Livecast #3: Growing 2 Unicorns at China Speed with Jack Yang (Mobike & MissFresh)
Recorded live Feb. 10, 2021.
Q&A with Jack Yujie Yang who led the growth of Mobike (acq. $2.8Bn) as VP of Growth & Product and Chief Growth Officer of MissFresh, ($3Bn+ grocery delivery unicorn). He is now working on his own e-commerce startup. We talk about:
Specific growth tactics used at Mobike & MissFresh, such as red packets, WeChat mini programs, WeChat group chats, etc.
Not all of these tactics can work in the US, why?
Weaknesses, difference in work culture, equity incentives of China market.
TRANSCRIPT
Rui: [00:01:18] Hi, everyone. Welcome to this room.
[00:01:20] So the format of today's event will be a 30 minute fireside chat with Jack and then Q&A. Jack. Please give the audience a bio of yourself.
Jack: Yeah. Thank you very much, Rui, for inviting me here. My name is Jack. I am currently traveling between China and U.S., building a mobile marketplace that enables people to create their mobile storefronts and sell affordable and quality clothing, shoes, and accessories. So the division of the company is to build a Taobao of North America.
[00:01:51] But before I started my company, I was the Chief Growth Officer at Missfresh, China's largest grocery e-commerce and delivery [00:02:00] company with an evaluation of $3 billion in the last round. Previously I was the VP product at Mobike, China's largest and first bike share, and Mobike was sold to Meituan for $3.7 billion in early 2018.
[00:02:15] And in addition to my China startup experience, I was a product manager at Facebook and Uber. And at Uber, I was responsible for Uber's China growth. Outside work, I like to travel, meditate. I'm a private pilot. I scuba dive. Yeah. I have a lot of fun too.
Rui: Oh, my gosh, I don't know where you find the tie.
[00:02:33] The reason why we wanted to have this conversation is because Jack, you're one of those few people that have experience doing growth in both the U.S. and China. So I don't think a ton of people have your experience, although more and more people are working on both continents. How do you grow unicorns in the U.S. versus China? [00:02:51] What are some of the key differences that people should be aware of? And the similarities.
Jack: I'll try to answer this question because it's a very broad and complex question and [00:03:00] whatever I say is going to be wrong, it's going to be too narrow headed, but I'm going to do my best. So the work of growing a company, first of all, maybe I should define what growth encompasses.
[00:03:10] So growth is this concept I think made public by Facebook around 2007 and 2008. And later on, so many companies build their growth organization and the growth team are trying to use a combination of marketing and product engineering to grow their north star metrics, grow their company, grow their businesses. [00:03:29] So the work involved in growth is going to define the product strategy and a growth strategy, and you need to build a full-fledged team and to execute that strategy to achieve the growth target.
What's the difference between growth and operations, because many operation people or user operations have these gross metrics? [00:03:48] My explanation is that growth is objective. Growth is like a factory, and operation as a function is only part of that factory, but that factory involves many other people, designers, product managers, [00:04:00] performance marketing, and so on. So in order to do growth, I have to have a cross-disciplinary kind of understanding of how each function works and have the ability to build a team, [00:04:10] to execute this growth strategy as a whole.
I think the major structural differences between China growth and the U.S. growth is that China has actually deeper mobile penetration, higher online time spent and arguably better infrastructure. When I was in Vermont skiing about a couple of months ago, I couldn't even get a signal, [00:04:29] even the wifi didn't work. But today, even if you go to the lowest tier town or county, you're going to have perfect internet connectivity. So I think this infrastructure advantage all of us that exposed me to a billion people to grow to. So even if I grew a company from a hundred million, right, to 200 million, whatever is relatively easy because the percentage of that large population having accessibility to the internet is relatively small.
[00:04:54] Secondly China's economy is growing faster than the U.S. So it just simply gives startups more [00:05:00] market opportunities. I don't take credit for growing those companies because I think I should give most of the credits to the time, right? The time that I'm living in, where China is growing so fast economically. [00:05:10] And I think that exposed me to a lot of opportunities. I'm simply a surfer riding the wave.
Lastly, competition in China, I think, is more aggressive, which is not quite an advantage. Chinese opportunity cost is lower when there's a trophy, a billion dollar trophy, many people participate, right? Many people are willing to give 16 hours a day to compete with you trying to get that trophy. [00:05:32] But I think in return that competition helps us build more resilient companies that may have an advantage in competing with like foreign competitors going forward.
