Evolving for the Next Billion

GGV Capital’s Hans Tung and Zara Zhang interview Toby Sun, the co-founder of Lime, a GGV portfolio company that's disrupting last-mile transportation in the US. A few months ago, we had Brad Bao, the other co-founder, on the show, back when the company was still called "LimeBike." At that time, Lime's operation was still pedal bikes only. A lot has changed since then. In a short span of a few months, LimeBike has expanded into 20 markets in four countries, changed its name to “Lime”, added other transportation modes including e-bikes and e-scooters to its services, and announced a $335 million funding round led by GV with participation from Uber, which will become Lime's strategic partner in the electric scooter space. Lime is currently working with Uber to co-brand its scooters and make them available in the Uber app.

In the episode, we discussed why scooters have a future in the US, how Lime envisions its partnership with Uber, and whether Lime sees itself as a “super app” going forward.

Join our listeners' community via WeChat/Slack at 996.ggvc.com/community.

You can view the full transcript of this episode at 996.ggvc.com.

The 996 Podcast is brought to you by GGV Capital, a multi-stage venture capital firm based in Silicon Valley, Shanghai, and Beijing. We have been partnering with leading technology entrepreneurs for the past 18 years from seed to pre-IPO. With $3.8 billion in capital under management across eight funds, GGV invests in globally minded entrepreneurs in consumer internet, e-commerce, frontier tech, and enterprise. GGV has invested in over 290 companies, with 46 companies valued at over $1 billion. Portfolio companies include Airbnb, Alibaba, Bytedance (Toutiao), Ctrip, Didi Chuxing, DOMO, Hashicorp, Hellobike, Houzz, Keep, Musical.ly, Slack, Square, Wish, Xiaohongshu, YY, and others. Find out more at ggvc.com.

We also recommend checking out our sister podcast, Founder Real Talk. It is a biweekly show that discusses challenges that founders and executives face and how they grow by dealing with them. The show is hosted by Glenn Solomon, managing partner at GGV Capital.

GGV Capital’s Hans Tung and Zara Zhang interview Jixun Foo (符绩勋), who is a Managing Partner at GGV Capital based in China. Jixun joined GGV in 2006 and has more than 20 years of experience in venture capital investing. He focuses on travel and transportation, social media and commerce as well as enterprise services in China. Jixun has led GGV’s investments in Qunar (去哪儿), Grab, Didi (滴滴出行), Youku-Tudou (优酷土豆), UCWeb, Mogujie-Meilishuo (美丽联合集团), MediaV, Full-Truck Alliance (formerly Yunmanman) (满帮集团), Meicai (美菜), and currently serves on the boards of XPeng (小鹏汽车), Hellobike (哈罗单车), Tujia (途家), Xiangwushuo (享物说), Zuiyou (最右) and Kujiale (酷家乐). Jixun played a critical role in many key strategic mergers and acquisitions, such as those of Youku-Tudou, Baidu/Qunar, Ctrip/Qunar, and Mogujie/Meilishuo.

Jixun has been recognized by Forbes China as one of the “Best Venture Capitalists” every year since 2006, and frequently appears on the Forbes Midas list. Before GGV, Jixun was a Director at Draper Fisher Jurvetson ePlanet Ventures, where he led the firm’s investment in Baidu. Prior to DFJ ePlanet, Jixun led the Investment Group under the Finance & Investment Division of the National Science & Technology Board of Singapore (NSTB) and has also worked in the R&D division of Hewlett Packard.

Jixun is from Singapore and graduated from the National University of Singapore with a First-Class Honors degree in Engineering, as well as a Master’s in Management of Technology from the university’s Graduate School of Business.

In this episode, Jixun discusses how he started his career in venture capital, the insider story behind the merger between Youku and Tudou (the largest merger in Chinese tech history at the time), why he invested in the bike-sharing company HelloBike (which overtook Mobike and Ofo to become the top player in the country), and what sectors excite him today.

Join our listeners' community via WeChat/Slack at 996.ggvc.com/community.

You can view the full transcript of this episode at 996.ggvc.com.

We are excited to announce a new program, "GGV Fellows", designed to help "sea turtles" or (海归) and Chinese students studying overseas to get to know the Chinese entrepreneurial landscape better. If you're a Chinese student/professional who is studying/working overseas (or have done so in the past), this is a program designed for you! It's a weeklong program in Jan 2019 in Beijing (during most US college's winter break). You will be able to learn from executives at some of China's most valuable tech companies, and visit some of their offices. You will also participate in mixers with students at top Chinese universities like Tsinghua and Beida to build a local network. Please visit fellows.ggvc.com for the application link and for more information.

