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Crystal Huang

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2018-01-10
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2018-01-10
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  1. “To sort of benchmark and analyze how good your program is. And it's almost agnostic to what you're using under the hood, right? It doesn't matter if you're using silance or you're using Symantec, the endpoint. It's just basically about the end product of how secure you are. So I like that, hey, this is the first principles idea. And so it's going to be able to survive regardless of what is happening in security trends and what vendors become hot at any moment or not. So I had the thesis, I had customer validation, that I had investors who wanted me to go away. So all of those things, I think were pretty convincing. And then we chased the deal pretty hard and ended up leading the sea.”

    2018-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 3 Key Differences Between US and Asian Tech Markets & With Such Large Incumbents Chasing Early Acquisitions, Is There A Market For Later Stage VC with Crystal Huang, Investor @ GGV Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “And existing buyers, and the feedback was just extremely positive. Like, it was super clear to me that this was the leading product in the space and that they just had an amazing amount of potential. And simultaneously, because I'd been looking at the security space, I was trying to find like, you know, what are some first principles that will help me make sense of a very crowded ecosystem, right? And a ton of companies getting invested in, but not that many exits. And what I liked about Bitsite was that it's kind of a ratings agency for security. So you can basically, they'll score you based on their observations that they make about your network, right? So do you use firewall? Do you have encryption practices? Do you use Next of Breed endpoint providers? Does your traffic observe from the outside show a lot of like malicious botnet traffic or not? So from the outside, they'll actually score you out of 800. So like a FICO score, and they'll tell you, well, have your security investments that you've made over the last couple of years even worked, right? Are you any good? Are you more defended now than before? So it's an amazing way.”

    2018-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 3 Key Differences Between US and Asian Tech Markets & With Such Large Incumbents Chasing Early Acquisitions, Is There A Market For Later Stage VC with Crystal Huang, Investor @ GGV Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I had a few that were not publicly announced. I guess I can't mention those. So last year, I co-led an investment in a security company called BidSight. We did the Series C. So I got really excited about the company initially because I had a friend in an investment bank who I was catching up with and he was in their IT group and he told me that they had become a customer of this company and really loved the product. So I started poking around at it. I found that a lot of existing investors were reticent to make intros because they wanted to put more money into the company, which is a great sign, right? Like, you know, you always want to be in a club that won't have you. So I started reaching out to the company, got no response. They were very sought after. So I took it up a notch and I started basically reaching out to customers of theirs, whoever they had disclosed on their website. I reached out to customers and said, hey, I'm researching this market. I'm an investor. I want to know more about your views on the market. I can share back my insight with you. And so I had this kind of really collaborative set of conversations, maybe 20 or 25 with different perspective buyers.”

    2018-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 3 Key Differences Between US and Asian Tech Markets & With Such Large Incumbents Chasing Early Acquisitions, Is There A Market For Later Stage VC with Crystal Huang, Investor @ GGV Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “This competition and get the best terms, right? And so people are always trying to apply rules to how they should be doing things. And then, unfortunately, or not people in their respective camps give very opinionated feedback on how you should do it. When in fact, it's much more of an art, right? The art of dealing with people is very vague. And so lots of things can work. You can run a very competitive process and maybe raise like a ton of money on the terms that you want. Or you can be courted by an investor that you really like for longer period of time and just work with that person, right? And both can work out fine. So I would say it's realizing that there's no right path and you have to find the path that aligns with your personality and how you like to deal with people. I think that's probably the thing I'd like to change most.”

