Evolving for the Next Billion

Today on the show we have Josh Luber, the co-founder of StockX. StockX is the world’s first online stock market for high-demand consumer goods, namely sneakers, handbags, streetwear, and watches. On the platform, buyers place bids, sellers place asks and when a bid and ask meet, the transaction happens automatically. The Detroit-based startup was launched in 2016 and has expanded to Europe by launching its first authentication center in London. StockX is a GGV portfolio.

Before launching StockX, Josh has built 3 other companies and worked at IBM as a strategy consultant for almost 5 years. He holds a dual degree in law and MBA from Emory University. None of this is as impressive as the fact that he started collecting sneakers from 10 years old and has more than 350 pairs of sneakers in his home.  

On the show, Josh shared with us how his online price guide for sneakers became a stock market for things, why the obsession for streetwear and sneakers is a global phenomenon, his definition of global company being a collection of local companies, having celebrities like Eminem as investors and how he found StockX’s new CEO Scott Cutler, who used to be the CEO of StubHub, eBay’s online ticket exchange platform. We also asked about StockX’s plan for entering China and some pro tip for buying sneakers on StockX. 

In this episode, GGV Capital’s Hans Tung and Rita Yang interviewed Renee Wang (王小雨), the founder and CEO of CastBox, a global podcast platform often referred to as the "Netflix for podcasting". It uses natural language processing and machine learning to power unique features like personalized recommendations and in-audio search. According to a report from Sensor tower in April 2019, Castbox is now the biggest 3rd-party pure-play podcast app.  

Before launching CastBox in 2016, Renee worked for Google in China, Japan, and Ireland. She holds a bachelor's degree in Peking University in psychology and mathematical statistics. While in college, she taught herself coding and became one of the earliest Android developers in China. 

On the show, Renee discussed user acquisition in international markets with a cross-cultural team, integrating Chinese social app features into its global podcasting platform, the landscape of consumer-facing audio apps in China and her strategic decision for not entering the Chinese market. She also shared her journey of landing a job at Google without speaking a word of English, selling her apartment in Beijing to fund her startup and leading a diverse team spread across the US and China.  

Join our listeners' community via WeChat/Slack at 996.ggvc.com/community.  The 996 Podcast is brought to you by GGV Capital, a global venture capital firm that invests in local founders. As a multi-stage, sector-focused firm, GGV focuses on seed-to-growth stage investments across Consumer/New Retail, Social/Digital & Internet, Enterprise/Cloud and Frontier Tech sectors. The firm was founded in 2000 and manages $6.2 billion in capital across 13 funds. Past and present portfolio companies include Affirm, Airbnb, Alibaba, Bitsight, ByteDance, Ctrip, Didi Chuxing, Grab, Gladly, Hello Chuxing, HashiCorp, Houzz, Keep, LingoChamp, Namely, Niu, Nozomi Networks, Opendoor, Peloton, Poshmark, Slack, Square, Wish, Xauto, Xiaohongshu, Yellow, YY, Zhaoyou and more. The firm has offices in Beijing, San Francisco, Shanghai and Silicon Valley. Learn more at ggvc.com, or “GGVCapital” on WeChat.

On this episode, we interviewed Brian Gu (顾宏地), the vice chairman and president of XPENG Motors, also known as Xiaopeng Motors, a Chinese electric vehicle company and a GGV portfolio company. The company designs and manufactures what it calls "Internet cars" which has AI technology integrated into the vehicles.

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. At XPENG, Brian leads the company's global strategy, finance, fundraising, investments and international partnerships.

Brian discussed his journey from an investment banker to a tech company executive, why China's EV market excites him, and how XPENG differentiates itself from its competitors. This episode also features a bonus interview with GGV Managing Partner, Jixun Foo, on why we invested in XPENG Motors.

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


The 996 Podcast is brought to you by GGV Capital, a global venture capital firm that invests in local founders. As a multi-stage, sector-focused firm, GGV focuses on seed-to-growth stage investments across Consumer/New Retail, Social/Digital & Internet, Enterprise/Cloud and Frontier Tech sectors. The firm was founded in 2000 and manages $6.2 billion in capital across 13 funds. Past and present portfolio companies include Affirm, Airbnb, Alibaba, Bitsight, ByteDance, Ctrip, Didi Chuxing, Grab, Gladly, Hello Chuxing, HashiCorp, Houzz, Keep, LingoChamp, Namely, Niu, Nozomi Networks, Opendoor, Peloton, Poshmark, Slack, Square, Wish, Xauto, Xiaohongshu, Yellow, YY, Zhaoyou and more. The firm has offices in Beijing, San Francisco, Shanghai and Silicon Valley. Learn more at http://ggvc.com/, or "GGVCapital" on WeChat.

