-Demand” creative economy, and how Tezign plans to continue to innovate.

Edward (Ed) Huang developed a keen interest in engineering at the age of 12. After college, he worked for Netease and Wandou Labs, two large Internet companies in China, as an infrastructure engineer. After working for Wandou Labs for about 3 years and witnessing first-hand the difficulty in scaling the database manually as data grew, Ed saw the huge pain point in big data storage. With the vision that there should be a new kind of database to tackle this problem, Ed co-founded PingCAP in 2015 as the CTO. Besides his day job, Ed is a passionate open-source advocate and tech blogger.

We sit down with Stella Zhou, Principal at Qiming Venture Partners in Shanghai. Since joining Qiming from GE Capital in 2010, Stella has focused on “Inter-sumer” - Internet and consumer - companies like Musical.ly and Mogujie. We'll start today's episode by first talking a little more about Qiming's investment coverage by geography and by sector. Then we'll tackle some of the major trends within Inter-sumer, including the sharing economy, entertainment, consumer applications of AI, and consumer upgrade. Lastly, we'll cover cross-border investment opportunities, the growth and prevalence of social video, and also have a discussion around how niche social networks and platforms can generate tremendous value, despite the interference of large existing players.

Harry Wang is the founding partner of Linear Venture, a $100m VC fund that specializes in early-stage technology investments related to China and greater Asia area. Harry has led investments into more than 40 technology companies, mainly focusing on data and AI-related firms. Harry has served as a CEO advisor to Baixing, Dianping & CSDN. Prior to founding Linear Venture, Harry was head of Facebook’s risk engineering team and led efforts on payments fraud control, and was one of the first engineers working on social ads and newsfeed. Harry received his MSE from Stanford and has a CS degree from Zhejiang University. With Harry we first discuss his personal story, including moving from China to the U.S. and working at Facebook during its early years, to why he returned to China as a venture investor. Harry shares his insight into Linear Venture’s core investment areas, its sourcing and deals strategy, his views on Chinese vs. US tech leadership and strengths, and of course – if and how might Facebook enter the China market.

William Bao Bean is General Partner at SOSV, a $300m venture capital fund known as “the Accelerator VC” with a >30% net realized IRR. He is also the Managing Director of Chinaccelerator, SOSV’s global Internet accelerator and the first accelerator in China, as well as MOX, the mobile only accelerator platform with 130m smartphone users in SE Asia. William has spent the past two decades in Asia \and has a breadth of experience that covers not only the rise of China's original tech giants (BAT), but also core movements including: O2O, entertainment, sharing economy, social commerce and more. We'll cover all of these major trends, William's Chinaccelerator investment experience, and his views on cross-border developments in the future.

Today we sit down with Spencer King, who's a divisional head at Yixia Technology. Yixia is the maker of China’s most popular short video app Miaopai (秒拍) and live-streaming app Yizhibo (一直播). We start with Spencer's story and learn more about what it was like starting a company in China that was acquired in just eight months. Key lessons include a different approach to UI/UX, execution and speed as a competitive differentiator, the prevalence of fraud and blatant copy-cats in China, and more. We then cover Yixia Technology and examine the broader online video space in China, discussing not only China specific trends across online video, short video, and live-streaming when it comes to content preferences and delivery approach, but also how they compare to the U.S.

Today we host a Skype call with Ariel Liu, who is the general manager of international growth at The ONE Smart Piano. The ONE develops smart musical instruments, including its flagship digital piano solution with a smart keyboard, associated mobile apps, and other services that can teach anyone to play the piano within minutes. We’ll learn more about how the ONE’s piano solution works, how they were able to raise venture funding from top investors such as Sequoia, and how the ONE piano became a best-seller in both China and abroad so quickly. The ONE has bigger aspirations to build an entire ecosystem around the piano and other musical instruments, so we’ll learn about how they’ll incorporate students, teachers, and parents into this environment, while addressing key pain points of the educational system in China.

Following the broader trend of modularization, Strikingly abstracts away lower level code and design requirements, allowing any user to build gorgeous, mobile optimized websites in just minutes. On today’s podcast, we sit down with Strikingly’s CEO David Chen to learn more about his website builder product, how it works, and how it is enabling a new generation of entrepreneurs to set up websites quickly and test out MVP products before scaling further. We also learn more about the B2B services landscape in China, how it differs from the U.S., and how to properly incorporate lessons from one market to another.

These days it’s getting increasingly easy for people to build full featured products and companies. Why? Well, fundamental features are becoming modularized and can be readily incorporated into existing software. That way, companies can focus on developing their core capabilities while out-sourcing other requirements to 3rd party providers. For example, use Strikingly to build your own website within an hour, activate payments with Stripe, and host everything on AWS. Or in the case of most mobile apps, incorporate Agora’s SDK or API suite to active voice and video calls over a public internet. Today we have joining us Tony Zhao, who is the founder and CEO of Agora.io. Agora's SDKs enable mobile and web users to make high definition voice & video calls, share screens, whiteboard, and use data channels to exchange files. Tony helps us understand: what are major trends in the global VoIP market and what are key success factors? Who are top competitors in this space and how do they differentiate? Why is Agora rolling out a virtual lens SDK on top of its classic VoIP offerings? Why does Agora have extensive operations in both Silicon Valley and China? What are examples of Chinese innovation, especially around video based social engagement and networking?