Avsnitt
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Hello, this is Rita Liao. Welcome to Episode #3 of Leapfrog, a podcast about entrepreneurs who have ventured out of their native land and are reshaping a slice of the global tech landscape. You can read more about why I started this project in About.
David Chang belongs to the generation of Chinese who came of age during the nation’s economic reforms, and whose worldview was shaped heavily by China’s increased openness to the world. A cohort of them went on to study abroad and founded tech companies that aspired to capture international markets. In recent years, however, they found it increasingly difficult to go global from China as geopolitical tensions heightened. Rather than taking sides between the US and China, Chang is keeping ties with both while charting an alternative path in Japan, where he’s about to deploy his firm’s autonomous delivery vans.
Tune into this episode if you’re curious how Chinese entrepreneurs like Chang are navigating increasing geopolitical complications.
Chang himself makes for an intriguing subject. Defiant of norms and authority, he fought his Chinese headmaster over school uniform policy. He rebuked Chinese investors who questioned his qualifications as an eager entrepreneur due to his privileged background. This Tianjin native bridges seemingly opposite qualities. He's both nerdy and flamboyant. He praises Shenzhen’s entrepreneurial spirit while criticizing its burnout culture. Growing up in China's state-oriented economy, he has nonetheless come to embrace free-market ideals inspired by political philosophers like Friedrich Hayek.
Timeline:
3:40 Why Chang left Baidu as the Chinese tech giant was embracing AI
7:42 Shenzhen, the least bureaucratic Chinese city
8:55 Chinese VCs are skeptical of founders from wealthy families
12:12 Most Chinese autonomous driving founders are ‘too old’
14:35 How Chang’s Whale Dynamic cracked the Japanese market
16:25 Why Japan is the “best” springboard for Chinese founders going global
18:43 Challenges for Chinese firms raising capital from US investors
21:25 Chang’s fight with his school headmaster changed his life
25:25 Chang had a culture shock arriving in Shenzhen from Tianjin
27:17 What the UK taught Chang as a young adult
28:46 Why Chang decided to seek US residency
31:42 To survive China’s business environment, one needs to be politically sensitive
33:41 Chang’s criticism of ‘involution’ (卷), the burnt-out culture in China
36:33 Chang’s defiance against the Chinese education system
37:59 Chang’s love for Frederick Hayek and the free market
39:07 Adapting to different cultural norms
40:34 Being street smart in China
42:20 Chang’s three life essentials
Mentions:
David Chang’s LinkedIn
Baidu started going ‘all in’ on AI around the mid-2010s (Tech in Asia)
China’s burnout culture — involution, or neijuan/内卷 (The New Yorker)
Chinese entrepreneurs face increased scrutiny from the West (TechCrunch)
Friedrich Hayek, Austrian-British political philosopher of the 20th century and an advocate of free-market capitalism
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit leapfrogs.substack.com -
Hello, this is Rita Liao. Welcome to Episode #2 of Leapfrog, a podcast about entrepreneurs who have ventured out of their native land and are reshaping a slice of the global tech landscape. You can read more about why I started this project in About.
Hailing from a rural chicken farm in eastern China, Winston Chi sauntered into a field after school every day, picking wild berries and daydreaming. It was a carefree childhood contrasting the academically rigorous, sedentary one his urban peers had in the 90s and 2000s. Occasionally, glimpses of the outside world came through gifts from visiting relatives, speaking to his village's history as a source of the Chinese diaspora.
When a relative brought home an early-generation iPod, Winston was enchanted — not by what music he’d put in the device, but its ability to store hundreds of songs. The original iPod sparked his interest in technology and a desire to explore the world beyond the berry field.
Winston is living in the Bay Area today. I talked to him just weeks after he sold his startup, Butter, to its larger competitor, GrubMarket, a pre-IPO company that offers software tools to farmers and growers across the U.S. On this episode, Winston talked about his journey from the chicken farm to a successful startup exit, the cultural differences he overcame (and is still working on) in the U.S., and how he handled his anxieties in life simply by taking action.
Winston’s words that stuck with me:
You don't have your family here. You have very limited support. So you actually need to be able to explain what you're planning to do, what's your actions and the potential outcomes to ensure you can gain support from people.
