Asia Startup Pulse

8X8 Speakers Series is back! Today, we are happy to present you the first 3 talks selected from Chinaccelerator 8X8 Speakers Series events in Autumn 2018 about how knowing yourself matters while running your business. Em Robin, Founder of Inner Circles, is a female entrepreneur for 8 years who shared “Entrepreneurship is about sharing what you created”. Founder of Beijing Mindfulness Centre Dalida Turkovic shared her personal journey including how she experienced the depression and financial crisis. Andrew Schorr, Founder of Grata, delivered his insights about how crucial it is to be honest with yourself, have passion and experiment.

Chinaccelerator’s 8X8 Speakers Series invite 8 of Chinaccelerator mentors - serial entrepreneurs, industry experts and investors - to share their personal stories about entrepreneurship twice a year in Beijing and Shanghai.

Show Notes:

01:44 Em Roblin’s Talk

10:57 Dalida Turkovic’s Talk

22:12 Andrew Schorr’s Talk

Many thanks to our speakers Em Roblin, Dalida Turkovic and Andrew Schorr, editor David and Geep, producer Eva Shi, organizer Chinaccelerator and sponsor People Squared. Be sure to check out our website www.chinaccelerator.com.

Happy New Year everyone! Today we invited Sean O’Sullivan, Founder and Managing General Partner of SOSV, the fund behind Chinaccelerator, to start the Year 2019 for China Startup Pulse and our listeners. In this episode, Sean shared his experience in China and provided his analysis of the investment trends in biotech, food tech, hardware, and software areas. Also, he pointed out the role of China in the global technology ecosystem and the impact that US-China trade war will have on startups and investors.

Sean’s entrepreneur life started in 1985 as a founder of MapInfo, bringing street mapping technology to personal computers. MapInfo went on to become a $200 million public company. He is also the co-creator of the term “cloud computing”. Now, Sean is managing SOSV, a Venture Capital firm which is running 6 accelerators in the world supporting investments in over 700 startups.

Show notes:

3:24 Start in Dalian

6:20 Examples in Food Tech

12:20 Chinese investors’ growing interest in Biotech companies

13:57 Investing in the education industry

16:41 Other important areas in China, such as machine learning

18:57 Hardware accelerator HAX’s Chinese portfolio

21:25 The perceptions of Chinese technologies from investors out of China

24:25 How the US-China trade war impacts the startups and investors

26:38 Sean’s opinions on the fast-growing Chinese software companies such as TikTok

28:10 Sean’s predictions about China in 2019

Many thanks to our host Oscar Ramos and guest Sean O'Sullivan , editor David and Geep, producer Eva Shi, organizer Chinaccelerator and sponsor People Squared. Be sure to check out our website www.chinaccelerator.com.

Again, thanks to all of our listeners for the support in 2018 and the team is looking forward to providing more insights in 2019.

In the second episode of our series on due diligence, we learn from Blockchain Founders Fund about how they evaluate blockchain startups and what they specifically look for in the due diligence process.

Recording from Money 20/20 China in Hangzhou, our host Oscar Ramos had an in-depth discussion with Aly Madhavji and Mansoor Madhavji, partners of the Blockchain Founders Fund, who shared their insights about their due diligence process, strategy and preferences when evaluating blockchain projects, and the examples how they work with early-stage projects, which is also illuminating for other startups. Here are some keywords they mentioned: Trust, product, traction, finance, etc.

Show Notes:

03:00 Portfolio and their Investment Strategy & Philosophy

06:10 How do they work globally?

07:21 Stages of Investment

07:35 First Step in Due Diligence for Blockchain

10:37 Transparency and Trust Matters

11:54 Checking Background and Company’s Strategies

13:30 How do companies react to your due diligence and how does that matter

14:38 Bringing in External Parties to the Due Diligence Process

15:23 Other Important Areas for Due Diligence

16:48 Product Evaluation in Blockchain Companies

19:06 Role of Stress Test

20:10 Measuring Traction and Evaluating Analytics

22:08 Financial Due Diligence

25:52 Their Perspectives on Startups Outsourcing Key Team Roles (e.g. CFO)

27:41 Do they look into Cliffs? 
28:55 Additional Tips from Aly and Mansoor

30:29 Due Diligence in East Asia

32:37 Contact Information and Signing Out

Contact them!

