Harbinger Asia

Today we sit down with Kai Huang, co-founder of RedOctane and the iconic game Guitar Hero. Kai shares his journey, from growing up in Silicon Valley as the child of Taiwanese immigrants to creating one of the most legendary music game franchises of all time. He reflects on key lessons from building RedOctane, including an early pivot from renting video games (like Blockbuster) to selling high-marg...

Hi folks, welcome back! Today Sandy Diao (Director of Growth at Descript) joins us to guest host and interview Adam Bao, founder of The Harbinger and COO at Metatheory. Since 2017, Adam took the path less traveled to explore business model innovation and venture deals across China, Taiwan, and SEA. Adam double clicks into startups he evaluated alongside Hurst Lin (Cofounder at Sina and DCM Venture...

Today we have joining us Peter Cheng, who is founding partner at Eminence Ventures. Eminence just raised $120m for its second fund focused on backing Chinese enterprise software and cloud start-ups. After a decade of torrid start-up growth driven by mobile and consumer internet, China’s enterprise software market is poised for a breakout and expected to reach $40bn in revenue in 2025. Peter shares...

Today we have a special episode with Hong Lu, founder of UT Starcom, one of the pioneering telecom companies in China. Hong is widely respected not only as a tech entrepreneur, but also as founding chairman at SoftBank China Venture Capital (which wrote an initial $18m check for Alibaba), and for his close friendship and successful collaboration with Masayoshi Son, founder of SoftBank Group and th...

Hi folks, welcome back to the Harbinger VC podcast. Today we have a conversation with my old friend from college, Jeff Zirlin, who is one of the founding members of Axie Infinity and runs their global growth efforts. In short, Axie Infinity created a Pokémon-inspired universe where players can earn tokens through gameplay, and in a just few years has become the #1 Ethereum game with over $1bn toke...

Hi everyone, welcome back to the Harbinger VC podcast. Today we have joining us Edmond Ng, who is a founding partner at Axiom Asia, one of the top performing private equity fund-of-funds (FoF) that invests across venture, growth equity, and buyouts in the greater Asia region. Axiom has had a stellar run since 2006, recently closing $1.8 bn for their Fund 6 (managing $7bn AUM overall), so they’re w...

Today we’re recording at the KKBOX studio in Taiwan, big thanks to the Firstory team for setting this up. We have joining us Phil Chen, founding partner of Race Capital and product executive at HTC, whom I can only describe as a basketball loving, deep tech investing, future building nerd of a modern Renaissance man. While at HTC, Phil led product management for the first ever Android phone, found...

Raymond Yang is founding partner of WestSummit Capital, a leading technology growth equity fund that primarily invests in the US and China. Since 2010, the team has led investments into defining unicorns including Unity (~$41bn mobile game and real-time 3D development engine), Segway-Ninebot (~$8bn mobility + robotics platform), Twitch (gaming live video platform leader acquired by Amazon), GigaDe...

Joseph (Jo) Phua is non-executive chairman of 17LIVE Inc, a company he cofounded and ran as CEO until June 2020. 17LIVE operates the largest live streaming platform in Asia (ex-China) with over 50m global users, led by its flagship app 17LIVE, as well as Meme Live and live stream eCommerce solutions HandsUP and FBBuy. Today, Jo shares with us his fascinating story, from selling watches in China to...

Today we have joining us Faisal Galaria, CEO of Blippar, a pioneer in augmented reality (AR). Now Blippar has a roller coaster of a story… the one-time unicorn raised $100m+ in venture funding but struggled to find a sustainable business model, burned through its cash and entered bankruptcy proceedings, before returning as a new business based on its drag-and-drop AR content creation tool (think W...

The Harbinger interviews Chee-We Ng, founding partner of Oak Seed Ventures. Chee-we invests solely in early-stage enterprise and core technology startups, and offers strategic advice and his network in order to help them succeed. Chee-We studied Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and has been programming in C and C++ since he was fourteen. Prior to founding Oak Seed, he was a manag...

The Harbinger interviews Tiger Fang, cofounder and CEO at Kargo Technologies, a Jakarta-based startup that aims to digitize trucking and freight logistics in Indonesia before expanding to other markets in Southeast Asia. Kargo counts among its investors Sequoia Capital, ZhenFund, Intudo Ventures, ATM Capital, Coca-Cola, as well as Uber cofounder Travis Kalanick. Kargo recently raised $31m in its S...

Zac (Xiang) Pan is Associate Partner at Lightspeed China Partners (LCP), one of China’s top early stage VCs managing $2 billion USD. Zac joined LCP in January 2013, after having worked at Steamboat Ventures (Disney corporate VC) and China Renaissance. Since then, Zac has invested in some of Lightspeed’s top deals, including QingCloud, Spark Education, Full Truck Alliance (Manbang), IfChange, PeerS...

Jacky Wang is COO of SHAREit, a platform that provides global users with high-quality digital content simply and quickly. Its basic file transferring function is over 200x faster than Bluetooth and enables sharing of files, photos, videos and music of any format. SHAREit has served emerging markets since 2015 and now has 1.8 billion installs and 600 million MAUs. Jacky previously worked at Google,...

Zou Jia is CTO of OYO JiuDian (OYO China), a Chinese hotel chain operator that since November 2017 has scaled to over 500,000 rooms on its platform by February 2019 and raised over $800 million from Softbank’s Vision Fund. OYO JiuDian partners with fragmented hotel owners in China by aggregating them onto its platform through leases or franchises and through renovations, standardizes the user expe...

Yuan Liu is a managing director at ZhenFund, one of China’s top seed funds founded by Xu Xiaoping (Bob Xu) and Wang Qiang (Victor Wang), cofounders at NYSE listed New Oriental Education, along with Sequoia Capital China. While at ZhenFund, Yuan has invested in some of their top deals, including autonomous driving unicorn Momenta, Yi23, Castbox, 12 Sigma, and more. With Yuan, we’ll learn more about...

The Harbinger interviews Dr. Fan Ling, founder and CEO of Tezign. We had our initial conversation with Dr. Fan back in fall 2017, and his company has since grown from 30 to nearly 200 people, so we’re quite excited to dig in and understand what’s changed at Tezign and in the broader China market since that time. As a refresher – Tezign is a digital platform for creative talent and content resource...

We interview Ben Hu, Cofounder and CTO at Liulishuo, an AI-powered English learning solution with nearly 100 million registered users that IPOed in September 2018 (as LAIX). On Liulishuo’s platform, AI technologies are integrated with learning content, well-established language learning pedagogies, gamified features and social elements to deliver an interactive and adaptive learning experience. Be...

Today we have the pleasure of interviewing Howard Chao, an active cross-border investor and advisor to entrepreneurs. Howard began his career as a corporate lawyer with O’Melveny & Myers, helped found the firm’s offices in Tokyo, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Beijing, practiced law for many years as a cross-border investment specialist, and was chair of O’Melveny & Myers’ Asia practice. In the past six...

Rapid fire Q&A with Tina He and Adam Bao. Covers China VC trends and opportunities across consumer internet, education, enterprise, AI, China US, and more. Full transcription at: http://www.theharbingerchina.com/blog/where-are-the-most-promising-vc-investment-opportunities-in-china TL;DR 👇🏻 - Wechat's ecosystem offers a new playground where customer acquisition cost is extremely low, so there's...

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...

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 S...

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 consum...

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 transitio...

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...