On a special "AMA" (Ask Me Anything) episode, GGV Managing Partner Hans Tung answers questions posed by our listeners on a wide range of topics.

How did Hans break into the VC world? What made he move to China and then come back to Silicon Valley afterwards? How does he deal with failures as an investor? What does it take for non-Chinese entrepreneurs to succeed in China? What motivates him to wake up and work hard every day?

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

The 996 Podcast is brought to you by GGV Capital, a global venture capital firm that invests in local founders. As a multi-stage, sector-focused firm, GGV focuses on seed-to-growth stage investments across Consumer/New Retail, Social/Digital & Internet, Enterprise/Cloud and Frontier Tech sectors. The firm was founded in 2000 and manages $6.2 billion in capital across 13 funds. Past and present portfolio companies include Affirm, Airbnb, Alibaba, Bitsight, ByteDance, Ctrip, Didi Chuxing, Grab, Gladly, Hello Chuxing, HashiCorp, Houzz, Keep, LingoChamp, Namely, Niu, Nozomi Networks, Opendoor, Peloton, Poshmark, Slack, Square, Wish, Xauto, Xiaohongshu, Yellow, YY, Zhaoyou and more. The firm has offices in Beijing, San Francisco, Shanghai and Silicon Valley. Learn more at ggvc.com, or "GGVCapital" on WeChat.

We interviewed Hao Wu, a Chinese American film director, producer and writer to discuss his recent work "People's Republic of Desire", a documentary about the live streaming industry in China.

Originally trained as a molecular biologist, Hao worked in tech before becoming a full-time filmmaker. He held various management positions at technology companies including Excite@Home, Yahoo China and Alibaba. From 2008-2011, he was the China Country Manager for TripAdvisor. As his career progressed, so did his passion in more artistic and creative endeavors. In 2012 he decided to pursue documentary filmmaking full time. His latest work, which is the subject of this episode, is a documentary called "People's Republic of Desire", a journey into the live streaming industry in China, where Hao follows a few top streamers on YY to document their lives behind the screen. The film has won the Grand Jury Award at the 2018 South By South West, among many other awards, and has screened at over 40 film festivals worldwide. The New York Times calls the film "hypercharged," while The Los Angeles Times says it's "invariably surprising and never less than compelling." If you haven't watched the film, we highly recommend doing so. It is available on Vimeo, iTunes, Amazon and Google Play; just visit desire.film for the links. Hao has produced two other documentaries, The Road to Fame, and Nowhere to Call Home.

Hao holds a bachelor's degree in biology from the University of Science and Technology of China, a master's degree in molecular and cell biology from Brandeis University, and an MBA from the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business.

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

The 996 Podcast is brought to you by GGV Capital, a global venture capital firm that invests in local founders. As a multi-stage, sector-focused firm, GGV focuses on seed-to-growth stage investments across Consumer/New Retail, Social/Digital & Internet, Enterprise/Cloud and Frontier Tech sectors. The firm was founded in 2000 and manages $6.2 billion in capital across 13 funds. Past and present portfolio companies include Affirm, Airbnb, Alibaba, Bitsight, ByteDance, Ctrip, Didi Chuxing, Grab, Gladly, Hello Chuxing, HashiCorp, Houzz, Keep, LingoChamp, Namely, Niu, Nozomi Networks, Opendoor, Peloton, Poshmark, Slack, Square, Wish, Xauto, Xiaohongshu, Yellow, YY, Zhaoyou and more. The firm has offices in Beijing, San Francisco, Shanghai and Silicon Valley. Learn more at ggvc.com, or "GGVCapital" on WeChat.

GGV Capital’s Hans Tung and Zara Zhang interview Tao Peng (彭韬), the president of Airbnb China.

Prior to joining Airbnb in Sept 2018, Tao has founded a number of companies in the travel space including Breadtrip, a social app for recording and sharing trips, and more recently, CityHome, a management platform for short-terms rentals across China. Before founding Breadtrip, Tao has worked at the network security provider IntelliGuard and has also worked for McKinsey for two years as a management consultant. Tao graduated from the University of Melbourne with Ph.D degree in computer networks and the Huazhong University of Science and Technology with a bachelor’s degree in communication engineering. He is also an avid traveler and has been to over 50 countries across seven continents.

Earlier on the 996 Podcast, we have interviewed Nathan Blecharczyk, Airbnb’s co-founder and chief strategy officer as well as the chairman of Airbnb China. If you haven’t listened to that episode, we highly recommend checking it out; it was released around exactly a year ago on April 11th, 2018. Airbnb is a GGV portfolio company and our managing partners Hans Tung and Glenn Solomon actively works with the company especially with regards to its China strategy.