    2018-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 3 Key Differences Between US and Asian Tech Markets & With Such Large Incumbents Chasing Early Acquisitions, Is There A Market For Later Stage VC with Crystal Huang, Investor @ GGV Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I find that people oftentimes like to belong to certain camps of thought and advocate kind of relentlessly for those to the exception of other trains of thought. So as an example, there are people falling into the camp of every startup must be a lean startup and believe that there's no other way to create a product, right? Like faceteration, get product down as soon as possible, even if it's semi-finished. And then there are people who think, oh, it has to be fully baked. You have dedicated a lot of engineering resources to have real innovation. And oftentimes they'll get into these spats, right? And I think either model can work just like how I think a high burn, high growth, high risk growth model can be just as good as a very lean cash flow positive model. I mean, maybe the outcomes can differ, but both of those models work as well. And so if people even have predefined rules about how to fundraise, right? I mean, sometimes entrepreneurs ask me for advice and say, hey, if I want to keep a VC excited, do I stay in touch with them over a couple of months before I fundraise or do I kind of just dump the idea that I'm going to fundraise over the next week and create a process and create a”

    2018-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 3 Key Differences Between US and Asian Tech Markets & With Such Large Incumbents Chasing Early Acquisitions, Is There A Market For Later Stage VC with Crystal Huang, Investor @ GGV Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Well, I guess, like everybody I read the information in the Stratecory. And so those are the most probably the two I read every day.”

    2018-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 3 Key Differences Between US and Asian Tech Markets & With Such Large Incumbents Chasing Early Acquisitions, Is There A Market For Later Stage VC with Crystal Huang, Investor @ GGV Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “I would say that, and maybe I'll conclude that I'm wrong later in my career, but I think that on investing, you can't necessarily specialize.”

    2018-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 3 Key Differences Between US and Asian Tech Markets & With Such Large Incumbents Chasing Early Acquisitions, Is There A Market For Later Stage VC with Crystal Huang, Investor @ GGV Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “You're going to think I'm boring. So number one is obviously my Kindle app. I read it every day on the train. I get a lot of reading done. I also use my tile, which is this little Bluetooth device that allows you to find lost belongings because I lose my keys every day. Oh, nice, great. And then the third is my Dyson space heater because it's sometimes very cold in SF.”

    2018-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 3 Key Differences Between US and Asian Tech Markets & With Such Large Incumbents Chasing Early Acquisitions, Is There A Market For Later Stage VC with Crystal Huang, Investor @ GGV Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “One of my favorites that's an oldie that I read a couple of times this year is called The Code Book by Simon Singh. It was written, I think, in 1999. It's a popular history account of the birth of cryptography. So from simple substitution ciphers to World War II and Turing and now to encryption and kind of this computational arms race that you see today, it's just a really kind of fun, interesting account that connects innovation to real-world political intrigue and warfare and necessity, which I think is a really great reminder of why we even innovate in the first place. And so it's a very fun read that you should look at if you haven't already.”

    2018-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 3 Key Differences Between US and Asian Tech Markets & With Such Large Incumbents Chasing Early Acquisitions, Is There A Market For Later Stage VC with Crystal Huang, Investor @ GGV Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “That's a fair question, and it's definitely not easy, right, to be an enterprise investor in China. I think that there's a lot of interest, but a lot of recognition that the competitive dynamics are pretty challenging. But as I said, case three, where you build something novel, you gain enough traction, and maybe you have enough revenue that you just don't need their money, that's a possibility still, right? And that's still worth investing in. And that's what people in the Valley do as well, right? I mean, every pitch that I hear about infrastructure is ostensibly something that Amazon could do one day, right? Or Microsoft or Google, but you've got to bet that the incumbent never moves as quickly as a startup. So that's just the bet that you have to make maybe with even a little more risk. But I think even for companies that maybe get aligned with one of these tribes or get acquired down the road, if you're early enough investor, you can still make a lot of money because if a company gets the point where they raise $100 or $200 million from one of these giants, they're very valuable. And so you're going to have a return regardless. It just might not be if you were the Series E investor. So you have to be early.”

    2018-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 3 Key Differences Between US and Asian Tech Markets & With Such Large Incumbents Chasing Early Acquisitions, Is There A Market For Later Stage VC with Crystal Huang, Investor @ GGV Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “You build something differentiated enough that they can't build and they don't notice until you're pretty large and you have lots of customers and they can't really kill you and you don't need their money anymore, then you have a chance of actually becoming independent company. So there are some cloud services companies like Ching Cloud and UCLAD, which are big enough at the moment and have enough customers where they might be able to stay independent. I recently met a company actually called A Tiny, which is basically started out as a storage and cloud infrastructure business and now offers a suite of back-end APIs for developers. They got really big, but the week I met them, they took a pretty sizable investment from Malibaba. So they can maintain some level of independence for sure and continue to do well. But certainly now there's an alignment. And so it'll be interesting to see what Baidu and Tencent do in response. But those are the three sort of examples of what could happen.”