Rui: I really liked how you put that the competition actually makes the companies more resilient. And this is the first time I've heard of opportunity costs being used to describe 996, but I think that's actually very accurate.
For the audience, [00:05:55] could you give them a sense of the types of growth that you were able to [00:06:00] achieve? Because you're throwing around these numbers, like a hundred, 200 million, but did you actually get there?
Jack: So when I was at Mobike, I joined a company when a company was operating in kind of four cities, having half a million registered users. [00:06:14] And within a year, literally within a year, we were able to grow the company to 250 million. And eventually we get to 300 million registered users in the first 18 months. And that we were operating from four cities when I first joined to 220 cities from one country to nine countries in one year.
[00:06:35] And then we built 10 million bicycles and we have to build the infrastructures to operate those 10 million bicycles, both kind of technologically, and then also working organizationally operating across the world.
And then 18 months after I joined the company, we were able to sell the company for $3.7 billion to our acquirer, main client, [00:06:54] which is also now a public company. I was so certainly I got there. Yeah. And I can tell you more about [00:07:00] how I got there.
Rui: And that sounds crazy. Tell us more about the specific tactics that you use that you think would be helpful for the audience. And maybe describe for the audience, some of these. Give a little bit more context, cause I'm not sure how many people know about the programs or [00:07:16] infrastructure that you relied on.
Jack: Of course, maybe I'll draw an analogy first. So growth in American companies typically rely on two things. One is that America, U.S. is one of the most advanced countries with the largest population, single language, et cetera. So you said advantage for American companies to build first in America, because America has one of the highest GDP per capita. But very after you start to have the product market fit in the U.S..[00:07:44] All of a sudden you have 2 billion, 2.5 billion people grow to, because typically companies grow internationalization.
In China though, we still primarily focus on the China market and we primarily focus on cultivating the 1.4 billion population within China. So growing a company in China [00:08:00] is different, but conceptually like a smaller startup grow, you also have to catch a big wave.
[00:08:05] For my experience, both of my companies actually were strategic partners with Tencent, and specifically WeChat. So I understand WeChat and Tencent is my wave, because more than a billion people use WeChat on a daily basis. And WeChat is the app, the ecosystem that has the highest time spent per user in China.
[00:08:24] So for example, Mobike’s growth was driven primarily by the adoption of Mini Program, and mobile payment for WeChat. And for people who don't know Mini Program is basically, there's like a wrapped kind of a web experience within WeChat that gives you much better experience and like stickiness compared to the traditional native HTML. [00:08:44] So it’s almost like an ecosystem and an app within an app.
So that became the strategic focus of Pony, the CEO of Tencent at a time, and in general. So they got us in a program and we were one of the first companies launching Mini Program with them. We're one of the first [00:09:00] apps for that.
Actually in the very beginning, because primary scenario using Mini Program was to scan a QR code to lock something's kind of IOT play. [00:09:08] And Mobike was the only scenario that enabling that. So for a very long time, we are like 80% of the traffic or 80% of DAU for Mini Program. And the Mini Program within I think a year and a year half grew from no users to I think 500 million users. So we grew with it up. So it's not surprising to imagine that I can also grow my users to 300 million, which is a fraction of their total addressable user base.
[00:09:33] And Missfresh was also driven by the penetration of Mini Program within the chat group. So we were creating a lot of gamification mechanisms, such as getting cash rewards to users to share your red envelope to their groups. Very interestingly, WeChat had allowed that and in some way, encouraged us to give money away to chat groups, to enable the penetration of Mini Program.
[00:09:55] And if we were doing the same mechanism in the U.S., actually interestingly, the [00:10:00] iOS and Android app stores, they would not allow us to do that. I know a lot of people are trying to export these magnetism to Latin America, to India. The moment they launch the app, they get banned. However, WeChat allowed it, somehow encouraged it to do so. It's a difference, right? [00:10:14] I couldn't have done the same thing in the U.S. and also there were no platforms, no kind of ecosystem that enabled me to do such a thing.
Rui: Yeah, it makes sense that WeChat allows that since that's actually how they virally grew WeChat pay itself, one of their most important parts of the ecosystem.