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

The 996 Podcast is brought to you by GGV Capital, a global venture capital firm that invests in local founders. As a multi-stage, sector-focused firm, GGV focuses on seed-to-growth stage investments across Consumer/New Retail, Social/Digital & Internet, Enterprise/Cloud and Frontier Tech sectors. The firm was founded in 2000 and manages $6.2 billion in capital across 13 funds. Past and present portfolio companies include Affirm, Airbnb, Alibaba, Bitsight, ByteDance, Ctrip, Didi Chuxing, Grab, Gladly, Hello Chuxing, HashiCorp, Houzz, Keep, LingoChamp, Namely, Niu, Nozomi Networks, Opendoor, Peloton, Poshmark, Slack, Square, Wish, Xauto, Xiaohongshu, Yellow, YY, Zhaoyou and more. The firm has offices in Beijing, San Francisco, Shanghai and Silicon Valley. Learn more at ggvc.com, or “GGVCapital” on WeChat.

GGV Capital’s Hans Tung and Zara Zhang interview Jane Sun (孙洁), the CEO of Ctrip, the largest online travel platform in China which is listed on the NASDAQ. It’s current market cap (at time of recording) is around $23 billion.

Jane has been at Ctrip for 13 years. Prior to becoming CEO in Nov 2016, Jane served as COO of Ctrip for four years and CFO for seven years. Before joining Ctrip, Jane worked at Applied Materials in the US as the head of SEC and External Reporting Division. Prior to that, she worked with KPMG as an audit manager in Silicon Valley for five years. Jane received her bachelor's degree from the business school of the University of Florida, and LLM degree from the Peking University Law School.

Jane discussed her journey from studying abroad in the US to one of the one of the top female leaders in Chinese tech, her daily routine as the CEO of a New York-listed Chinese tech company, and her advice for young people with cross-cultural backgrounds.

This episode also features a bonus interview with GGV managing partner Jixun Foo, who led the firm’s investment in the online travel search company Qunar, which merged with Ctrip in 2015.

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

The 996 Podcast is brought to you by GGV Capital, a global venture capital firm that invests in local founders. As a multi-stage, sector-focused firm, GGV focuses on seed-to-growth stage investments across Consumer/New Retail, Social/Digital & Internet, Enterprise/Cloud and Frontier Tech sectors. The firm was founded in 2000 and manages $6.2 billion in capital across 13 funds. Past and present portfolio companies include Affirm, Airbnb, Alibaba, Bitsight, ByteDance, Ctrip, Didi Chuxing, Grab, Gladly, Hello Chuxing, HashiCorp, Houzz, Keep, LingoChamp, Namely, Niu, Nozomi Networks, Opendoor, Peloton, Poshmark, Slack, Square, Wish, Xauto, Xiaohongshu, Yellow, YY, Zhaoyou and more. The firm has offices in Beijing, San Francisco, Shanghai and Silicon Valley. Learn more at ggvc.com, or “GGVCapital” on WeChat.

GGV Capital’s Hans Tung and Zara Zhang interview two “GGV Fellows,” David Sun (a data scientist on Apple’s Siri team) and Bo Ning Han (a recent Harvard grad working on a startup in Beijing), on their life stories and their takeaways from the GGV Fellows program. What is the GGV Fellows program? Read this blog post to find out more: https://hans.vc/why-we-organized-ggv-fellows/

If you are interested in applying to future batches of GGV Fellows or our other events, please join our listeners' community via WeChat/Slack at 996.ggvc.com/community, where all related announcements will be posted.

The 996 Podcast is brought to you by GGV Capital, a global venture capital firm that invests in local founders. As a multi-stage, sector-focused firm, GGV focuses on seed-to-growth stage investments across Consumer/New Retail, Social/Digital & Internet, Enterprise/Cloud and Frontier Tech sectors. The firm was founded in 2000 and manages $6.2 billion in capital across 13 funds. Past and present portfolio companies include Affirm, Airbnb, Alibaba, Bitsight, ByteDance, Ctrip, Didi Chuxing, Grab, Gladly, Hello Chuxing, HashiCorp, Houzz, Keep, LingoChamp, Namely, Niu, Nozomi Networks, Opendoor, Peloton, Poshmark, Slack, Square, Wish, Xauto, Xiaohongshu, Yellow, YY, Zhaoyou and more. The firm has offices in Beijing, San Francisco, Shanghai and Silicon Valley. Learn more at ggvc.com, or “GGVCapital” on WeChat.

