TBC China Tech Livecast by Pandaily

Greg is the founder of Pillar Legal, a boutique international law firm across Shanghai and San Francisco that specializes in the video game industry. Before founding his own law firm, Greg served as General Counsel for Shanda (盛大网络), which was the largest Chinese gaming company at one point with a very successful game Chuanqi (传奇 The Legend of Mir), and completed an IPO at NASDAQ listing in 2004. Hear about: What was the regulatory environment like back then vs now? What was a game approval process like? Are Chinese sensors actual gamers themselves? What challenges did bureaucratic rivals cause for game companies? What happened after the March 2018 reorganization? Why does the Party always have a love and hate relationship with the gaming industry? Is the Chinese government's stance now going more towards the fear side? Why are Chinese gaming companies looking for a global audience from day one? Has the IP situation in China improved over time? Finally, hear Greg's recommendations for foreign companies to anticipate in China, especially after the new Personal Information Protection Law was passed on November 1st. Find Greg at http://www.pillarlegalpc.com/en/

Liqian Ren 任丽倩, Ph.D., is the Director of Modern Alpha at WisdomTree Investments where she manages, among other things, an ETF focused on non-state-owned companies in China using quantitative strategies.  She was a quantitative portfolio manager at Vanguard for 11 years, worked for the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, and has an MBA and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago. Hear about: Why macro is usually not the main or only factor when it comes to investment research; Why investors should be more discernible to headlines and rumors when investing in China; How much the demographic slowing down, the decline in birth rates actually affects Chinese equities; The risk of the VIE, the variable interest entity, and potential de-listings of Chinese equities from US exchanges;  The overall regulatory environment and regulations that were impacting tech in particular; Why Liqian believes the Evergrande crisis is not contagious; Liqian's predictions on sectors that will have great opportunities; Follow Liqian on Twitter and her company blog at wisdomtree.com/blog

Richard (Rich) Turrin is the international best-selling author of “Cashless - China's Digital Currency Revolution” and “Innovation Lab Excellence.” He is an Onalytica Top 100 Fintech Influencer and an award-winning executive previously heading fintech teams at IBM following a twenty-year career in investment banking.  Living in Shanghai for the last decade, Rich experienced China going cashless first-hand. Hear about:   What is the Chinese digital yuan, and why it is different from cryptocurrencies; What are the different levels of anonymity the digital yuan offers; Will the Chinese digital yuan help break the duopoly of the Alibaba and Wechat mobile payments in China; How will the Chinese digital yuan impact the world; Rich's personal experience using the digital yuan in Shanghai; How does PBOC enable the digital yuan to be used without internet access? Find Rich on LinkedIn, Twitter, and check out his book Cashless on apple books, Amazon, and any other digital bookstores across the planet.

Raymond Huang was most recently the Chief Strategy Officer of MOGU (蘑菇街), a publicly listed Chinese eCommerce company, and the FIRST one to launch livestreaming eCommerce or live shopping in China, which accounted for an estimated $150Bn USD in GMV last year. He used to be an investment banker in Hong Kong, and worked closely with Chinese tech firms e.g. JD, Bilibili. In 2018, he decided to join Mogu as Chief Strategy Officer. Learn about: Why Mogu began experimenting with livestreaming eCommerce back in 2016; What is Mogu's technology lab and how it helps beginner influencers to start; Why is the 24x7 supply chain throughout China essential to the rapid growth of livestreaming eCommerce; What is the difference between QVC (TV shopping) and livestreaming shopping, and why livestreaming eCommerce hasn't taken off in the west; What are the major differences between western influencers and Chinese influencers; What niche business models, special products are a good fit in livestreaming eCommerce; What are the strengths of each of the major livestreaming eCommerce firms such as Douyin, Kuaishou, Alibaba and Wechat, and their challenges; Why DTC brands are fond of building private traffic, and why Ray is skeptical about it.