Jack: I think that's like one interesting thing that we rely on different platforms to grow our users. [00:10:37] And also I think because the labor is still relatively cheaper in China, we rely on a lot of food soldiers, the sales, in-person salespeople to drive our growth.
For example, the Missfresh, we are delivering grocery, right? So we hire tens of thousands of food soldiers to go from apartment to apartment, do in-person sales. [00:10:55] We ask them to join a WeChat group. And if you join, they give you a $5 [00:11:00] coupon. And each time when it reaches about 200 to 300 people, we create a new group. We use a boss to moderate these groups. We do a lot of this kind of like relatively manual things. And because the labor is cheaper. [00:11:12] We also have a lot of tools where we're still able to scale these operations to 12 cities and have a coverage of millions of users.
Rui: Why do you think these differences exist and what are some conclusions we can draw?
Jack: I think the differences exists because China has been a follower trying to catch up in the past 20, 30 years. [00:11:32] Right. It's working really hard to catch up. China's GDP growth was impressive right in the last 20, 30 years. And in many ways, our demand, right? Our demographics and our demand leapfrog several generations. So China probably use the past 20, 30 years and accomplished what the U.S. did in the past 80 years since world war II.
[00:11:51] And I think therefore you can imagine everything moves three times faster in China compared to the U.S. and the various civically. For example, in the past 10 years, there are [00:12:00] many social networks, right. And that kind of appeared in China.
WeChat; Douyin, which is the Chinese TikTok; Kuaishou, which is also a similar short video app that recently went public and has like a valuation of, I don't know, $200 billion; Red, which is like a conti network. [00:12:17] We also have Bili, which is a social network specifically for gen Z.
And we've got a 1 billion new smartphone users. 1 billion, new mobile payment users. We created in the past three, four years, three, 600 million short video and streaming users. And everything happening is at the same time, it's both faster [00:12:36] and also at a much larger scale.
It is almost like the Cambrian explosion of new users, new scenarios, new channels, new opportunities, new rishis as everything happened at the same time. So it's relatively easier for people to catch one of these opportunities and grow big and grow rich. Of course, the downside, as I mentioned, is there's also a billion people trying to compete with you, right?
[00:12:58] So I think the structural reasons [00:13:00] created these differences and also was interesting is that it was these changes e-commerce for example, reached almost 40% of penetration by the end of 2019. The U.S. invented e-commerce, right? But we got a 40% penetration, but in the U.S. by the end of 2019 pre pandemic, that same number is only 16%. [00:13:18] So it was 40% versus 16%.
So I think the rise of China is the single biggest growth driver. And we were just all riding the big wave. I really didn't do as much as that big kind of a market trigger that opened up so many opportunities to us.
Rui: You’re being very modest, because there are plenty of other companies, like you said, started at the same time and we're not able to get to that level of success, but what are some of the weaknesses aside from the competition? [00:13:45] What are some of the weaknesses?
Jack: I think the weaknesses as I'm experiencing now, and I think Rui, you're actually helping us to solve these weaknesses where the problem created by these weaknesses is China has been pretty close off, right? China is at a phase where [00:14:00] it needs to grow out of its comfort zone of only serving its domestic users.
[00:14:05] It is already the largest consumer market in the world. It has the strongest supply chain. But China, in order to continue to grow, it needs to grow to reach globally, it needs to not only just technologically, also culturally, also ideologically, it needs to be a leader of some source.
And most Chinese companies have been competing within China using the Chinese way, [00:14:26] taking advantage of the Chinese opportunity. So they may or may not have that tool sets. Let's say to really serve the consumers outside of China and to compete fairly and squarely with competitors outside of China. I do think, and I'm very confident that this is going to change. I think, Rui, you and I are somehow being part of the solution, trying to make this change.
Rui: [00:14:48] Hopefully I am as effective as you are, you're building an international business. So that's one of the reasons you've decided to stay and trying to end. What are some of the opportunities that you see going [00:15:00] forward?
Jack: First of all, I want to say not everything's an opportunity. I think the higher level concept is I think some sectors are decoupling. [00:15:07] The deep technology sector is decoupling, and U.S. is building independence, right? In some of these very strategically important sectors. Either banning China from having access to the latest technology, or building independence around what used to be dependence on China.