    2018-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 3 Key Differences Between US and Asian Tech Markets & With Such Large Incumbents Chasing Early Acquisitions, Is There A Market For Later Stage VC with Crystal Huang, Investor @ GGV Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Millions or tens of millions of US dollar bond rate, even so they're actually doing pretty well. Then Alibaba released Ding Talk, which is a free workplace collaboration and chat product and it's been free and it's basically completely sucked away that market and run away with it. And now really nobody wants to build a enterprise chat product anymore because it just can't win because they can survive independently without having a revenue source and Alibaba offers it for free. So that was one case where that happened. A second possibility is that one of the three giants will try to own a significant percentage in your company. So they will try to invest in you. But the purpose is to kind of make you part of their ecosystem or their tribe, to use you as a selling point to win more customers and beat the other two. So Alibaba might try to suck you into their ecosystem so that they can better compete with TezZed and Baidu. And then each of those two will invest in their own version of the same. The three of them will go ahead to head. This has happened across many consumer platforms and it's happening in the enterprise as well. Or in the third case, if you're really lucky,”

    2018-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 3 Key Differences Between US and Asian Tech Markets & With Such Large Incumbents Chasing Early Acquisitions, Is There A Market For Later Stage VC with Crystal Huang, Investor @ GGV Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Yeah, definitely. So everybody talks about Baidu Alibaba Tencent, which they call BAT. And then, of course, there are a couple of other giants that often follow, right? Whether that's Xiaomi or DDAxi or Totia or Maituan or some of the other big ones. But the top three exert an almost disproportionate influence on the market relative to even Amazon or Google in the US. So as an example, if you're an enterprise software company and you're starting up and you're starting to gain paid traction, one of three things will most likely happen. So one of those three giants will take notice and they'll either build 80% of the similar functionality in-house and make it free and basically completely take away your market share, even if they do that at a loss because what they care about is market share and users. So they'll basically destroy your ability to monetize that market if they want. So that's one possibility. This actually happened. So two years ago when I went back to China, I visited a bunch of companies. There was a small ecosystem of companies trying to be like Slack in the US, right? So workplace chat and productivity. Some of them had gotten to”

    2018-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 3 Key Differences Between US and Asian Tech Markets & With Such Large Incumbents Chasing Early Acquisitions, Is There A Market For Later Stage VC with Crystal Huang, Investor @ GGV Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “In the way that I would say Uber has struggled with different cities and different municipalities over and over again in its life, I find that that friction exists less. So even though the idea could be quite similar, the way that you make that idea succeed just can't be done except by a local team. So that's one aspect of it. But there's the second aspect of it, though, is that there is a lot of net new innovation happening as well, right? And so the whole concept of bike sharing, right? The concept of sharing anything like iPhone chargers and now there are shared printers and various other things you can fix assets that you can share basically. That was completely invented in China. So I think they're increasingly and those models are actually starting to come to the US, as you may have noticed. And so I think we're just now starting to have that balance shift in terms of not just deployment and business model innovation, which is what they've always touted, but also actually net new ideas. And then I think very soon we're going to see that the AI and machine learning and deep learning talent in China is very, very strong because the government and the large technology.”

