Evolving for the Next Billion

This episode is the last of our 3-part-webinar series on how founders and leaders are dealing with the current global crisis. It was hosted by GGV's Head of Talent Jennifer Holmstrom and featured Dylan Tey, Senior VP of HelloBike, one of China's biggest mobility service platforms, which manages a 30,000 flexible ground operators and Jeff Harper, Chief People Officer at HashiCorp, an enterprise software company that has its entire engineer team distributed across the world.

We covered 3 key decisions each company made in the wake of COVID-19, the systems put in place to mobilize a big team in crisis, and the long-term impact this virus have on their industries.

*HelloBike and HashiCorp are both GGV portfolio companies

For the full transcript of the show, go to nextbn.ggvc.com
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When the SARS pandemic struck in 2003, Savio was working as president and COO of an internet startup named Alibaba. Not only did the startup survive SARS, it launched a new business called Taobao and emerged as one of the most valuable companies in the world. On a special live podcast session, former President and COO of Alibaba (from 2001-2003) Savio Kwan joined GGV Capital Managing Partner Hans Tung to share the key learnings from Alibaba's SARS experience and answered live questions from founders in GGV's global network.

Savio Kwan - Former President and COO of Alibaba Savio Kwan is best known for his time as president and COO of Alibaba from 2001 to 2003. He later took on the chief people officer role in 2004. He has more than 30 years' global management experience, including 17 years at the medical systems division of General Electric, where he was responsible for sales, marketing, operations, business development and establishing joint venture companies in Asia.

For the full transcript of the show, go to nextbn.ggvc.com

Join our listeners' community for future webinars, go to nextbn.ggvc.com/community.

With the escalated spread of the coronavirus, GGV Capital is running a 3-session-webinar series with founders around the world to help them navigate the radical uncertainty ahead. Today's episode is the recording of the first webinar on managing cash flow at this special time, joined by Dr. Brian Gu, President and Vice Chairman from XPeng, and GGV's managing partner Jixun Foo.

We covered everything from best practices of cash flow management during an external crisis, tips on alternative funding, to macroeconomic shifts startups must pay attention to in the post-virus world.

Jixun Foo is a Managing Partner at GGV Capital and joined the firm in 2006. He is consistently recognized among the top VCs in China and counts 13 of his investments as mega-unicorns or unicorns, including Baidu, Boss Zhipin, Didi, Grab, Hello, Manbang, Meicai, Qunar/Ctrip, Tujia, Mogu, UCWeb, Youku Tudou, and Xpeng Motors.

Brian Gu is the vice chairman and president of XPENG Motors, also known as Xiaopeng Motors, a Chinese electric vehicle company and a GGV portfolio company. At XPENG, Brian leads the company's global strategy, finance, fundraising, investments and international partnerships. Prior to joining XPENG Motors in March 2018, Brian was the Chairman of Asia Pacific Investment Banking at J.P. Morgan. He holds an MBA from Yale University, a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Washington Medical School and a bachelor's degree in Chemistry from the University of Oregon.

For the full transcript of the show, go tonextbn.ggvc.com

Join our listeners' community for future webinars, go tonextbn.ggvc.com/community.

For all of our listeners whose life has been disrupted by the coronavirus, we want to let you know that we stand in solidarity with you. We will get through this together. If you are a startup founder, we put together some operational tactics so you can take care of your team and adapt to change and cause the least disruption in the long run.

Today's episode was recorded during the GGV Fellows program in Beijing. It is a week-long intensive learning experience for aspiring entrepreneurs who want to get into China's startup ecosystem. This year's 35 fellows came from top institutions around the world. With an amazingly diverse set of backgrounds, we got everything ranging from PH.D. in machine learning to a real estate startup founder who's also a pilot. For this episode, we sat down with 4 GGV fellows on their life stories, takeaways from the GGV Fellows programs, and their experiences of doing startups in China.

Wenyou Tan
head of Corporate Finance @ OVO, a Fintech Unicorn in Indonesia

[email protected]

founder of a gaming startup in Beijing, who used to work on wall street.

Get in contact with Raven for his startup at [email protected]

Sophie Luo
a Wharton MBA who built a SaaS company in China

Yuchen Jiang
ex-software engineer at Facebook

For the full transcript of the show, go to nextbn.ggvc.com
Join our listeners' community, go to nextbn.ggvc.com/community.

Today on the show, we have Amit Gupta and RK Misra, co-founders of Yulu. Yulu is India's ride-sharing startup launched in December 2017. It provides a network of over 10,000 shared vehicles, including bicycles and lightweight electric scooters, in Bengaluru, Pune, Mumbai, and Bhubaneswar. Yulu's vision is to reduce traffic congestion by providing a scalable, affordable, efficient, and clean solution for the short-distance commute.

In this episode, we covered why Amit and RK decided to start Yulu after having some successful exits, how shared mobility works in urban India and working with the government to draft India's first micro-mobility policy.

Before Yulu, Amit co-founded India's profitable unicorn InMobi - an online mobile marketing and advertising platform. During his 12 years there, he grew the company's business into other markets like China, US, and Western Europe. Amit has a bachelor's degree in engineering from India's top university India Institute of Technology, Kanpur.

