The China Startup Pulse

Liulishuo is an AI-powered English language learning platform operated by the AI firm LAIX founded in 2012 and it went public on New York Stock Exchange in Sept 2018. We are lucky to have Ben Hu, Co-Founder, CTO and Head of Adult English of Liulishuo to share the first 6 months of starting the company, their early successes, the growth, as well as his insights about managing a team from 5 to 200 people. “Empathy and strategic thinking together make the management easier.”

As of June 30, 2018, Liulishuo has over 83.8 million registered users and 7.2 million average monthly active users in 175 countries. The average daily time per user is 60+ minutes.

Drew Kirchhoff is a product guy. After studying finance in the USA and working for a diamond investment firm in China, Drew became one of the most successful product managers to publish the game Crossy Road in the market achieving more than one hundred million downloads.

“A great product manager makes a great CEO”. After being a product manager, he co-founded Yoli which allows users to learn English directly through WeChat. He shared how he and his co-founders found the market opportunities driven by the advent of WeChat, how they launched the company, developed Yoli WeChat mini-program and later, he explored deeper in the technical area to improve the product.

Today we have invited Philip Beck, who has had more than 40 years experience in the social media and marketing industry in and out of China. He commented on China’s digital transformation and how it is infusing innovation into China’s startup space.

He continued on to discuss how agencies and big companies have created opportunities for new startups to capitalise on those opportunities and the changing profiles of startup founders that are building new companies

The system of human perceptions is multi-faceted and voice is one of the perceptions that people pay the most attention to in Artificial Intelligence areas. Sogou established a speech recognition team in 2012 to explore technologies such as intelligent voice and machine translation. Now it is obviously a leader in the Chinese voice technology field.

In this episode, we’ve invited Chen Wei, the Chief Scientist of Sogou Voice Interaction Technology Centre, to introduce the technological breakthroughs in speech recognition, machine translation and speech synthesis behind Sogou translation products.

Chen Wei and his team also developed the Zhiyin OS system which is a system with multi-modal perception capabilities including speech recognition, handwriting recognition and lip reading ability. The edge of this technology also extends to areas such as hardware and visual identification.

Perks for our listeners: You can find a promotion code to get free tickets for NewCo Shanghai 2018 in this episode. Limited tickets and first come, first serve.

You must have heard of the Chinese social commerce legend Pinduoduo, the fastest-growing mobile shopping platform featuring “team purchase” and social sharing function in China which became a $23 billion empire in under 4 years.

For this week’s episode, we invited Nicolas du Cray, an early investor of Pinduoduo and Partner at Cathay Capital - Innovation Fund to talk about Pinduoduo and Social Commerce in China. Nicolas shared how he decided to invest in this company, analyzed the strengths of Pinduoduo, and the challenges of internationalising the social commerce model. He also answered many questions collected from our listeners.

As an early pioneer in cross-border commerce, Lu Guo chose to leave a multinational company and jump into the jungles of entrepreneurship. She shared her belief behind building her startup Shopal which aims to help global brands to build a strong presence in China through a data-driven process. She also shared her early stage business life in an accelerator - Chinaccelerator. Here is a quote from her: “The scary piece is that you only believe in system”.

Shopal is a solution provider for online and offline retailers in China which has secured RMB200 million (US$29.17 million) in a series B+ round in September 2018. Chinaccelerator SOSV invested in Shopal as one of Batch 7 companies.

Many opportunities and challenges are found in the startup world under the impact of globalization. Today, we have invited Omid Scheybani, former Global Head of Partnerships and Business Development at ofo to share the challenges of Chinese business going international from the perspective of management, product and brand, and also opportunities for overseas talents working in China.

Ofo is a leading bike sharing company in China, which was valued at up to $2 billion and had over 62.7 million MAU (monthly active users) in 2017.

Mindfulness as a tool for businesses has been growing in the West and is now starting to come to China. Brandon Mehrgut, of Shanghai Mindfulness, explains what mindfulness meditation is and how beneficial it is to the Chinese start-up culture and community. Practicing mindfulness can help improve attention, focus, and stress. It has also been practiced by important people and businesses, such as Steve Jobs and DiDi. Join us, and listen to how mindfulness can improve your business. Shanghai Mindfulness is an English-speaking mindfulness organization. It was founded by Brandon Mehrgut and has become China’s largest mindfulness community. Shanghai Mindfulness helps overworked, stressed out people find peace and balance.

Chinese companies are exploring many initiatives to achieve business sustainability, including Ele.me's RELAB and Meituan's emphasis on environment protection. Ofo, Mobike and many Chinese bike sharing companies ever generated a large amount of attention and discussion on whether they are leading a sustainable lifestyle or just creating e-waste mountains. You can see many opportunities in different industries in China to experiment and implement your idea of sustainability. Today, we have Richard Brubaker, expert in business sustainability, to share his perspectives.

Collective Responsibility is a Shanghai-based firm to design and develop corporate responsibility, sustainability, and leadership strategy for corporates, nonprofit and academic institutions.

The buzzword “New Retail” has swept through China for over one year. What challenges does it bring to the traditional retail industry and how can international brands cope with the new retail concept? Today, we have invited Stephane Monsallier, founder of shops for the future. He shared with us his views on the very exciting concept that was born in China and is now rapidly spreading to the rest of the world.

Shops of the Future helps international brands navigate the new innovation in the retail space in china.