Companies mentioned:

Many thanks to our host Oscar Ramos and guest Aly Madhavji and Mansoor Madhavji , editor David and Geep, producer Eva Shi, organizer Chinaccelerator and sponsor People Squared. Be sure to check out our website www.chinaccelerator.com.

Entrepreneurs looking for funding can not escape from the due diligence from investors. In order to have more founders to understand the process of investment due diligence, we are introducing a new and special series, where we talk with investors about due diligence.

Recording from Money 20/20 China in Hangzhou, Oscar Ramos talked with Carman Chan, Founder and Managing Partner of Click Ventures who successfully invested in Spotify, Meetup and many tech companies. 


In this episode, Chan shared insights on how they evaluate traction, team, product as well as what founders should have prepared for investors, the proper plan for companies to work on and lastly the differences in Asia versus the West regarding due diligence.

Show Notes:

1:32 Carman Chan’s strong background in data and mathematics

2:08 Introducing Click Ventures, investment thesis and projects

3:38 Due Diligence process

4:25 Importance of company metrics

6:36 Best tools to measure traction

8:30 Red flags Carman met in the process

10:30 Due Diligence in product

12:47 Product roadmap

13:20 Importance of the founding team

14:04 Missing team members

15:07 Team related problems in Due Diligence

15:55 Other parts Carman evaluates including advisors, founder vesting plan, etc

17:22 Relationship with co-investors in Due Diligence

18:25 Differences in Asian Companies compared to those from other countries

22:11 Contact Information and Signing Off

What’s the differences between Chinese market and international market in terms of User Experience (UX)? What’s the key principles to localize your design for Chinese market? Samuel Jesse is the right person to talk with who co-founded a UX research lab UXSPOT in Shanghai. With 10 years of experience in UX, we talked with Samuel about his experience working with Chinese clients as an International designer, UX practices for Chinese consumers, Why mobile is crucial and more about product localization. Here’s a short quote from Samuel , “when something is [well] designed, it gives that perception of trust, it transfers that perception of quality.”

Show Notes:

00:00 Introduction & Summary

01:20 Introducing Samuel Jesse

2:00 Moving from Beijing to Shanghai

2:46 Working with Chinese Clients

3:40 Shanghai vs Beijing Environments

4:31 Initial UX Design Projects with Local Clients

6:14 Change in Chinese attitudes towards UX

7:31 A UX Research Lab in China

9:10 UX Approach and Test in Chinese market

10:21 Importance of Mobile

11:14 Differences between Chinese consumers and international market

12:48 Issues in Translation

14:10 User Verification for Mobile Users

14:45 UX Best Practices in China

16:20 Establishing Trust through Design

18:08 Good Design in China

19:40 International and Chinese UX Differences From Design Perspective

20:40 Implications of Familiarity with Local Companies

22:55 Copy-Cat Culture in China

25:03 Chinese Companies going International

26:34 Over-Localization

27:33 Contact Information and Sign Off

Many thanks to our host Oscar Ramos and guest Samuel Jesse, editor David and Geep, producer Eva Shi, organizer Chinaccelerator and sponsor People Squared. Be sure to check out our website www.chinaccelerator.com.

PK is an Indian entrepreneur and angel investor in social network, content and live-stream space who built, grew and finally sold his startups InstaLively and Pulse to Tencent-owned company Hike Messenger. After selling them, PK came to China for new opportunities and challenges where he started being a consultant for Various Startups which helps China-India Startups and VCs in building the next billion Internet users in Indonesia and India, as well as mentoring founders for Chinaccelerator.

In this episode, PK shared his journey about selling startups to Tencent and also delivered insights about the China-India startup and investment ecosystem, including the challenges to localize Chinese companies in India and how the Chinese data drive model works in India, etc.

Show Notes:

Feel free to leave a comment and start a conversation with us! If you have an ideal guest whom you would like to listen to, please let us know and we'll do our best to realize it!

