The China Startup Pulse

More thoughts are required when cultivating the relationship between the brands and users, from a level of “friendship” to being part of a one big “family”. As such, how can businesses deliver better experiences in this environment? Our guest Michael Lai has a diverse background with over 10 years of consulting experience in the areas of branding, interaction design, service design, and experience design. We will learn more from this interview in terms of how he understands the importance of segmenting your customers, maintaining your perspective and moving at the right speed in today’s society.

TANG is an experience strategy and design consultancy focusing on helping clients build a holistic ideal experience for their customers, whose clients have included Fortune 500 companies, startups, nonprofit organizations from financial, consumer electronics, automotive, and education industries.

Welcome back to the FINAL episode of Chinaccelerator 8X8 Speakers Series with Maggie Tan, Former Co-head of Strategy & Planning, Uber China, Russell Flannery, Chief Editor of Forbes China, and Michael Lai, Partner & Dean of X Academy TANG.

Now, stop for a second. Hold your breath and imagine yourself burning 20 million RMB per hour. Unbelievable? That’s what Uber and Didi actually did. Ultimately, burning money is a choice and Maggie advised that one should do the math before venturing into it. How do you actually pitch your company to the media in an impactful manner? For this, Russell provided us with some sage advice on how to stay ahead of the pack and carve your existence successfully. Lastly, the final chapter of this speaker series ends with a book. Michael revealed the essence of x-thinking, and how lessons learned from writing a book could also be applied to the domain of entrepreneurship.

Don’t miss out the amazing insights they shared in this episode!

Welcome back! We are heading to the 3rd episode of Chinaccelerator 8X8 Speakers Series with Alvin Graylin, China President of HTC, Neil Liang, Chief Product Officer & Co-founder of The Carevoice, and Lucas Englehardt, CEO of xixilab.

Price, Product, Place, Promotion. Sounds familiar? Wait till you see how Alvin raised the bar for this business strategy by doubling it to 8Ps. The path of entrepreneurship, in all its variation, still holds some key principles for those who wish to embark on it. “The simpler u made your customer journey, the more likely your customers will actually repeat that journey,” remarked by Neil. In fact, good customer experience can even be regarded as a baseline that either makes or breaks your business. Finally, Lucas believed in the power of focusing on one thing that works. No buzzwords, no fancy terms. We are going to do things one step at a time and examine for ourselves the beauty in simplicity.

Don’t miss out the amazing insights they shared in this episode!

This week, we shall continue with the second part of Chinaccelerator 8X8 Speakers Series with Lu Guo, Founder and CEO, USHOPAL, Jane Lin-Baden, Managing Partner of APAC, Publicis Group and Yintao Feng, Founder of MIXPACE.

What does it take to be a capable CEO? Lu recalled how she had to raise a few hundred million RMB within a period of 12 months during her coldest winter. Despite all those setbacks, she managed to get the results done and keep the company afloat. Fear of pressure, fear of being unnoticed and fear of falling. Aside from the fear, Jane also revealed to us the secret of flying high above the crowd and bringing out the best quality of yourself even when no one is watching at all. Yintao walked us through the time when he experienced a culture shock after returning back to China. Sharing his transition from corporate to startup, we can get to learn how he adapted to this new environment and what were his techniques in managing and working with people.

Last month, we just hosted Chinaccelerator 8X8 Speakers Series where we invited 8 of our mentors - serial entrepreneurs, industry experts and investors - to share their personal stories about entrepreneurship in Beijing and Shanghai, from where we selected several talks for our podcast listeners who couldn’t join us in person. Today we would like to present the first 3 talks delivered by Dirk Eschenbacher, Co-founder of Zanadu Travel & Media, Rhea See, Co-founder & COO of She Loves Tech and Jaeson Ma, Co-founder of 88rising.

What comes first into Dirk’s mind when he looked back on his startup journey is an important lesson he learned - knowing your customers and focusing on the problem, not the solution. As a female entrepreneur, Rhea zeroed in on the female community and suggested entrepreneurs not to accept the conventional image and sell themselves short. Jaeson Ma brought the house down with his passion and vision to represent Asia media in mainstream culture the right way.

Check out more suggestions they shared in the episode.

What is your first impression when you think of a co-working space? Ricky Adam and Frederic Bazin envisioned it to be an open community of developers in a shared physical space focused on creating successful engineering team.

It may sound ironic but the process of building software would necessitate social activities, and this requires a wide range of talented people. Coderbunker is right now having huge momentum and getting other non-developers into this community as well. The question is: could this business model be happening in other industries and become a game changer in the future of work?

Tencent Music, China’s answer to Spotify, filed for U.S. IPO with its soaring valuation at approximately $20 billion in 2018. What is happening in China music and entertainment industry?

Today we have Kenny Bloom who has 40 years experience in the global entertainment media space as the “Zero-man” for Warner in China to walk us through the history of China music industry from the 1980s until now and share his observations from every angle of the market. Once controlling 85% of the international music market in China and producing the #1 Chinese rock star Cuijian, Kenny is telling us the next big opportunities to succeed in this competitive market.

“If you think you can come to China and become a concert promoter, don’t come; if you want to start a record label, don’t come; but if you get innovative technology, this is a really great place to use as a launchpad to test.”

With his five-decade experience co-founding and investing in over 90 IT companies, Yossi is unofficially titled with “Israeli hi-tech godfather” and twice received the Prime Minister Award for life achievements in the high tech area. He is also the creator of ICQ, the world’s first instant messaging company, which inspired many messaging products including QQ in China.

We are honored to have Yossi to be on China Startup Pulse Podcast today where he shared his thoughts about the copycat, innovation, IP protection, Israeli tech ecosystem, and Chinese startups. As he mentioned, “We have to evaluate the whole picture...not just good or bad to be a copycat".

MWC Shanghai 2019 4YFN Startup Event now is opening 1000 free tickets to Chinaccelerator and China Startup Pulse fans! Fill in this form to reserve your seats in advance: www.wjx.top/jq/35116917.aspx

247tickets is a leading social commerce platform for entertainment in China, which just secured $2M in Series Pre-A led by Artesian Venture Partners with the participation from SOSV and Haitao Capital, and the company’s annual revenue in 2018 reached $4.9M. Greig Charlton, CEO at 247tickets and alumni of Chinaccelerator, joined us to share 247’s growth story today. After listening to this episode, you will understand how the new idea was born, how to deal with your competitors, the biggest challenge to run a business in China, and also how difficult it is to fundraise in China. In the future, 247tickets plan to utilize AI technology for personalizing the user experience.

95% of exits are acquisitions rather than IPO. Also nearly a half of them are before Series B. In today’s episode, we invited Benjamin Joffe, who is a partner at the leading global hardware accelerator HAX and has made nearly a thousand angel investments, to share his insights about exits. Here you can find out the big differences between exits in China and exits in the rest of the world, how Chinese companies develop the acquisition playbook globally and also for entrepreneurs, how you can plan your exits and the better way to integrate yourself into another corporate body.