    2018-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 3 Key Differences Between US and Asian Tech Markets & With Such Large Incumbents Chasing Early Acquisitions, Is There A Market For Later Stage VC with Crystal Huang, Investor @ GGV Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Obviously, teams in China take inspiration a lot from what's working in the US, right? And there have been many, many big companies built up in China just doing that. But I think you should probably, there's almost this bifurcated market, right? In that, yes, you know, they'll take inspiration from ideas that have succeeded here and then they'll deploy those ideas in China. But the deployment is actually oftentimes pretty different. So the general idea might be the same, right? Such as, you know, there's an Uber equivalent in China called DD, right, which we've invested in that is essentially kind of the same service to the consumer. pricing of how you've designed the app, the way that you have to map very complicated cities in China and way more of them, as well as the way that they will create incentives for drivers and create incentives for riders to adopt because it's such a competitive ecosystem. There's all these different tricks that they're kind of doing under the hood that differ a lot from how you might have built up that business in the US. And then there's also less of a regulatory overhang there, actually.”

    2018-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 3 Key Differences Between US and Asian Tech Markets & With Such Large Incumbents Chasing Early Acquisitions, Is There A Market For Later Stage VC with Crystal Huang, Investor @ GGV Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “And allowed them to name the company something different in Mandarin. You know, like a clever, witty Chinese translation of the name. All of those little tricks are really important to gaining mindshare. And for the most part, companies here are not willing to take those risks.”

    2018-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 3 Key Differences Between US and Asian Tech Markets & With Such Large Incumbents Chasing Early Acquisitions, Is There A Market For Later Stage VC with Crystal Huang, Investor @ GGV Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Colleagues over there to open the office and start hiring local people, but the direction, the strategy is really still coming from the headquarters. That isn't really a model that works very well. Because as I alluded to, to succeed, you really have to be flexible with your business model, your pricing scheme, how you distribute, how you deal with customers. You really have to be flexible and you can only do that by hiring local talent. And giving them a lot of runway to be independent and make their own decisions, even if they are completely different from what HQ would have done. So it's hard for most companies to do that, right? They want to exert control over what they might perceive to be a branch office, but that's not a formula for success. There have been a couple of, I would say, moderate successes, not resoundingly successful, but for a long time now people have pointed to Evernote and LinkedIn as being decent deployment that happened in China. And both of those cases, they hired very local sort of general managers or heads of China. It gave them the freedom to build their own teams, let them sign distribution deals, BD deals on their own.”

    2018-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 3 Key Differences Between US and Asian Tech Markets & With Such Large Incumbents Chasing Early Acquisitions, Is There A Market For Later Stage VC with Crystal Huang, Investor @ GGV Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “A fair question, right? I mean, yeah, you're right that there have been very few successes. I think it comes down to a couple of points. One is that China is much more of kind of a closed ecosystem, right, than you might see in most other countries. If you go to India or you go to Brazil, the most popular consumer applications and some of the most popular enterprise software suites are probably comparable to what they are here. It's pretty easy to get products into those countries and sell them. In China, the most popular consumer products don't really exist here. They're not similarly popular. There's Alibaba, there's Tencent, there's the Hawi Chad ecosystem. There's a whole slew of different games. The whole world is different and there are a lot of barriers to entry from a regulation perspective, but also from a distribution perspective. So a lot of companies maybe five, ten years ago tried to get into China, but don't make a couple of key mistakes. One is they won't be sufficiently committed to hiring a local team with experience in both China and the US. Oftentimes maybe they'll ship a bunch of American”

    2018-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 3 Key Differences Between US and Asian Tech Markets & With Such Large Incumbents Chasing Early Acquisitions, Is There A Market For Later Stage VC with Crystal Huang, Investor @ GGV Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “System feels over our ways, not necessarily the wrong way, and it might be the better way. And so if you want to deal with them today in this kind of environment, you really have to try to do it their way or compromise because there's no need for them to ever buy from an American company, right? They could build a house. They have local solutions that are good. And so they have a lot of negotiating leverage today that they used to not have. And so I would say, yes, they'll converge with US distribution and deployment and sales habits, but not right away.”