The 996 Podcast is brought to you by GGV Capital, a multi-stage venture capital firm based in Silicon Valley, Shanghai, and Beijing. We have been partnering with leading technology entrepreneurs for the past 18 years from seed to pre-IPO. With $3.8 billion in capital under management across eight funds, GGV invests in globally minded entrepreneurs in consumer internet, e-commerce, frontier tech, and enterprise. GGV has invested in over 280 companies, with 30 companies valued at over $1 billion. Portfolio companies include Airbnb, Alibaba, Bytedance (Toutiao), Ctrip, Didi Chuxing, DOMO, Hashicorp, Hellobike, Houzz, Keep, Musical.ly, Slack, Square, Wish, Xiaohongshu, YY, and others. Find out more at ggvc.com.

GGV Capital’s Hans Tung and Zara Zhang interview Grant Horsfield (高天成), a South African serial entrepreneur who came to China in 2005 and founded naked Group, which includes the coworking space naked Hub (裸心社) and the luxury resort brand naked Retreat (裸心谷).

In 2007, Grant and his wife, Delphine Yip-Horsfield, opened the first naked resort – naked Home – in Moganshan (莫干山), a beautiful mountain 30-minute drive from Hangzhou. Following its success, Grant continued to expand the naked resort business into other high-end, eco-friendly resorts which prioritize sustainability development

In 2016, Grant and Delphine launched the coworking space naked Hub, which seeks to combine hospitality, design, technology, and community. Naked Hub offers several services, include open office, private office, and hot desks. It now has 10,000 members across 24 office locations both in Shanghai and Beijing. It has expanded into Australia, Hong Kong, and Vietnam. In April 2018, Naked Hub and WeWork announced that they would join forces to support business in China and throughout Asia.

In this episode, Grant explained why he moved to China from rural South Africa, how he earned the trust of local Chinese farmers in Moganshan, and what differentiates naked Hub from other coworking spaces.

The full transcript of this episode is available at 996.ggvc.com. Join our listeners' community via WeChat/Slack at 996.ggvc.com/community. GGV Capital also produces a biweekly email newsletter in English, also called “996,” which has a roundup of the week’s most important happenings in tech in China. Subscribe at 996.ggvc.com.

We are excited to announce a new program, "GGV Fellows", designed to help "sea turtles" or (海归) and Chinese students studying overseas to get to know the Chinese entrepreneurial landscape better. If you're a Chinese student/professional who is studying/working overseas (or have done so in the past), this is a program designed for you! It's a weeklong program in Jan 2019 in Beijing (during most US college's winter break). You will be able to learn from executives at some of China's most valuable tech companies, and visit some of their offices. You will also participate in mixers with students at top Chinese universities like Tsinghua and Beida to build a local network. Please visit fellows.ggvc.com for the application link and for more information.

GGV Capital is a multi-stage venture capital firm based in Silicon Valley, Shanghai, and Beijing. We have been partnering with leading technology entrepreneurs for the last 18 years from seed to pre-IPO. With $3.8 billion in capital under management across eight funds, GGV invests in globally minded entrepreneurs in Consumer/New Retail, Social/Internet, Enterprise/Cloud and Frontier Tech. GGV has invested in over 290 companies with more than 45 companies valued at more than $1 billion. Portfolio companies include Airbnb, Alibaba, Ctrip, Didi, Grab, Hellobike, HashiCorp, Houzz, Keep, Opendoor, Peloton, Slack, Square, ByteDance (Toutiao), Wish, Xiaomi, Xiaohongshu, and YY. Find out more at ggvc.com. 

GGV Capital's Hans Tung and Zara Zhang interviewed Zilin Chen, founder and CEO of BingoBox, China's first scalable 24-hour cashier-free convenience store and a GGV portfolio company. BingoBox features a smart counter for a staffless check-out experience, and uses RFID and computer vision to keep track of items. Users scan a QR code to enter the store, and pay via Alipay or WeChat Pay.

BingoBox is a pioneer in a phenomenon known as "new retail" in China, commonly understood as using technology to transform offline retail. BingoBox was launched to public in August 2016 and now has over 300 boxes in almost 30 cities in China. GGV led BingoBox's series A investment in July 2017. The company raised another $80 million in series B this January, which GGV also participated in.

Zilin discussed how the idea for BingoBox came about, how BingoBox differs from Amazon Go, and the technology and unit economics behind the stores.

The episode also features a bonus interview with Eric Xu, GGV Capital's managing partner based in China, who led our investment in BingoBox. Eric discussed the meaning of "new retail" and what made him want to invest in BingoBox.