RK is a serial entrepreneur and a public figure known for his expertise in the nation's urban planning policy. He is an undergraduate from IIT with a Master's Degree from Tokyo University, also an alum of Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

For the full transcript of the show, go to nextbn.ggvc.com

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Today's episode originally aired in July 2018. The guest is Eric Yuan, the founder and CEO of Zoom. Known for its easy-to-use and reliable video conferencing product, Zoom became a listed company in April 2019 and soon became one of the largest public SaaS companies in the world.
The recent outbreak of the coronavirus has made remote working part of many people's new realities. It also puts remote working tools like Zoom under a stress test with the surging needs, which Zoom did incredibly well. It always works. GGV has been a happy customer of Zoom for a really long time and we hope this conversation can give you a hint on how it became successful in the first place.

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, getting its first paid customer, balancing the needs of SMB and enterprise, and what makes Zoom different from its competitors.

For the full transcript of the show, go to nextbn.ggvc.com
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This episode is co-hosted by GGV's investment colleague Madhu Yalarmathi.

In this episode, we have Vamsi Krishna, CEO & Co-Founder of Vedantu. Vedantu is India's leading online tutoring company that enables students to learn LIVE with some of India's best-curated teachers. The name Vedantu is formed by two Sanskrit words Veda (Knowledge) + Tantu (Network), signifying a 'Knowledge Network' where any student can tap into and learn from a teacher, anytime-anywhere.

In our conversations, Vamsi shared his experience in moving into online after building a successful offline tutoring center, getting his early users and his definition of an "EdTech" company. Before starting Vedantu, he has been a teacher for 13 years and founded a test prep company Lakshya, which was sold to a listed education company in 2012. You can watch Vamsi's TedTalk in which he made the argument against the standard curriculum.

03:14
Trained as an engineer, how did you become a teacher?

05:03 In your TED Talk, you argued that standard curriculums and standard delivery mechanisms won't work. Share with us more on that.

08:40
Back in early 2012, when you started the company, it was way before JIO and 4G came out in India. Internet users were growing but not as fast as the rest of the world.

13:24

How did you gain the confidence that the right way to build your second startup should be online education?

16:18
What are the scalability aspect of the business model to make it easier for new students to get acclimated to the online learning environment?

21:13

Many of your early users took a leap of faith and moved towards a fully online institution to prepare for the most important exam in their educational life. How did you get them to do that? How are you going about it now?

29:02

As an EdTech company, what do you look for from your tech team?

37:50

It's not hard to imagine that given the large talent pool of Indian teachers here, that the business could exponentially expand beyond India at some point in the future. Share with us how you think about that.

For the full transcript of the show, go to nextbn.ggvc.com
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This episode is co-hosted by GGV's investment team colleague Madhu Yalamarthi.

On this episode we have Rajesh Yabaji, co-founder and CEO at BlackBuck. BlackBuck is India's largest trucking logistics company, often referred to as "Uber for Trucks".

In the episode, we covered creating a full-stack logistics marketplace in India, the conviction and rigor it takes to create a new category, building an agile company culture, and the choice of living in the same building with his co-founder.

Prior to starting BlackBuck, Rajesh worked in the Indian multinational conglomerate ITC Limited for four years as a manager in supply chain and category management. He holds a bachelor's degree from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Kharagpur.

For the full transcript of the show, go to nextbn.ggvc.com
Join our listeners' community, go to nextbn.ggvc.com/community.

Today on the show we have Chen Ying. Ying is the founder and CEO of Shihuituan, the leading community commerce company in China. The literal meaning of Shihuituan means plenty of things. It's also a pun for value for money.

With its network of 80,000 community influencers, the company currently serves 20 million households in 60 cities in China. For November of 2019, it recorded a monthly GMV of 500 million RMB （roughly 71 million dollars). Shihuituan is a GGV portfolio.

Before launching Shihuituan, Ying founded an NGO aimed at helping farmers selling their goods online and another eCommerce company called "The Good Stuff". Ying worked in Bain Consulting and Bain Capital for 5 years before he got his MBA from Harvard Business School. Calling himself an intellectual cowboy, Ying has always been fascinated by the next frontier, which in his mind is the space, Africa and rural China.

We discussed the ins and outs of how the community group buy model works, including how he found the product market fit, the role social apps play in this business model, the multi-layer delivery system, and the replicability of this model in other markets.

If you have more questions for Ying, please submit them here.

For the full transcript of the show, go to nextbn.ggvc.com

Join our listeners' community, go to nextbn.ggvc.com/community.

For this bonus episode, we have Jixun Foo, managing partner of GGV Capital. Jixun recently led GGV's investment in Telio's Series A. Jixun shared with us why he chose to invest in the B2B eCommerce model vs B2C, his advice for founders who are solving the fragmentation of supply chain in different markets, the metrics he tracks for startups in that space and his outlook for Vietnam as a startup ecosystem.

For the full transcript of the show, go to nextbn.ggvc.com
Join our listeners' community, go to nextbn.ggvc.com/community.