    2018-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 3 Key Differences Between US and Asian Tech Markets & With Such Large Incumbents Chasing Early Acquisitions, Is There A Market For Later Stage VC with Crystal Huang, Investor @ GGV Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Over time they're going to converge. 10 years ago in moving from field sales and person sales to inside sales to lightweight demand gen. I think it's as people become more tech savvy and as engineering and IT organizations even in traditional industries learn more, try more things, get pitched by more vendors, it's almost inevitable that you're going to move toward a lighter weight model in my opinion. So I'm sure that there's going to be a convergence. But today, if you're an American company trying to break into China, you definitely have to play by their rules. I think that, you know, maybe in the past, you know, the valley was more of a model that they believe they should emulate, not just in terms of technology, but in terms of business model, how things are sold, how you deal with customers. But now the whole Chinese startup and tech ecosystem is incredibly vibrant and incredibly strong. And in some ways even out innovating the US, right? And so it's kind of hard to capture the sense of pride that the whole sort of ecosystem”

    2018-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 3 Key Differences Between US and Asian Tech Markets & With Such Large Incumbents Chasing Early Acquisitions, Is There A Market For Later Stage VC with Crystal Huang, Investor @ GGV Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Live. Some inside salespeople growing number because that model is getting more popular but still lean. And then in terms of peer demand gen, not very many because that model hasn't yet found a way to work.”

    2018-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 3 Key Differences Between US and Asian Tech Markets & With Such Large Incumbents Chasing Early Acquisitions, Is There A Market For Later Stage VC with Crystal Huang, Investor @ GGV Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Yeah, exactly. So again, I think comparing the two geographies, increasingly there's the popularity in the US of self-service models, right? Small deal sizes, high velocity inbound demand generation. You can nurture people through your funnel and not even have to talk to them on the phone. It's almost the very end, right? And this is the model exemplified by Shopify or by Zendesk and even relatively larger deal sizes in the 50 to 100K can be closed over the phone or with not that many touches. And so you can have much larger inside sales team than you do field sales and then you sort of deploy your field salespeople only for the very, very big whale type customers, right? And so that's how you're able to run a sales org in the US today. In China, you have to be very reliant on field sales. There's still the expectation that you would go see them in person, that you have to build trust that way. They still expect that you're going to do some level of customization for them because they're just used to, right? This is how they've been sold software for a very long time historically. And so you're going to have way more people in the field meeting customers.”

    2018-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 3 Key Differences Between US and Asian Tech Markets & With Such Large Incumbents Chasing Early Acquisitions, Is There A Market For Later Stage VC with Crystal Huang, Investor @ GGV Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Today, there's two trains of thought here, right? If you sell just pure software and you're not able to provide very heavy duty professional services element to it, you're not going to be able to get a very big deal size. If you want to get to ever larger deal sizes, a large proportion of that will be training, consulting, professional services, deployment type work. And so you have to basically commit to a certain type of model, right? Either you have a pretty high cost of sales, high cost of deployment model where you justify bigger deals, or you have to realize that if you sell pure software in a relatively lightweight and it has minimal customization, that the deal sizes will be much smaller than in the US. And so you have to sell way more of them, which means that your acquisition model has to be way more efficient and you have to potentially monetize with other things beyond license. So those are the kind of two pads that you can pick from, right? Both of which are relatively different from how companies might sell in the US today.”

    2018-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 3 Key Differences Between US and Asian Tech Markets & With Such Large Incumbents Chasing Early Acquisitions, Is There A Market For Later Stage VC with Crystal Huang, Investor @ GGV Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Sure, so no particular order. I would first say, you know, I've had the chance to travel to China a bit as a part of my role and meet enterprise companies there. And I actually was just there last week. So some of these points are really fresh in my head. The first I'd flag is there's a difference in deal sizes and as well as, you know,”

    2018-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 3 Key Differences Between US and Asian Tech Markets & With Such Large Incumbents Chasing Early Acquisitions, Is There A Market For Later Stage VC with Crystal Huang, Investor @ GGV Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “People who maybe come from financial backgrounds like myself who are very curious and analytical still have a shot at mattering adventure and doing good investments. And so I think that's very motivating in any kind of background can really succeed if they want to.”

