Harbinger Asia

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...

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 I...

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...

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 \an...

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 sp...

Today we host a Skype call with Ariel Liu, who is the general manager of international growth at The ONE Smart Piano. The ONE develops smart musical instruments, including its flagship digital piano solution with a smart keyboard, associated mobile apps, and other services that can teach anyone to play the piano within minutes. We’ll learn more about how the ONE’s piano solution works, how they we...

Following the broader trend of modularization, Strikingly abstracts away lower level code and design requirements, allowing any user to build gorgeous, mobile optimized websites in just minutes. On today’s podcast, we sit down with Strikingly’s CEO David Chen to learn more about his website builder product, how it works, and how it is enabling a new generation of entrepreneurs to set up websites q...

These days it’s getting increasingly easy for people to build full featured products and companies. Why? Well, fundamental features are becoming modularized and can be readily incorporated into existing software. That way, companies can focus on developing their core capabilities while out-sourcing other requirements to 3rd party providers. For example, use Strikingly to build your own website wit...

We sit down with Walker Wallace, managing partner of O’Melveny’s Shanghai office, to discuss how foreign tech companies should think about entering the China market. It’s worth noting that most tech start-ups should not even consider China entry in the early days, as building up tech and achieving a focused product-market fit should be the only priority, and a premature obsession over China could...

Today we catch up with my good friend Michael Wang, who is currently COO of YCloset, an online clothing rental and subscription service that raised $20m Series B in March and has already scaled to 40 cities in China. Before YCloset, Michael was on the other side of the table, having spent a few years at KKR before joining IDG Capital, where he was also the lead investor for YCloset's Series A+ rou...

Alvin's career to date has been an epic adventure, a journey that's taken him across epicenters of technology and the world's three largest internet markets: China, India, and the US. As a Stanford undergrad, he started ThinkBulbs, which developed 2 leading iOS photo apps and amassed over a million users before being acquired by Megatasty Labs. After college, Alvin spent time as EIR at StartX, bef...

Dun Xiao's pursuit of a quality education has taken him around the world, from Cambridge University to MIT and Harvard, where he studied electrical and information engineering. Armed with a lifelong passion for education and his technical background, Xiao Dun was inspired to found 17zuoye.com, (a.k.a. Homework Together), the largest online homework platform for K12 students in China. And so today,...

Dan Hu has seen it all. From leading multiple successful investments for Sequoia China during the 2010-2014 tech boom to helping found ZhenFund (China's top seed fund), Dan has always had an eye for finding the next big thing. That penchant for uncovering opportunities has led him to found Omni Prime, a mobile consumer finance service company that provides payday loans to low income entrants with...

At Chinese unicorn Ninebot Inc, VP of Robotics Li Pu compares building the Loomo personal robot to that of Apple's first personal computer, with the vision of introducing a robot helper or companion into everyday life. By democratizing the underlying requirements for robotic function (e.g. computer vision, voice recognition, mobility, etc.), Li's robotic platform serves as base infrastructure on w...

We sit down with Guy Sivan, who - immediately upon graduation from Columbia University - moved to Beijing in 2005 and has since started 4 different companies. In 2010, he sold his third startup’s core technology to a publicly listed company, and today he is CEO of Vericant, a Shunwei backed company that helps US schools better understand their international and Chinese applicants through video int...

Pollution is a real problem in China. So it should come as no surprise that the 13th Five Year Plan includes drastic policy measures, calling for a reduction of emissions from coal burning industries, while showing support for wind, solar and bio power. And beyond policy making or economic restructuring, there is also a call for domestic entrepreneurs who can help develop innovative solutions to m...

The sharing economy is one of the hottest sectors in China, with $250m of seed and Series A capital invested April-May '17, without accounting for the $1 billion+ poured into bike-sharing start ups Mobike and Ofo. While some of these start ups have the potential to create significant businesses (e.g. car hailing and bike sharing), the verdict is still out on others that are peddling shared umbrell...

We sit down with Cheng Tian (or as we call him "Tian Ge"), partner at Shunwei Capital covering TMT and consumer related industries. Previously he held senior positions at Goldman and Temasek, and he has participated in many investments including: Alibaba, Xiaomi, VANCL, Youku-Tudou, Tuniu, Shanda Literature, Mogujie, Momo, Didi, Rong360, Jiuxian, etc. Building on a previous episode about the shari...

In our first episode, we sit down with Shunwei VP/EIR Meng Xing to explore a broad range of socioeconomic, institutional, and financial factors that shape the Chinese tech environment. For example, why are the Chinese typically fast followers and excel at 1-100 over 0-1? What are primary founder incentives, and why is there a lack of talent in middle management? Why are there so many unicorns in s...