We recently visited the Xiaomi office to chat with Donovan Sung, Director of Product Management and Marketing at Xiaomi Global. Over the past few years, Donovan has led not only product development, but also helped build the global team at Xiaomi responsible for launching in dozens of new markets around the world and turning Xiaomi into a truly global brand. We discuss Xiaomi’s global product and business strategy, how this varies by market (e.g. China vs. developing markets vs. developed markets), key channels and partners, and how Xiaomi has been able to achieve incredible international success in such a short period of time.

Link to write-up here: https://www.theharbingerchina.com/blog/understanding-xiaomi-s-global-strategy-with-donovan-sung-xiaomi-global-s

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The Harbinger recently spoke with Sandy Diao, Head of Global Growth for Indiegogo, a leading crowdfunding platform that has raised over $1b for makers. In this interview, Sandy shares her insights on how Indiegogo differentiates in building up a suite of services that addresses the entire lifecycle for hardware companies, how to leverage Indiegogo for product tests and pre-sales, and the role of Shenzhen and Chinese manufacturing in accelerating price, product, and business model innovation.

Link to write-up here: https://www.theharbingerchina.com/blog/enabling-a-lean-startup-approach-to-hardware-with-indiegogo-head-of-global

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The Harbinger recently spoke with Ayden Ye, Co-Founder & CEO of VeeR, which connects creators and users of VR content though a combination of social-following and algorithm-based recommendation. In this interview, Ayden shared his insights on the rapidly changing landscape of VR, and the unique position of Veer that allows it to participate in the entire lifecycle of VR content creation and consumption.

Link to write-up here: https://www.theharbingerchina.com/blog/unlocking-immersive-vr-consumption-for-everyone-with-ceo-of-veer-vr-ayden-ye

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Today we are joined by Alan Jiang, Head of Southeast Asian business for ofo, the world’s leading station-free bike sharing company. Alan oversees the company’s strategy and operations in Southeast Asia. Previously, Alan worked at Uber for four years, helping to launch Uber’s business in China, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Indonesia. Today, Alan starts by first sharing his story at Uber, before transitioning to ofo. Alan tells us more about how bike sharing is drastically different from ride sharing, and the impact that companies like ofo have on cities where these programs are located. Alan also talks about ofo’s global strategy, particularly in Southeast Asia.

Link to write-up here: https://www.theharbingerchina.com/blog/ofo-and-the-future-of-urban-transportation-with-ofo-sea-gm-alan-jiang

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit harbingerpodcast.substack.com

The Harbinger recently interviewed Dr. Fan Ling, founder and CEO of Tezign. Tezign is a Sequoia-backed startup that creates platform-based design and creative talent solutions. In this interview Dr. Fan shares insights on what led him to start his company, the unique cloud-based solution Tezign offers and the role of AI, different trends in the “On-Demand” creative economy, and how Tezign plans to continue to innovate.

Link to write-up here: https://www.theharbingerchina.com/blog/innovating-in-the-on-demand-creative-economy-with-tezign-founder-and-ceo

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Edward (Ed) Huang developed a keen interest in engineering at the age of 12. After college, he worked for Netease and Wandou Labs, two large Internet companies in China, as an infrastructure engineer. After working for Wandou Labs for about 3 years and witnessing first-hand the difficulty in scaling the database manually as data grew, Ed saw the huge pain point in big data storage. With the vision that there should be a new kind of database to tackle this problem, Ed co-founded PingCAP in 2015 as the CTO. Besides his day job, Ed is a passionate open-source advocate and tech blogger.

Link to write-up here: https://www.theharbingerchina.com/blog/revolutionizing-infrastructure-software-a-conversation-with-ed-huang

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit harbingerpodcast.substack.com

We sit down with Stella Zhou, Principal at Qiming Venture Partners in Shanghai. Since joining Qiming from GE Capital in 2010, Stella has focused on “Inter-sumer” - Internet and consumer - companies like Musical.ly and Mogujie.

We'll start today's episode by first talking a little more about Qiming's investment coverage by geography and by sector. Then we'll tackle some of the major trends within Inter-sumer, including the sharing economy, entertainment, consumer applications of AI, and consumer upgrade. Lastly, we'll cover cross-border investment opportunities, the growth and prevalence of social video, and also have a discussion around how niche social networks and platforms can generate tremendous value, despite the interference of large existing players.

Link to write-up here: https://www.theharbingerchina.com/blog/the-new-chinese-inter-sumer-with-qiming-principal-stella-zhou

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Harry Wang is the founding partner of Linear Venture, a $100m VC fund that specializes in early-stage technology investments related to China and greater Asia area. Harry has led investments into more than 40 technology companies, mainly focusing on data and AI-related firms. Harry has served as a CEO advisor to Baixing, Dianping & CSDN. Prior to founding Linear Venture, Harry was head of Facebook’s risk engineering team and led efforts on payments fraud control, and was one of the first engineers working on social ads and newsfeed. Harry received his MSE from Stanford and has a CS degree from Zhejiang University.

With Harry we first discuss his personal story, including moving from China to the U.S. and working at Facebook during its early years, to why he returned to China as a venture investor. Harry shares his insight into Linear Venture’s core investment areas, its sourcing and deals strategy, his views on Chinese vs. US tech leadership and strengths, and of course – if and how might Facebook enter the China market.

Link to write-up here: https://www.theharbingerchina.com/blog/a-cross-border-perspective-on-frontier-tech-investing-with-linear-venture

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William Bao Bean is General Partner at SOSV, a $300m venture capital fund known as “the Accelerator VC” with a >30% net realized IRR. He is also the Managing Director of Chinaccelerator, SOSV’s global Internet accelerator and the first accelerator in China, as well as MOX, the mobile only accelerator platform with 130m smartphone users in SE Asia. William has spent the past two decades in Asia \and has a breadth of experience that covers not only the rise of China's original tech giants (BAT), but also core movements including: O2O, entertainment, sharing economy, social commerce and more. We'll cover all of these major trends, William's Chinaccelerator investment experience, and his views on cross-border developments in the future.

Link to write-up here: https://www.theharbingerchina.com/blog/how-china-s-internet-economy-evolved-with-chinaccelerator-md-william-bao-bean

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit harbingerpodcast.substack.com

Today we sit down with Spencer King, who's a divisional head at Yixia Technology. Yixia is the maker of China’s most popular short video app Miaopai (秒拍) and live-streaming app Yizhibo (一直播).

We start with Spencer's story and learn more about what it was like starting a company in China that was acquired in just eight months. Key lessons include a different approach to UI/UX, execution and speed as a competitive differentiator, the prevalence of fraud and blatant copy-cats in China, and more. We then cover Yixia Technology and examine the broader online video space in China, discussing not only China specific trends across online video, short video, and live-streaming when it comes to content preferences and delivery approach, but also how they compare to the U.S.

Link to write-up here: https://www.theharbingerchina.com/blog/short-video-and-live-streaming-as-a-platform-with-yixia-technology

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit harbingerpodcast.substack.com