The full transcript of this episode is available at 996.ggvc.com/2018/08/15/episode-18-zilin-chen-of-bingobox-on-the-future-of-new-retail-in-china/.

Join our listeners' community via WeChat/Slack at 996.ggvc.com/community. GGV Capital also produces a biweekly email newsletter in English, also called “996,” which has a roundup of the week’s most important happenings in tech in China. Subscribe at 996.ggvc.com.

The 996 Podcast is brought to you by GGV Capital, a multi-stage venture capital firm based in Silicon Valley, Shanghai, and Beijing. We have been partnering with leading technology entrepreneurs for the past 18 years from seed to pre-IPO. With $3.8 billion in capital under management across eight funds, GGV invests in globally minded entrepreneurs in consumer internet, e-commerce, frontier tech, and enterprise. GGV has invested in over 290 companies, with more than 45 companies valued at over $1 billion. Portfolio companies include Airbnb, Alibaba, Bytedance (Toutiao), Ctrip, Didi Chuxing, DOMO, Hashicorp, Hellobike, Houzz, Keep, Musical.ly, Slack, Square, Wish, Xiaohongshu, YY, and others. Find out more at ggvc.com.

Listen to past episodes of our sister podcast, Founder Real Talk. It is a biweekly show that discusses challenges that founders and executives face and how they grow by dealing with them. The show is hosted by Glenn Solomon, managing partner at GGV Capital.

GGV Capital’s Hans Tung and Zara Zhang have a conversation about Xiaomi’s IPO, which took place in Hong Kong on July 9. Hans is one of the early investors in Xiaomi and a former company board member of the company.

Hans recounts the original pitch that Xiaomi’s founder Lei Jun gave him back in 2010, and what made him want to invest in a seemingly “crazy” idea.

We also touched on frequently-asked questions like: Why can Xiaomi be thought of as an “Internet company” instead of a hardware company? Why should people stop comparing Xiaomi to Apple? Was Xiaomi’s IPO valuation justified? What does the “Xiaomi ecosystem” mean?

Join our listeners' community via WeChat/Slack at 996.ggvc.com/community. GGV Capital also produces a biweekly email newsletter in English, also called “996,” which has a roundup of the week’s most important happenings in tech in China. Subscribe at 996.ggvc.com.

We also recommend checking out GGV Capital’s sister podcast, Founder Real Talk. It is a biweekly show that discusses challenges that founders and executives face and how they grow by dealing with them. The show is hosted by Glenn Solomon, managing partner at GGV Capital.

The 996 Podcast is brought to you by GGV Capital, a multi-stage venture capital firm based in Silicon Valley, Shanghai, and Beijing. We have been partnering with leading technology entrepreneurs for the past 18 years from seed to pre-IPO. With $3.8 billion in capital under management across eight funds, GGV invests in globally minded entrepreneurs in consumer internet, e-commerce, frontier tech, and enterprise. GGV has invested in over 280 companies, with 30 companies valued at over $1 billion. Portfolio companies include Airbnb, Alibaba, Bytedance (Toutiao), Ctrip, Didi Chuxing, DOMO, Hashicorp, Hellobike, Houzz, Keep, Musical.ly, Slack, Square, Wish, Xiaohongshu, YY, and others. Find out more at ggvc.com.

GGV Capital’s Hans Tung and Zara Zhang interview serial entrepreneur Justin Kan. In 2007, he co-founded Justin.TV, a website that allowed anyone to broadcast video online. In 2011, Justin.tv spinned off its gaming division as Twitch, which went on to become the leading live streaming platform for video games in the US. Twitch was acquired by Amazon in 2014 for almost a billion dollars. More recently, Justin co-founded Atrium LTS—the “LTS” stands for “Legal Technology Services” - a startup that’s building technology to revolutionize the legal industry. GGV is an investor in Atrium.

Justin is a true startup veteran—in addition to starting multiple companies of his own, he has worked with hundreds of startups as a partner at Y Combinator, and has also personally angel invested in over 65 companies. Justin grew up in Seattle as a second-generation Chinese American, and graduated from Yale in 2005 with degrees in physics and philosophy.

In this episode, Justin recounted the story of how he started to live streaming his life before streaming became cool, the pitfalls he has gone through during his startup journey, whether it was the right decision to sell Twitch to Amazon in 2014, and what gets him excited about his new venture Atrium.

Join our listeners' community via WeChat/Slack at 996.ggvc.com/community. GGV Capital also produces a biweekly email newsletter in English, also called “996,” which has a roundup of the week’s most important happenings in tech in China. Subscribe at 996.ggvc.com.