But in other sectors, such as consumer technology, or consumer in general, I think is one of the biggest kind of opportunities for China, especially China exporting to the west, [00:15:33] and the reason being China has the highest density of a supply chain.
And then 2020, the supply chain, most countries just simply got shut down, but the supply chain in China continued. So manufacturers as I interview and research them, they've been telling me they've never received orders and this large falling waters from H&M, from Zara, [00:15:54] from these foreign companies and now they're receiving them. So I think because of these high density, concentration of [00:16:00] low skilled labor supply chain, I think consumer sector is going to continue to see a lot of growth.
Rui: That's definitely been a huge investment area. Okay. Let's go for something a little bit more lighthearted [00:16:11] before we open up to audience Q&A. What were some of the most memorable moments in your career?
Jack: Yeah, I think this is very subjective. I always thought that I would celebrate when we sold our companies to our acquirers, and so that I can have an exit and be financially rewarded. But both time when we sold Uber China to DD for $7.2 billion, [00:16:33] and when we sold Mobike to Meituan for $3.7 billion, I cried, I got drunk. I blacked out both times.
I think for me, I put a lot of heart into building product companies, organizations, and building relationships. And I think giving away these relationships is very difficult for me. I think that's maybe also why I'm determined to build my own company to have more control, [00:16:58] have it more safe [00:17:00] in this type of marriage. I don't want to just raise a child and have no stay and give it away.
Rui: I have another question. This has occurred to me, many people say that there is a difference in talent that you can find between the U.S. and China. And you're, like I said, one of those few people that's worked in both [00:17:19] large U.S. companies and large Chinese internet companies. So what's your assessment of, how does the culture differ? How does the talent level differ? I'm sure everyone's very strong, but where do you see the relative strengths and weaknesses?
Jack: I can only speak in the consumer tech category because this will be vastly different from category to category. [00:17:41] So in the category that I'm having had experienced in consumer tech marketplaces. China’s talent is more specialized. They typically have more experience just simply because China has had so many kinds of very diverse, different business models and things that happen.
It's very easy for me, say, to [00:18:00] talk to 10 high level consumer tech people operators working in Alibaba, and show me basically the next [00:18:06] five-year roadmap for my company right now. It's very easy to do. And it's very difficult to do. It's really hard for me, not just because I couldn't find them. It's literally, they don't really quite exist in the U.S..
But also on the other hand, I think China talent is typically more specialized. We don't really have as good as a liberal arts education, or college network, university network compared to the U.S.. So people typically went to school and get very specialized in a specific area.
[00:18:31] And what that means is when I was building an organization, it strictly followed my experience from Uber and Facebook to build that type of organization. I have to think about how to adopt a kind of organizational structure and best practices to what people are good at and not good at.
So we divided up our roles and responsibility more granularly compared to the U.S. and that we typically hire more people, right, [00:18:56] to do the same type of job. But going forward, I do see [00:19:00] Chinese talent will get more liberal arts education and become more well-rounded. But I think for the next three, five years or so, I think this will continue to be true.
Rui: That's interesting because a lot of people will say the reverse. Okay. And we now have some questions from the audience.
[00:19:13] So first question. Could you comment on differences in equity structures for startup employees, and has that made a big impact on the ecosystem in China and your experience?
Jack: I can think of some major differences and these equity structures and especially those very important terms in the equity investment term sheet is quite intimidating.
[00:19:34] Let's say this is that either bring the company IPO, and then you can get rich. Or you go nowhere, it's very much incentivizing you to go big or go home. I think in the U.S. is relatively more founder friendly and in the end, so even if you sell your company at a hundred million dollars, you can still make some money, is still considered a very successful exit, but a very few exits like that happened in China each year. [00:20:00] And even fewer of those exits are considered a success.
And I think second thing is, in China for employees, they're not very much attracted by these equities. They're very much like cash because cash is more, I think is more certain and most companies, as we know their equity, are eventually worthless.
In the U.S., I think because with probably a more mature ecosystem and a lot of past successes, and people are more open to being incentivized with equity. [00:20:28] So people certainly also have these perception differences.
Rui: I would definitely agree with that. I know lots of people who prefer cash over equity. Okay. And our next question is from someone who wants you to talk a little bit more about your video fashion startup. Could you tell us more about that?