GGV Capital’s Hans Tung and Zara Zhang discuss the opportunities and challenges faced by Chinese overseas returnees (“sea turtles”, or 海归) who are interested in working in China’s tech industry. These are people who were born and raised in China, completed their high education outside of China or have worked overseas, and then have returned to China for opportunities. There has been a growing number of sea turtles in recent year as China’s tech economy boomed and the US immigration policies became less friendly to foreign talent.

We addressed questions including: What are the common pitfalls that sea turtle entrepreneurs run into? In an age where the premium of an overseas education is arguably declining in China, how can sea turtles make the most of their global experience? For aspiring sea turtle entrepreneurs, which verticals should they spend time on?

If you're an aspiring or current Chinese overseas returnee, we have a special resource for you: we recently compiled a list of 10 Chinese books on tech & entrepreneurship in China that we recommend all sea turtles read before going back to China. These include books on China's tech giants Tencent, Alibaba, JD, and Meituan, books on practical aspects of running a startup in China such as growth and marketing, as well as books on general Chinese business history. To read the book list, please follow GGV's WeChat official account by searching "GGVCapital" in WeChat, and then message the word "sea turtle" to that account. We also have a lucky draw for you: If you comment on that article with your story of coming back to China as a sea turtle before April 10th, you can enter a lottery to win a bundle of these 10 books, which will be mailed to you. We look forward to hearing your story.

And, here’s a list of news outlets and resources that can help you stay in touch with what's going on in tech in China: https://zarazhang.com/2018/03/25/how-to-keep-up-with-whats-happening-china/

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

The 996 Podcast is brought to you by GGV Capital, a global venture capital firm that invests in local founders. As a multi-stage, sector-focused firm, GGV focuses on seed-to-growth stage investments across Consumer/New Retail, Social/Digital & Internet, Enterprise/Cloud and Frontier Tech sectors. The firm was founded in 2000 and manages $6.2 billion in capital across 13 funds. Past and present portfolio companies include Affirm, Airbnb, Alibaba, Bitsight, ByteDance, Ctrip, Didi Chuxing, Grab, Gladly, Hello Chuxing, HashiCorp, Houzz, Keep, LingoChamp, Namely, Niu, Nozomi Networks, Opendoor, Peloton, Poshmark, Slack, Square, Wish, Xauto, Xiaohongshu, Yellow, YY, Zhaoyou and more. The firm has offices in Beijing, San Francisco, Shanghai and Silicon Valley. Learn more at ggvc.com, or “GGVCapital” on WeChat.

GGV Capital’s Hans Tung and Zara Zhang interview Wang Yu (王宇), the co-founder and CEO of Tantan (探探), China’s leading dating app. Tantan is social app that help young people in China connect with one another. It has a slide-left slide-right interface. Only when two users both slide right on each other can they start a conversation. The company was founded in 2014 and has helped users make over 10 billion matches to date. In 2018, Tantan was acquired by Momo (陌陌) for $735 million. Momo is a top location-based social networking platform in China that help people meet strangers around them. It is also one of the leading live streaming platforms in China. It is a public company on the NASDAQ and its current market cap is around $6.8 billion.

Wang Yu was born in Beijing and grew up in Sweden. He holds two master’s degrees, one on computer science and one in industrial economics. In 2007, he moved back to China and started his first business P1, a fashion community, before founding Tantan in 2014.

During this episode, Yu discussed how the failure of his first startup P1 proved crucial to the success of Tantan, why flawless execution is more important than flawless product in China, whether any social apps in China will be able to challenge WeChat, and the advantages and disadvantages of being an overseas Chinese returnee entrepreneur.

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

The 996 Podcast is brought to you by GGV Capital, a global venture capital firm that invests in local founders. As a multi-stage, sector-focused firm, GGV focuses on seed-to-growth stage investments across Consumer/New Retail, Social/Digital & Internet, Enterprise/Cloud and Frontier Tech sectors. The firm was founded in 2000 and manages $6.2 billion in capital across 13 funds. Past and present portfolio companies include Affirm, Airbnb, Alibaba, Bitsight, ByteDance, Ctrip, Didi Chuxing, Grab, Gladly, Hello Chuxing, HashiCorp, Houzz, Keep, LingoChamp, Namely, Niu, Nozomi Networks, Opendoor, Peloton, Poshmark, Slack, Square, Wish, Xauto, Xiaohongshu, Yellow, YY, Zhaoyou and more. The firm has offices in Beijing, San Francisco, Shanghai and Silicon Valley. Learn more at ggvc.com, or “GGVCapital” on WeChat.