The 996 Podcast is brought to you by GGV Capital, a multi-stage venture capital firm based in Silicon Valley, Shanghai, and Beijing. We have been partnering with leading technology entrepreneurs for the past 18 years from seed to pre-IPO. With $3.8 billion in capital under management across eight funds, GGV invests in globally minded entrepreneurs in consumer internet, e-commerce, frontier tech, and enterprise. GGV has invested in over 280 companies, with 30 companies valued at over $1 billion. Portfolio companies include Airbnb, Alibaba, Bytedance (Toutiao), Ctrip, Didi Chuxing, DOMO, Hashicorp, Hellobike, Houzz, Keep, Musical.ly, Slack, Square, Wish, Xiaohongshu, YY, and others. Find out more at ggvc.com.

Tweets:

"I always thought that 'management' was a dirty word. But we could have been much more effective if we had implemented actual management in the early days." - @JustinKan of @Twitch on the 996 Podcast with @hanstung & @zarazhangrui https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/996-podcast-with-ggv-capital/id1336107529?mt=2

"I think we [the US] take immigration of skilled labor for granted. We should be trying to get every single engineer from around the world to live here, to stay here." - @JustinKan of @Twitch on the 996 Podcast with @hanstung & @zarazhangrui https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/996-podcast-with-ggv-capital/id1336107529?mt=2 @GGVCapital

"The most common mistake I see in founders is that they are not focused enough." - @JustinKan of @Twitch on the 996 Podcast with @hanstung & @zarazhangrui https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/996-podcast-with-ggv-capital/id1336107529?mt=2 @GGVCapital

GGV Capital’s Hans Tung and Zara Zhang interview Eric Yuan, founder and CEO of Zoom, the leading video conferencing solution for enterprise. Zoom is used by a third of Fortune 500 companies and 90% of the top 200 universities in the US. Eric was recently named the Top CEO on Glassdoor, with an approval rating of 99%, and was the first person of color to win the award.

Eric grew up and went to college in China, arrived in Silicon Valley in 1997 and joined WebEx when it was still a small company. In 2007 WebEx was acquired by Cisco and Eric became Cisco’s Corporate VP of engineering in charge of collaboration software. Eric spent 14 years in total at WebEx and grew its engineering team from 10 to 800, and increased its revenue from zero to over $800 million. Eric holds 11 patents, plus 20 pending patents in the pipeline.

In this episode, Eric shared his story of being rejected a US visa for 8 times while in China, how to overcome the “bamboo ceiling” as a Chinese engineer in Silicon Valley, and what makes Zoom different from its competitors.

Join our listeners' community via WeChat/Slack at 996.ggvc.com/community. GGV Capital also produces a biweekly email newsletter in English, also called “996,” which has a roundup of the week’s most important happenings in tech in China. Subscribe at 996.ggvc.com.

The 996 Podcast is brought to you by GGV Capital, a multi-stage venture capital firm based in Silicon Valley, Shanghai, and Beijing. We have been partnering with leading technology entrepreneurs for the past 18 years from seed to pre-IPO. With $3.8 billion in capital under management across eight funds, GGV invests in globally minded entrepreneurs in consumer internet, e-commerce, frontier tech, and enterprise. GGV has invested in over 280 companies, with 30 companies valued at over $1 billion. Portfolio companies include Airbnb, Alibaba, Bytedance (Toutiao), Ctrip, Didi Chuxing, DOMO, Hashicorp, Hellobike, Houzz, Keep, Musical.ly, Slack, Square, Wish, Xiaohongshu, YY, and others. Find out more at ggvc.com.

Hans Tung and Zara Zhang interview Jenny Lee, a managing partner at GGV Capital based in Shanghai. Jenny joined GGV in 2005 and was instrumental in setting up GGV’s presence in China. Forbes recently ranked Jenny as the world’s 16th most powerful woman in tech.

A self-professed geek who loves new technologies and products, Jenny has been involved with consumer internet, SaaS, and frontier technology companies at GGV, and has helped many go public. Since 2011, Jenny has been recognized by the Forbes Global 100 VC Midas List of top venture capitalists, ranking as the #1 woman and #10 overall in 2015.

Jenny grew up in Singapore and was educated in the U.S., where she attended Cornell and Northwestern University. In this episode, we discussed how Jenny rose from a newcomer to one of the most respected VCs in China, how she set up the China presence of a U.S. venture capital firm, how venture deals are done in China, and how U.S. companies can better align themselves with Chinese government’s interests.