Andy Tian is the founder of Asia innovations group, a company that has a suite of live social apps, e.g. Uplive, Lamour, SupreFans with more than 410 million registered users located in over 150 countries and regions worldwide. Andy has strong opinions about what's the best way to take the most interesting things he has seen in China and throughout Asia, and export them to the rest of the world. Hear about: How China's uniquely firewalled off environment created a different ecosystem, thus resulted in different revenue models of social apps in China; What is Operation aka Yunying (运营) in China, and how it works differently in western countries; The twin trends of globalization & localization in social apps; Why Andy implemented multi-regional operations from the start; What he believes are the unique catalysts for the explosion of livestreaming eCommerce in China, and why it hasn't taken off just yet in the U.S. or anywhere else.

William Li is the CEO of Akulaku,  the largest consumer finance company in Indonesia, and a very fast-growing digital bank. Akulaku is a Southeast Asian tech company that has both Chinese and Southeast Asian management, and investors from China. William used to work in the legal and financing industry for over 10 years. He founded the Akulaku with his co-founder Gordon, a senior developer in late 2014 and received funding from IDG. Hear William explain: How they identified the opportunity in SEA, and pivot the business from Bitcoin to a digital bank; Why they started with eCommerce, and how it helped with the rapid growth of their digital bank business; The difference in the banking system among Hong Kong, mainland China, and Indonesia; How Akulaku is structured and resources are allocated to optimize the efficiency, as well as balanced between the eCommerce and digital bank business; What the SEA market looks like today, and why they decided to expand to Europe next;

Richard is the co-founder of Grandview Capital, a VC fund focused on investing in Chinese entrepreneurs who do business outside of China (AKA go overseas or "chuhai" in Chinese). He's based in Silicon Valley and his co-founder is in China. Hear Richard explain: Why he started to look at Chinese entrepreneurs who are attacking overseas markets back in 2015; How the nature of the manufacturing & technology industry makes it easier for these companies to globalize; How he believes in applying the "time machine" paradigm to his investments How it's no longer about copying but localizing Why Chinese companies favor Southeast Asia and Latin American markets What he's investing in these days.   Find Richard on LinkedIn!

Albus Yu works for China Growth Capital, a venture capital fund that manages about 1.4 billion dollars. He specializes in consumer internet, consumer brands, and services investment. Hear Albus explain: The reason that he  had started to invest in consumer internet and e-commerce marketplaces; What the growth of DTC brands in China looks like these days; The differences that the DTC brands are growing between the US versus in China right now, and Why it is a better opportunity from both the consumer side and supply & manufacturing side; and he gave the Chinese "Lululemon" as an example; The reason that Albus recommend brands to start off online and build offline presence as well; He perceives the potential for some Chinese new brands to expand internationally as positive.  

Ray Hu is the founder of Blue Lake Capital, an early stage VC fund in China with about $700mm under management. Blue Lake specializes in SaaS investments. Hear Ray explain: The current state of Chinese SaaS, enabling factors and requirements for success Case study: Jushuitan (JST), an ecommerce SaaS and their sales strategy Enterprises' willingness to pay and other differences in the Chinese market Internationalizing

Jordan Berke spent fifteen years transforming the world's largest retailer into a truly digital organization by leading strategic alliances with JD and Tencent. He's now the founder of Tomorrow Retail, a consulting company. Hear about: How does Walmart China outstrip the US in four major categories? What are retailers in the U.S. focusing on right now? How do retailers turn their business into a platform? What are the differences in the China and U.S. business ecosystems? What myths persist in the industry? And finally, what's the future outlook?

Recorded March 9, 2021 on Clubhouse as part of the Inside Asia Club. Ron Cao has spent 20 years as a venture capitalist in China. He first went there during the 90s when semiconductor investing was a thing, but then found himself investing in consumer internet startups such as ByteDance and Pinduoduo because that sector yielded the greatest return, and is now finding himself investing in semiconductors again. We talk about lots of things, including: Has the pandemic changed your thesis that the next China is (rural) China? Is deeptech investing in China really taking off? What kind of background teams -- returnees -- are you funding? Thoughts on blockchain -- Ron was the one who told CZ of Binance about Bitcoin! Since we're talking about blockchain, why not talk about SPACs! Chinese companies expanding abroad / targeting overseas markets AKA "chuhai" Antitrust regulations ... hint: Ron thinks they're good for the ecosystem Offline businesses going online Financial markets are opening up, ie STAR market

Early on in VC, Boyu Hu was at DCM China and worked on the Kuaishou deal. Now he has his own fund XVC, managing $600mm, focusing on consumer internet. I asked what's changed in the last ten years and: Why's he continuing to invest in consumer internet? Is rural China where it's at? Are the big platforms more important? Are the big funds more important? How's he adjusting his strategy? Our conversation was recorded Feb. 24, 2021 over Clubhouse app and Zoom.