Jack: Okay. [00:20:43] So I'll limit myself to maybe a minute or so, because this is a big topic, but in general, if you are a brand creator and you happen to be in China, And you want to launch your brand. You want to build a DTC brand that you have many platforms to choose from. You can literally [00:21:00] build your storefronts TikTok or a Chinese TikTok - Douyin or Kuaishou, Tmall and Taobao, JD and Pinduoduo. We have many platforms to choose from. So you don't really have a, let's say marketing challenge. You just, you can just focus on your product development and your supply chain.
If you were in the U.S., you have a dilemma, right? [00:21:19] So if you were building, say a hardware or something, you consider going to Amazon, of course, Amazon, but then you're going to be competed by 70% of other Chinese suppliers who probably can do something cheaper and then compete for each market share. Or you can go to Shopify and build your store. But if you go to Shopify, you have to figure out how am I going to afford the advertising spend on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and et cetera. [00:21:42] And then you don't really have any other options.
So I see the opportunity is there's a vacuum of platforms, e-commerce platforms in the U.S. and specifically on mobile. If you build a store on Shopify, great. You have a great, beautiful website. But how about mobile? People spend 80% of their time on mobile, 60% of the spend on [00:22:00] mobile. How do you capture that? I know. Facebook and Instagram are trying to solve that, but still adopting unity is too big.
So I think that is where I'm specifically focused on. And I think maybe video streaming can be a very good content format, but I think the structural opportunity here is that the U.S. needs a platform, especially post pandemic.
Rui: [00:22:20] Wow. Okay. Now I'm excited. I want to know more. We'll have to catch up offline about that. Thanks for asking that question, Christina. Okay. Next question. Well, you've used Mini Programs a lot in your growth strategies. Do you think they're a valid way of testing out an idea before making a full blown app, [00:22:38] perhaps?
Jack: I think the answer is yes and no. If your target audience happened to spend time on WeChat, either in groups or in public profile, et cetera, I think that's a perfect way to do that. And you probably ended up just actually investing more in Mini Programs than in building an independent app.
[00:22:57] However, if your target audience is not [00:23:00] primarily spending time there, but elsewhere. Then you probably have to consider using a different stack, but in general, I think if you could find some platforms to allow you to build something cheaply and mostly trying to figure out what your customers need and really gather insight and information and feedback, I would definitely do.
Rui: [00:23:17] Yod Hu has a question for you? Runs a fantastic podcast, specifically helping businesses scale in China, call the D network.
Guest: How do you find the right team or even co-founders for your new venture when you are affecting China right now? So I suppose you're probably going to be building a team in China. [00:23:35] So how do you go about that?
Jack: Yeah, first of all, yes, I am in China right now, but I have a team in San Francisco. And also building a team in China. And so it's going to be, I'm going to have maybe even two headquarters in several offices for this startup, but to answer your question, I think I would take an approach of just write down all the names and contacts of good people [00:23:56] I know from my direct relationship to the second degree [00:24:00] of separation my friends.
So when I was looking for my technical co-founder, I literally wrote down almost a hundred people that I know, directly or indirectly that are good, that actually fit into my profile, machine learning, AI as tech and et cetera.
[00:24:14] And I talk to all of them. That's why I ended up talking to, I think, 60 out of the 80 people. And get 10 people to be interested. Five people to say yes. And then picked one. That's how I do things. I've very much like how we typically recruit people. I just use the same methodology on deep.
Rui: Jack has a habit of muting himself at the right before he finishes the sentence. [00:24:36] But yes, we got your point. You have a very methodical approach.
Guest: Thank you. Thank you so much. It's crazy. Actually, since you brought up my podcast, Rui, we actually interviewed a crew of Fritz Dimopoulos, who is one of the co-founders of TruNarc in China. And he has a very similar approach to you, Jack.
[00:24:52] But if you guys are interested in learning more about this guy on spreadsheet, or just a very analytical type of approach to building a team [00:25:00] or growing a company, You can go and listen to that.
Rui: He has a very top-down approach to figuring out what company to start.
Guest: So I want to ask a question about how design is being viewed and leveraged in your company.
Jack: [00:25:13] I think of design as architecture. And there are three elements that are very important in architecture. One is that it needs to be engineeringly, like mechanically sound, otherwise the building collapses. So we have to understand how actually everything works, right? Making sure that data flow works. [00:25:30] Otherwise the data claps.
