Evolving for the Next Billion

GGV Capital’s Hans Tung and Zara Zhang interview Bertrand Schmitt, the CEO and co-founder of App Annie, the leading global provider of app market data. Bertrand started App Annie in Beijing in 2011 and has since then grown it into a truly global company, with 450 employees across 13 countries today. App Annie is now used by industry leaders all over the world. Customers include Google, Snapchat, and the New York Times as well as Chinese companies like Tencent, Bytedance, and Xiaomi.

In this episode, we discuss why Bertrand, a native of France, chose to move to China despite the language and cultural barriers, how a non-Chinese entrepreneur can become successful in China, and why having a multicultural DNA can be the best asset for startup teams today.

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.

On the first live show of the 996 Podcast, GGV Capital’s Hans Tung and Zara Zhang interviewed Nathan Blecharczyk, the co-founder and chief strategy officer of Airbnb, and the chairman of Airbnb China. In front of 150 audience members gathered at Airbnb’s San Francisco headquarters, Nathan discussed Airbnb’s China strategy, how it has evolved over the years, and what lessons he has learned through working with China. He also explained how to build relationships in China, how the company thinks about local competitors, and why Chinese authorities might actually be more open-minded than those elsewhere.

GGV Capital is an investor in Airbnb, and managing partner Hans Tung and Glenn Solomon have been advising the company’s China strategy.

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 Brad Bao, the co-founder and chairman of LimeBike, a fast-growing dockless bike-sharing company in the U.S. based in San Mateo, California. Founded in January 2017, LimeBike is currently in more than 50 different markets in the U.S., and has helped users with more than 2 million trips since it launched. Before founding LimeBike, Brad was an investor at Fosun Kinzon Capital, and previously helped launch and build up Tencent’s U.S. operations as Tencent’s first employee outside of China. LimeBike is an example of a phenomenon known as “copy from China” — importing innovative business models from China into the U.S.

In this episode, we discuss Brad’s “pivot” from an investor searching for a bike-sharing deal to the founder of a bike-sharing company, why bike sharing can work in the U.S., and why being cross-border is a crucial advantage in this space.

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.

Miranda Qu is the co-founder of Xiaohongshu (“Little Red Book” in Chinese), the world’s largest lifestyle platform that integrates community and content with ecommerce. Over 75 million users spend a total of over 100 million yuan per month on the app to buy fashion, cosmetics, and lifestyle products from both overseas and domestic brands. Xiaohongshu is a pioneer in integrating content, commerce, and community — the “3 Cs” that GGV managing partner Hans Tung thinks today’s ecommerce platforms must possess in order to stand out in “the age of Alibaba and Amazon.”

Miranda graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University with a degree in journalism, and left her job in 2013 to start Xiaohongshu. In this episode, Miranda discusses how she met her cofounder, Charlwin Mao, in a shopping mall in Boston; Xiaohongshu’s journey from a “Lonely Planet for overseas shopping” to one of China’s most popular ecommerce platforms; and why young Chinese consumers increasingly prefer domestic brands over foreign ones.

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.

Yi Wang is the founder and CEO of Liulishuo (a.k.a. LingoChamp), China’s leading mobile learning platform for spoken English, with over 70 million users. It uses speech recognition technology to enhance the learning experience and provide learners with measurable and proven results. Within a few months of launching, Liulishuo rose to the top of the Apple app store in China, and was recently ranked by CB Insights as one of the 100 most promising artificial intelligence startups in the world in 2018.

Yi is a “sea turtle” (海归, overseas returnee) who returned to China after studying and working in the U.S. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from Princeton University in 2009 and his M.S.E. and B.E. in electronic engineering from Tsinghua University. Before founding Liulishuo in 2012, Yi was a product manager at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, from 2009 to 2011. Yi has also worked as a product director at AdChina, responsible for its performance ads platform.