Recorded Thursday 2/10/21. Kevin, now at Github, is the founder of interconnected.blog, a bilingual newsletter on the intersections of tech, business, money, geopolitics, and US-Asia relations. We go over: What is Agora? It's a platform as a service company. The origin story of Tony Zhao the CEO who was previously at WebEx & then CTO at YY, where he achieved substantial success. Agora's technology & business model, which is developer facing and self service and usage based What happens when there are more Chinese companies like Agora building infrastructure technologies? Does innovation have to be something super different / sexy or can it also be arising out of battle-tested scaling-up technologies, like Agora? And finally, Agora's latest acquisition, another Chinese company called Easymob.

Recorded live Feb. 10, 2021. Q&A with Jack Yujie Yang who led the growth of Mobike, China's leading bikesharing company (acquired by Meituan for $2.7Bn in 2018) as VP of Growth & Product. He grew the company from 4 to over 200 cities, ~500k to over 30 million trips per day. He then joined MissFresh, one of China's grocery delivery unicorns ($3Bn+ valuation) as Chief Growth Officer. He is now working on his own e-commerce startup. We talk about: Growth in the US vs. China Specific growth tactics used at Mobike and MissFresh, such as red packets, WeChat mini programs, WeChat group chats, etc. Not all of these tactics can work in the US, why? Aside from favorable macroeconomics, some weaknesses Jack perceives in the Chinese market. Difference in (work) culture, equity incentives at Chinese startups Why Jack is working on e-commerce as his next opportunity Can mini programs be used effectively to test out new ideas? How do you find cofounders and employees? How do you hire, what do you look for? Influencer fatigue -- how are Chinese platforms combating this, if at all? Lots of great things about China speed, but what are the drawbacks? 

Recorded Feb. 5, 2021. On this livecast, we chat with seasoned investor Ed Tsai on the business of cybersecurity in China. Here are the main points: Ed's self introduction of how he ended up in China and some background on his most recent employer, QiAnXin, the largest pureplay cybersecurity company in China, a $15Bn market cap company that is at about 5,000 employees. Overview of the sector & history of the regulations that have really accelerated the industry. Hint: now that you can personally get fined or go to jail for having lax security software, executives and governments are buying quality solutions and willing to pay the price. Consequences of the US-China decoupling and its effects on Chinese cybersecurity businesses.  Ed thinks the entire space falls roughly into 4 categories and gives the representative players for each. Differences between US, China and Israeli companies in cybersecurity. Are we going to see foreign companies enter China successfully? What about Chinese companies going abroad? China seems to have a cost advantage. We end with some innovations Ed observes in the Chinese cybersecurity ecosystem but also overall business environment in China. Some of these things are out of necessity, such as training up talent.

Recorded live Jan. 23, 2021 Dan Grover is an experienced product manager who previously worked at WeChat in Guangzhou, China, and now works in Silicon Valley for an American internet giant. He writes on China tech and other trends at www.dangrover.com. In this session, Rui and Dan have a wide ranging conversation on their thoughts about WeChat 8.0 and the Channels video function in particular. WeChat Update: 1.1Bn DAU, 30% use video chat, 11% post to Moments feed, 40% use mini programs and 200mm people already use Channels, the video function that creator Allen Zhang says will drive WeChat's strategy for the next decade. Listen in to hear our predictions on: Will Channels survive or die off like Time Capsules? Will it beat Douyin in terms of time spent? How many people will post to Channels? Will we see more DAU on Channels or mini programs? What kind of content will be on Channels? Longer or shorter videos?           Will ByteDance build an ecosystem the way WeChat has?