The second thing is in architecture is that you have to do function design, right? So usability, understanding what the people are really doing in the game. They're really playing. They're really understanding functions.
And lastly is aesthetics. You gotta look cool. You gotta look beautiful. [00:25:46] You gotta look like you're resonating with your audience. So I focus on those three key pillars of design and then make sure our designers actually have a very deep knowledge and fundamentals in those areas.
And actually right now for [00:26:00] my startup, I'm working with a designer who was a pretty good designer at Apple, who used to be an architect. [00:26:05] So I really drew a lot of inspiration from her and I think her methodology really works. And I think in a way she contributed to my understanding of design today.
Rui: Okay. Next, we have a really young entrepreneur who has a question about how do you think about adding more people to your team, especially when your resources[00:26:24] are constrained? What is the best way to approach this hiring problem? And how do you maximize productivity when recruiting people? How do you think about this?
Jack: I think because you're working in the health sector, even though you're building it for us, we're going to innovative companies. But the business fundamentals, [00:26:41] the core concepts and truth about our business probably remained the same or very similar.
So I will first add understanding the key pillars of your business. I take my business for example, I'll focus on merchandising operations. I'll focus on marketing, I'll focus on product and technology. So I have four pillars.
[00:26:59] And when I look at [00:27:00] those four pillars, I try to understand what key core competencies must this person, this head of this function have. Sometimes when I was talking about design, right? I talk about engineering, integrity, talk about function design and public aesthetics. Those are basically core competency [00:27:15] this person must have.
I applied that same kind of logic into these things and when we're looking for people, when you're assessing your co-founders, instead of focusing on how much experience they had or how successful they were, they got to focus on the fundamentals. You gotta understand whether or not they have the fundamental knowledge, and fundamental ethics to actually work in this function.
[00:27:37] Because startups change so quickly, every single year you're going to face new challenges, you don't want to hire an old dog that cannot learn new tricks. And the only possibility that the old dog can learn new tricks is because the old dogs have very good fundamentals and core competencies in the stuff that they do.
[00:27:56] So you've got to assess that kind of stuff and make sure your first layer of [00:28:00] management or startup founding team, whether it's co-founders or founding employees, truly have excellent fundamentals, otherwise you cannot scale. So that is my best advice.
Rui: Okay. We have a really specific question about the KOL ecosystem in China. [00:28:14] So last year, McKinsey came out with a report saying that influencer marketing has seen major growth year on year, but on some of these platforms, the effectiveness and engagement rates are dropping because of influencer fatigue.
And Jack, because you see so much of China, and China's much more e-commerce and social media forward, and also has a much larger KOL ecosystem. [00:28:37] What are some of the lessons and strategies that Chinese companies are using to combat influencer fatigue? How are they continuing to engage with their audience?
Jack: I think influencer marketing in China is mostly driven by new platforms. So we had old platforms such as Sina Weibo, right? The tiniest copycat of Twitter, they had a lot of influencers and I think their growth has become [00:29:00] stagnant. And then people have influencer fatigue and all this traffic and resources gravitates towards the top. So that platform doesn't have vitality and people move on to Douyin, people move on to Kuaishou, people move on to other things. So I think the Chinese influencer marketing stuff that you see is primarily driven by [00:29:15] the faster pace of innovation and the faster emergence of new platforms.
In the U.S., so you don't quite have a lot of that. You have Instagram, but Instagram is pretty segment. Right now you have TikTok, and I know TikTok is a great platform, even influencers with hundreds of thousands of followers would likely to engage with you, just because they need to collaborate with brands in order to create new content, because they need to create new content every single day.
[00:29:41] You also have Twitch, Reddit, Discord, and many other things. So I think if there's one thing to learn is to be bolder, to be the first person to eat a crap, trying these new platforms and trying to find your footing. And I think that's where you're going to have these arbitrage opportunities.
Rui: So you're saying, just for clarification, [00:30:00] cuz we actually just did a chat on this with me, Sophia actually on the speaker box and also with Peter, who's not in this room, but you're saying that the lower engagement on these older platforms, it's not lower engagement across all social media. It's just that people are going to whatever's the hottest new thing.