Many thanks to our host Oscar Ramos and guest PK, producer Eva Shi, editor David and Geep, organizer Chinaccelerator and sponsor People Squared. Be sure to check out our website www.chinaccelerator.com

Liulishuo is an AI-powered English language learning platform operated by the AI firm LAIX founded in 2012 and it went public on New York Stock Exchange in Sept 2018. We are lucky to have Ben Hu, Co-Founder, CTO and Head of Adult English of Liulishuo to share the first 6 months of starting the company, their early successes, the growth, as well as his insights about managing a team from 5 to 200 people. “Empathy and strategic thinking together make the management easier.”

As of June 30, 2018, Liulishuo has over 83.8 million registered users and 7.2 million average monthly active users in 175 countries. The average daily time per user is 60+ minutes.

Show Notes:

0:00 Summary

Feel free to leave a comment! If you have an ideal guest whom you would like to listen to, please let us know and we'll do our best to realize it!

Many thanks to our host Oscar Ramos and guest Ben Hu, editor David and Geep, producer Eva Shi, organizer Chinaccelerator and sponsor People Squared. Be sure to check out our website www.chinaccelerator.com.

Drew Kirchhoff is a product guy. After studying finance in the USA and working for a diamond investment firm in China, Drew became one of the most successful product managers to publish the game Crossy Road in the market achieving more than one hundred million downloads.

“A great product manager makes a great CEO”. After being a product manager, he co-founded Yoli which allows users to learn English directly through WeChat. He shared how he and his co-founders found the market opportunities driven by the advent of WeChat, how they launched the company, developed Yoli WeChat mini-program and later, he explored deeper in the technical area to improve the product.

Show Notes:

Feel free to leave a comment and start a conversation with us! If you have an ideal guest whom you would like to listen to, please let us know and we'll do our best to realize it!

Many thanks to our host Oscar Ramos and guest Drew Kirchhoff, editor David and Geep, producer Eva Shi, organizer Chinaccelerator and sponsor People Squared. Be sure to check out our website www.chinaccelerator.com

Today we have invited Philip Beck, who has had more than 40 years experience in the social media and marketing industry in and out of China. He commented on China’s digital transformation and how it is infusing innovation into China’s startup space.

He continued on to discuss how agencies and big companies have created opportunities for new startups to capitalise on those opportunities and the changing profiles of startup founders that are building new companies

1:03 Philip Beck intro

Feel free to leave a comment and start a conversation with us! If you have an ideal guest whom you would like to listen to, please let us know and we'll do our best to realize it!

Many thanks to our host Oscar Ramos and guest Philip Beck, editor David and Geep, producer Eva Shi & Summer Xia , organizer Chinaccelerator and sponsor People Squared. Be sure to check out our website www.chinaccelerator.com

The system of human perceptions is multi-faceted and voice is one of the perceptions that people pay the most attention to in Artificial Intelligence areas. Sogou established a speech recognition team in 2012 to explore technologies such as intelligent voice and machine translation. Now it is obviously a leader in the Chinese voice technology field.

In this episode, we’ve invited Chen Wei, the Chief Scientist of Sogou Voice Interaction Technology Centre, to introduce the technological breakthroughs in speech recognition, machine translation and speech synthesis behind Sogou translation products.

Chen Wei and his team also developed the Zhiyin OS system which is a system with multi-modal perception capabilities including speech recognition, handwriting recognition and lip-reading ability. The edge of this technology also extends to areas such as hardware and visual identification.

Perks for our listeners: You can find a promotion code to get free tickets for NewCo Shanghai 2018 in this episode. Limited tickets and first come, first serve. https://chinaccelerator.com/newco-shanghai-2018/

Show notes:

Feel free to leave a comment and start a conversation with us! If you have an ideal guest whom you would like to listen to, please let us know and we'll do our best to realize it!

Many thanks to our host Oscar Ramos and guest Chen Wei, editor David and Geep, producer Eva Shi, organizer Chinaccelerator and sponsor People Squared. Be sure to check out our website www.chinaccelerator.com