Ben Gilbert: preference

Transcript context

…Of course, makes TikTok and Toutiao, but also Alibaba and Alibaba's massive Alipay and Ant Financial platforms in China. If you rewind back to 2015, 2016, and 2017, these are major things that are on Tencent's mind. Right as the magical unicorn, decacorn, centacorn Pinduoduo is being birthed. Keep that in mind as we go. Let's start, as we always do with the founder, Colin Huang. He was born in Hangzhou, China in 1980. His parents were factory workers. Neither of them finished junior high school. They were maybe on the fringes of the establishing China middle class at this point in time, but just barely hanging on. Again, longtime listeners and China tech fans might be smiling here because of what other very famous China tech entrepreneur was born in Hangzhou to lower-middle-class parents—a generation earlier. That would be Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba. The parallels are going to be quite apt here. You mentioned the generations. For folks that haven't listened to any of our China series before, the way to think about China tech companies is there are the best three from the previous generation of Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent. They controlled the ecosystem. They were the kingmakers. They were not only your Google and Facebook but also your Benchmark and Sequoias. They were both the VC and the Fang powerhouse of China. The companies that we've been seeing this generation—Xiaomi, Pinduoduo—are the ones that are rising up to become the next generation. You can see those big three then fighting to participate in the success of this next generation. It's such an interesting different ecosystem from US tech. When Colin was in junior high, he loved math—really loves math. He must have been quite good at it because he participates in a national math Olympiad. They have contests like this in the US. I remember doing this when I was growing up. In China, this is a really big deal. He ends up winning a medal in this Olympiad. Besides the medalist—he got an actual medal—one of the other prizes for how he placed in the competition as he got an entrance exam ticket to take the entrance exam and apply to the Hangzhou Foreign Language School. Initially, Colin is like, I'm not that interested in English. Fine, languages. I really just care about math and physics. His parents are like, no, no, no. You got to go take this exam because it turns out it's not just a foreign language English school in Hangzhou. It is one of the very best schools in all of China, and one of the most prestigious prep schools. It's a public school but a prep school in the country. He ends up taking the entrance exams. He does well. He must have done incredibly well because he's still on the fence about going to the school. The president of the school called him up personally—I think he's probably a sixth-grader at this point in time—to convince him to come to enroll in the school. He does go, he does very well. He ends up going—to the also very prestigious—Zhejiang University where he studied Computer Science. He interns (while he's there) at Microsoft in Beijing. This is crazy. Apparently, he said in an interview, he makes more in his summer interning at Microsoft in Beijing than his parents do in a year working in the factory. I don't know if this was while he was in undergrad or when he was in grad school, he also interns at Microsoft in the US in Redmond. He makes eight times what he made that summer in China in the US. Here's this kid, unlike Jack Ma, who stayed in Hangzhou, super fascinated with English and America. Worked as a translator and a tour guide but didn't get good grades. Stayed there until his 30s. Here's Colin. He couldn't care less about English and America. He just wants to code, but he comes and he makes tons of money.…

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