One thing I do believe is that if everything shut down, like all the restaurants were shut down… I think there'll be a new norm. In a few years when everything is back to normal, it will not be pre-COVID-19.
When I was there [near a California wildfire], the only thing that can deviate me from anxiety is taking actions. And that's still one of the thing I do believe: if you feel like you cannot really think it through on many things, take some actions and you will see through afterwards.
Because we didn’t grow up in Silicon Valley or went to Stanford and then work here, we have even a wider view of what the world should be, right? Especially if you are from a third-world country, you've seen the countryside super poor, you've seen the country developed so much in the last 30 years, and you have the belief that the world can be changed.
Timeline:
3:30 Winston’s biggest culture shock upon arriving in the U.S.: a society that rewards presentation, a contrast to Chinese people’s faith in meritocracy
7:00 Raising capital in Silicon Valley: try to make people’s life 10x better; and pitch in a way that even your grandpa can understand.
12:17 Winston doing the intuitive-enough-for-grandpa pitch
15:51 Why Winston pivoted from the crypto industry into a backward, “web 0.5” space
16:58 How COVID-19 inspired Winston to start a food distribution tech startup
19:18 Start building if you have a strong calling. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know the exact solution.
22:05 The best ideas always come from taking a walk and grabbing bubble tea with your teammates, not over a Zoom call.
26:35 How being an “outsider” positioned Winston well in building a food tech startup in the U.S.
28:42 Winston’s childhood in the Chinese countryside
31:18 How the diaspora community in Winston’s village shaped his understanding of the world at a young age
38:42 Winston’s three life essentials
Mentions:
DoorDash founder Tony Xu’s YC pitch in summer 2013
GrubMarket buys Butter to give its food distribution tech an AI boost (TechCrunch, May 2024)
The Art of Self-Defense, directed by Riley Stearns
The Social Network, directed by David Fincher
2001: A Space Odyssey, directed by Stanley Kubrick
*Leapfrog is also on Apple Podcast, Spotify and other podcast apps. The RSS feed is: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/2686580.rss
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit leapfrogs.substack.com -
Saknas det avsnitt?
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Hello, this is Rita Liao. Welcome to Episode #1 of Leapfrog, a podcast about entrepreneurs who have ventured out of their native land and are reshaping a slice of the global tech landscape. You can read more about why I started this project in About.
When Xin Yan heard about Bitcoin in 2017, he was studying electrical engineering in Israel. He soon dropped out of the masters program and joined a wave of entrepreneurs trying to prove that cryptocurrency, and more broadly, blockchain, has real-world utility beyond enabling speculative bubbles and scams. Backed by Sequoia Capital, his startup EthSign is building a digital residency system powered by blockchain technology. In a few weeks, he might be shaking hands with the president of Sierra Leone to bring his solutions to the West African country.
Timeline:
6:00 The “ideological ivory towers” of the U.S. and China.
9:30 How Xin chose where to reside: a place with inflows of talent and capital, and absent of a “strong culture”
14:11 Why blockchain might be the solution to verifying online identities
15:45 Meeting and vetting the “professional ambassadors” of Sierra Leone
20:04 Venture capitalist Balaji Srinivasan’s “network state”
25:24 Players in the grey area are “always quick to adopt frontier technologies”
27:05 Regulators “should spend more time studying the newest technology”
27:50 People in China find ways to use crypto despite it being banned
33:28 How Xin learned from his grandpa to always seize opportunities in life
38:41 Xin’s three unconventional life essentials
Links:
* @realyanxin
* The Network State (Balaji Srinivasan)
* EthSign brings DocuSign-like features to Line, Telegram with a web3 twist (TechCrunch, December 2023)
* Asia emerges as a promising haven amid the crypto winter (TechCrunch, October, 2013)
* Despite crypto ban, China’s tech talent rides the global web3 wave (TechCrunch, July 2022)
*Special thanks to Jess for drawing the wonderful frog logo, Jordan for sharing the technicalities of podcasting, Vlad for polishing my words, and Yunan and Jason for inspiring my vision.
*Leapfrog is also on Apple Podcast and Spotify. The RSS feed is: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/2686580.rss
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit leapfrogs.substack.com