Jack: [00:30:20] I'm saying yes. In these older platforms, I think you're going to see the winner takes most, eventually all the money, all the attention, going to the top 1%, if not 5%. But as a platform star, you probably know it's more, a lot more democratic, but as the platform matures, and if the platform doesn't really have a good mechanism, you've got to see these kind of raised to the top.
[00:30:40] So to work with these effective influencers, most startups and companies, brands, they don't have the resources to do, and they can’t afford it. And that's why they have to abandon this wagon and move on to the next wagon. But don't get me wrong. I think Instagram continues to be very effective. But it's just effective for whom, and are you those people?
[00:30:58] And if not, you'll have to move on to [00:31:00] these new platforms and find new arbitrage opportunities and to build your scale, to become those big dogs. And then you can play with these big influencers.
Rui: Yeah. I thought we had one more person. Was that you, Sophia?
Guest: Yes, I'm back now. When we talk about China speed, I think there's a lot of great things that happening, but if you would redesign this and if you have a magic wand, what things that you would not take from China speed?
Rui: [00:31:24] Great question, Jack.
Jack: I really don't know. I think what I want to say is that every choice and decision has its benefits and has its costs. I think China very specifically trolls this direction for a reason. And I think Rui and I were discussing, right? What is really different between the U.S. and China?
[00:31:47] And I think right now the U.S. and China are not really competing at execution level. They are really competing who has a better governance and strategy planning to compete on a higher level. China very much takes [00:32:00] a Schumpeter economics approach, like really clear strategy, and centralized decision, enabling entrepreneurs for innovation, things like that.
And then the U.S. is taking a more laissez faire approach, democratic. And I don't know who's going to be more effective, but even if you can say, the U.S. is taking a very democratic approach to democratic until right now, a lot of consensus cannot be made and things are not moving. [00:32:25] Is that good or bad? And people can say, oh, it's bad because nothing happens. But it's also good that there's no single point of failure.
And you're looking at China, right? So we are very efficient because the government taking a five-year planning, every five-year has a new plan. And then the entire country's resources go into the strategically important focus. [00:32:40] And that's why we are able to move fast, more costly effectively. But for the things that are falling outside of these plans, typically getting more. And is that a good or bad? It's really hard to say.
I think ultimately is that which country and wish government in which the system can govern and leave the most amount of people at the [00:33:00] highest relative efficiency to achieve a certain objective and goal.
[00:33:03] So I would say the U.S. and China are very different where we have different sets of ideas. We have different problems to solve, but eventually we will be measured against the same set of measurements for success.
So I don't want to jump to a conclusion and say, okay, so how could I have changed it? I couldn't have changed anything. [00:33:20] It happened for a reason, but now we're facing new challenges. I'd very much like to take a forward looking approach and see how we should do this.
And I think I can comment on that, I think China need to grow is acceptance of differences and to be more confident with its politics, being more confident with its culture and to participate right in cooperation with the world, technology wise, be more open, consumer wise, support and really cultivating more Chinese entrepreneurs and people to be bilingual, multilingual multicultural, and to work with other people. [00:33:52] Just like what we're doing here. That's really, if you asked me a single thing I would do, I would change I think.
Guest: That's great. Yeah, the rationale I'm asking [00:34:00] the question is obviously, as we know the larger names, as we know, we are dealing with a lot of the unintended consequences and that's something that I also want to know from China's approach. [00:34:10] So thank you. Thank you for your answer.
Rui: Thank you. Thanks everyone for your participation. This marks the end of our hour.
Jack: Thank you again for inviting me here to speak. I’m very much excited to do this, because I think being an agent of change and being able to share stories, cross border, bring more collaboration is very important. Not only for my business, but also I think at the age of our times, right now that this macro environment. I just want to encourage everyone to participate more in these cross border discussions to bring these ideas and news to our individual audience.
[00:34:42] I think the world really needs this. And I think because of us, all of a sudden, I feel like the media is not that divided. At least there are some people trying to bring cohesion and collaborations here. We want to acknowledge everyone here for participating in doing this. And if you have questions and want to connect, or you can add me on your Instagram, [00:35:00] or I have my WeChat handle in my bio, you can add me on WeChat and we can continue our conversation.
[00:35:05] And Rui, thank you very much. And I'll be following your podcast and your shows and rooms. And I will learn a lot more from you.