In this episode, we discuss questions such as: Why did Yi choose to leave his comfortable job in Silicon Valley to start a new venture in China? What challenges must “sea turtles” overcome to successfully start a company in China? What makes Liulishuo so engaging to its millions of users? Will AI ever replace human teachers?

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.

Lin Bin, the co-founder, president, and head of mobile for Xiaomi, reveals the secret sauce of one of the most valuable private companies in the world, which is reportedly going public later this year. Xiaomi had an unprecedented “comeback year” in 2017. In January 2018, Xiaomi was the third-largest smartphone seller in the world by shipment, the No. 1 smartphone seller in India, and one of the top five sellers in 12 other countries. Lin Bin, an engineer by training, recounts the founding story of Xiaomi, the uniqueness of the “Xiaomi ecosystem,” the phenomenon called “Mi Fans,” how he learned to fall in love with offline retail, and his takeaways from Xiaomi’s meteoric rise in 2017 following a sluggish 2016.

Prior to Xiaomi, Bin worked at Microsoft for 11 years and Google for 4 years. He served as the engineering director of Microsoft Research Asia, the vice president of the Google China Institute of Engineering, and the engineering director of Google Global.

Hans Tung, one of the earliest investors and a former board member of Xiaomi, discusses how he first met the team and why he believed in a company whose success was considered “almost impossible.”

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 Tao Zhang, the founder of Dianping, a lifestyle services company that is often known as “the Yelp of China” but is much more than that. In 2015, Dianping merged with the group buying giant Meituan. The new company, Meituan-Dianping, is now worth $30 billion and is the fourth most valuable startup in the world. Why did Tao want to put restaurant reviews online, before Yelp was even started? How did Tao survive the “thousand-Groupon war” that seized China’s internet scene in the early 2010s? How do you approach a merger between two multi-billion dollar companies? How should startups in China think about strategic investments from giants like Tencent and Alibaba?

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 Liu Zhen, the senior vice president of Bytedance (Toutiao), one of the fastest-growing Chinese tech startups that has made a lot of headlines. You may know Bytedance through its flagship product, Jinri Toutiao (今日头条), a content discovery and recommendation mobile app platform that uses artificial intelligence to recommend content to its users. What you may be less familiar with is that Bytedance also owns some of the most popular short video apps in China, and has demonstrated its global vision with its recent merger with Musical.ly, a top-ranking short video app in many countries with hundreds of millions of users, and a GGV portfolio company. Prior to Bytedance, Liu Zhen led Uber’s China team before it was acquired by Didi Chuxing (a GGV portfolio company) in 2016.  

With a background that includes being a lawyer in Silicon Valley, helping Uber scale in China, and spearheading Bytedance’s global expansion, Zhen has had unique experiences that inform her views on the tech ecosystem in China and the U.S.

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 Kai-Fu Lee, the founder and CEO of Sinovation Ventures (an early-stage VC fund in China) and a renowned computer scientist known for his work in artificial intelligence. He was the founding president of Google China and played a key role in establishing Microsoft Research Asia as well.

In this episode, Kai-Fu recounts the journey that took him from Taiwan to Tennessee and then to prominence in the tech sector. At first a computer science student working on speech recognition, he became one of the world’s experts on artificial intelligence. He has helped U.S. giants like Google and Microsoft expand into China and assisted Chinese entrepreneurs as an investor, mentor, and thought leader.

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 Kai-Fu Lee, the founder and CEO of Sinovation Ventures (an early-stage VC fund in China) and a renowned computer scientist known for his work in artificial intelligence. He was the founding president of Google China and played a key role in establishing Microsoft Research Asia as well.

In this episode, Kai-Fu recounts the journey that took him from Taiwan to Tennessee and then to prominence in the tech sector. At first a computer science student working on speech recognition, he became one of the world’s experts on artificial intelligence. He has helped U.S. giants like Google and Microsoft expand into China and assisted Chinese entrepreneurs as an investor, mentor, and thought leader.

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.