    2018-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 3 Key Differences Between US and Asian Tech Markets & With Such Large Incumbents Chasing Early Acquisitions, Is There A Market For Later Stage VC with Crystal Huang, Investor @ GGV Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “A really fascinating deploying dozens of builds every day, always changing up your stack. So even if you were a successful founder, operator 10 years ago, the sort of arsenal of tools that you were really familiar with probably have changed. So from that perspective, that's true that skill sets become very stale. I would say though that there are some skills that are timeless and universal, and that has a lot to do with people management, right? And so how do you incentivize talent? How do you build up an organization that is really sensical and is incentivized in the right way? How do you motivate talented people? I think some of these things that you learn, these muscles that you build are probably applicable no matter what kind of business you're investing in. And so non-operating investors, you know, like myself, there's always ways to train that muscle, right? Observing more boards. And so you can always get to the same destination, but you certainly have to work a little harder at it. But I would say overall, you know, because trends are changing, business models are changing, technologies change a lot.”

    2018-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 3 Key Differences Between US and Asian Tech Markets & With Such Large Incumbents Chasing Early Acquisitions, Is There A Market For Later Stage VC with Crystal Huang, Investor @ GGV Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Yeah, definitely. So, this is a question about the value of operating versus non operating and investing, right? People have talked a lot about the counter examples and examples that are good cases for both, right? And people always bring up Mike Moore's having been a journalist and Bill Gurley having been a public markets analyst and obviously non-operating but both really successful. So I'd largely agree with Pat's point. Cycles of innovation are accelerating, which in turn makes operating experience at any point in time more likely to become outdated. So I'd actually reference a couple articles I read but recently Richard Foster professor at Yale found some research that said that the average lifespan of a public company used to be over 60 years in the 1950s and now it's about 15 years. So companies get acquired or closed shop much faster. They get disrupted much faster. Technologies that used to be dominant have much more precarious positions today. And so it's very hard to maintain this competitive edge, especially because lean startups could have heralded this age.”

    2018-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 3 Key Differences Between US and Asian Tech Markets & With Such Large Incumbents Chasing Early Acquisitions, Is There A Market For Later Stage VC with Crystal Huang, Investor @ GGV Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Of Ali, and I'm now on the board of that alongside some of your prior guests like Roseanne at IBP. Yeah, exactly. So there's a mailing list that sends out job postings every once in a while. I saw job posting from GGV. I thought it was really interesting. A friend of mine, Dave Weikler, who's now at TCV, actually made the initial introduction. I got to know the team and I thought it was just really great chemistry, pretty lean team it still is to this day, even though the fund is pretty big. And what I especially liked about it was that it was the US-China fund. So we had, we now have two offices in China. We've always been investing in that market since the 2000s. And it was a great opportunity, I think, to learn two geographies and kind of observe how tech was getting globalized very quickly on a multiple fronts. I just thought it was a good fit, you know, interviewed with them. Unfortunately, they liked me. So that was how I got my start.”

    2018-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 3 Key Differences Between US and Asian Tech Markets & With Such Large Incumbents Chasing Early Acquisitions, Is There A Market For Later Stage VC with Crystal Huang, Investor @ GGV Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Definitely. So the short story is after college, I moved out to the Bay Area. I was a technology M&A banker at Blackstone on Sandhill for a couple of years and was fortunate to be entrenched in technology and to meet Venture Back to startups and to start learning a couple of sectors really well myself. And as time went on, many people drank the Kool-Aid and I definitely did. And I got really interested in exploring a longer-term career in the valley, whether that was as a founder or as an operator. And I really thought that venture was just an excellent platform for that, right? You learn a lot of new business models, you meet new people who could be co-founders or partners. You learn how to raise money. I really just thought that venture was a great platform to jumpstart a longer-term career in the valley, regardless of what I wanted to do in the long term. So how I heard about the job was, you know, I'd been networking around and I had been meeting different funds, but there's this group called NextGen Partners, which I think you may be familiar with. That's a really big pre-partner networking association.”

    2018-01-10 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 3 Key Differences Between US and Asian Tech Markets & With Such Large Incumbents Chasing Early Acquisitions, Is There A Market For Later Stage VC with Crystal Huang, Investor @ GGV Capital · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source