Join our listeners' community via WeChat/Slack at 996.ggvc.com/community. GGV Capital also produces a biweekly email newsletter in English, also called "996," which has a roundup of the week's most important happenings in tech in China. Subscribe at 996.ggvc.com.

The 996 Podcast is brought to you by GGV Capital, a multi-stage venture capital firm based in Silicon Valley, Shanghai, and Beijing. We have been partnering with leading technology entrepreneurs for the past 18 years from seed to pre-IPO. With $3.8 billion in capital under management across eight funds, GGV invests in globally minded entrepreneurs in consumer internet, e-commerce, frontier tech, and enterprise. GGV has invested in over 280 companies, with 30 companies valued at over $1 billion. Portfolio companies include Airbnb, Alibaba, Bytedance (Toutiao), Ctrip, Didi Chuxing, DOMO, Hashicorp, Hellobike, Houzz, Keep, Musical.ly, Slack, Square, Wish, Xiaohongshu, YY, and others. Find out more at ggvc.com.

In the first joint live session of GGV Capital’s 996 Podcast and the Sinica Podcast, we interviewed Yasheng Huang, a renowned economist and professor of global economics and management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. GGV Capital’s Hans Tung and Zara Zhang were joined by Kaiser Kuo, host of the Sinica Podcast and producer of the 996 Podcast.

Huang founded and runs the China Lab and the India Lab, which aim to help entrepreneurs in those countries improve their management skills. He is an expert source on international business, political economy, and international management. In collaboration with other scholars, Huang conducts research on human capital formation in China and India, entrepreneurship, and ethnic and labor-intensive foreign direct investment.

In this episode, we discussed the recent trade tensions between the U.S. and China, how geopolitical factors are affecting the global tech industry, and how China’s growth story compares with that of India and other developing countries.

Join our listeners' community via WeChat/Slack at 996.ggvc.com/community. GGV Capital also produces a biweekly email newsletter in English, also called "996," which has a roundup of the week's most important happenings in tech in China. Subscribe at 996.ggvc.com.

The 996 Podcast is brought to you by GGV Capital, a multi-stage venture capital firm based in Silicon Valley, Shanghai, and Beijing. We have been partnering with leading technology entrepreneurs for the past 18 years from seed to pre-IPO. With $3.8 billion in capital under management across eight funds, GGV invests in globally minded entrepreneurs in consumer internet, e-commerce, frontier tech, and enterprise. GGV has invested in over 280 companies, with 30 companies valued at over $1 billion. Portfolio companies include Airbnb, Alibaba, Bytedance (Toutiao), Ctrip, Didi Chuxing, DOMO, Hashicorp, Hellobike, Houzz, Keep, Musical.ly, Slack, Square, Wish, Xiaohongshu, YY, and others. Find out more at ggvc.com.

GGV Capital’s Hans Tung and Zara Zhang interview Yinglian Xie and Fang Yu, the co-founders of DataVisor, a fast-growing startup in Silicon Valley that provides big data security analytics for consumer-facing websites and apps. Its customers include some of the largest companies in the world, such as Alibaba, Dianping, Pinterest, Yelp, and Bytedance (a.k.a. Toutiao), among others.

Both Yinglian and Fang have decades of experience in internet security, specifically on fighting large-scale attacks to online services, such as fraudulent online payments, spamming, user hijacking, search-result poisoning, etc. They were both senior researchers at Microsoft for many years before starting DataVisor in 2013, and have filed over 20 patents.

Yinglian received her Ph.D. in computer science from CMU and a Bachelor’s degree from Peking University. Fang holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Berkeley and a Bachelor’s degree from Fudan University.

Join our listeners' community via WeChat/Slack at 996.ggvc.com/community. GGV Capital also produces a biweekly email newsletter in English, also called "996," which has a roundup of the week's most important happenings in tech in China. Subscribe at 996.ggvc.com.

The 996 Podcast is brought to you by GGV Capital, a multi-stage venture capital firm based in Silicon Valley, Shanghai, and Beijing. We have been partnering with leading technology entrepreneurs for the past 18 years from seed to pre-IPO. With $3.8 billion in capital under management across eight funds, GGV invests in globally minded entrepreneurs in consumer internet, e-commerce, frontier tech, and enterprise. GGV has invested in over 280 companies, with 30 companies valued at over $1 billion. Portfolio companies include Airbnb, Alibaba, Bytedance (Toutiao), Ctrip, Didi Chuxing, DOMO, Hashicorp, Hellobike, Houzz, Keep, Musical.ly, Slack, Square, Wish, Xiaohongshu, YY, and others. Find out more at ggvc.com.