Hello there. This is Jason with KrASIA.
I enjoy reading. And every day I come across a bunch of inspiring content, which I want to share with you guys here. Starting today.
I appreciate your feedback on this and KrASIA at large. Please email me through jemshenghao@gmail.com.
GGV Capital, the US-China VC with excellent investment performance, launched their 996 Podcast a few days ago. Its managing partner Hans Tung interviewed some of the most influential figures in China tech scene, eg. Jerry Yang of Yahoo!, Liu Zhen of ByteDance, Kai-Fu Lee of Sinovation Ventures.
The latest interview was with Tao ZHANG, the founder of Dianping, a lifestyle services company that is often known as “the Yelp of China”. In 2015, Dianping merged with its rival Meituan to form Meituan-Dianping, which now worth $30B and is the fourth most valuable startup in the world.
https://996.ggvc.com/2018/02/01/episode-1-tao-zhang-of-dianping-on-merging-with-meituan-and-the-groupon-war/
This 69 minutes long interview covered a lot of stuff dating back to the “thousand-Groupon war” in China in 2010. What I found the most inspiring is:
1) How he and Xing WANG (CEO of Meituan-Dianping) see “boundary of a company” differently.
2) Tao ZHANG’s opinion on picking sides and how to approach strategic investments from giants like Tencent and Alibaba.
3) Tao ZHANG regrets Meituan-Dianping merger didn’t happen sooner and thus missed the ride-hailing opportunity, which was seized by Didi-Chuxing, now a $56 billion company.
