It wasn’t that long ago when Kevin Xu, general manager of global strategy and operations at PingCAP, remembers walking into what he described as a “dark and dingy” basement at an internet cafe to play World of Warcraft and eat noodles in his native China.

“Those days did exist, but not so much anymore — there are many mobile phone vendors now and [almost] everything is being done on your smartphone,” Xu said.

But after attending Stanford University Law School from 2014 until 2017 — when he took advanced computer science classes at the campus because he thought law school was “boring” — the Chinese Internet economy has become a much different place.

“The interesting thing about the Chinese internet economy is that, number one, it has the largest number of Internet users in the world of about 800 million people since my last count, which is like two and a half times the entire population of the United States and is probably more now,” Xu said. “And not only are they internet users, but they are also mostly mobile users.”

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Open Source Summit China 2019 in Shanghai served as the perfect backdrop to record this latest edition of The New Stack Makers podcast with Xu.