Today we have joining us Peter Cheng, who is founding partner at Eminence Ventures. Eminence just raised $120m for its second fund focused on backing Chinese enterprise software and cloud start-ups. After a decade of torrid start-up growth driven by mobile and consumer internet, China’s enterprise software market is poised for a breakout and expected to reach $40bn in revenue in 2025. Peter shares with us his formative experiences across eBay, AdChina (adtech start-up he founded that was acquired by Alibaba), and Tencent (as GM of ads products), before launching his career as a venture capital ..read more

Today we have a special episode with Hong Lu, founder of UT Starcom, one of the pioneering telecom companies in China. Hong is widely respected not only as a tech entrepreneur, but also as founding chairman at SoftBank China Venture Capital (which wrote an initial $18m check for Alibaba), and for his close friendship and successful collaboration with Masayoshi Son, founder of SoftBank Group and the Vision Fund. The story goes, while working the night shift at an ice cream shop near UC Berkeley, Hong met Masa Son, who refused to pay for a milkshake unless it was made extra thick. The two Japane ..read more

Hi folks, welcome back to the Harbinger VC podcast. Today we have a conversation with my old friend from college, Jeff Zirlin, who is one of the founding members of Axie Infinity and runs their global growth efforts. In short, Axie Infinity created a Pokémon-inspired universe where players can earn tokens through gameplay, and in a just few years has become the #1 Ethereum game with over $1bn token market cap. Today’s interview is spontaneous, but I had to get Jeff on since NFTs (non-fungible tokens) and the Metaverse are white hot conversation topics these days, especially after Beeple’s $69 ..read more

Hi everyone, welcome back to the Harbinger VC podcast. Today we have joining us Edmond Ng, who is a founding partner at Axiom Asia, one of the top performing private equity fund-of-funds (FoF) that invests across venture, growth equity, and buyouts in the greater Asia region. Axiom has had a stellar run since 2006, recently closing $1.8 bn for their Fund 6 (managing $7bn AUM overall), so they’re well capitalized to continue backing growth in the region. Edmond shares with us his formative experiences, including what it was like to join GIC at the height of the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997 an ..read more

Today we’re recording at the KKBOX studio in Taiwan, big thanks to the Firstory team for setting this up. We have joining us Phil Chen, founding partner of Race Capital and product executive at HTC, whom I can only describe as a basketball loving, deep tech investing, future building nerd of a modern Renaissance man. While at HTC, Phil led product management for the first ever Android phone, founded Vive VR, and launched the world’s first blockchain phone (HTC Exodus). At the same time, Phil ran HTC’s corporate development efforts, where he invested in KKBOX and SoundHound, and also led HTC’s ..read more

Raymond Yang is founding partner of WestSummit Capital, a leading technology growth equity fund that primarily invests in the US and China. Since 2010, the team has led investments into defining unicorns including Unity (~$41bn mobile game and real-time 3D development engine), Segway-Ninebot (~$8bn mobility + robotics platform), Twitch (gaming live video platform leader acquired by Amazon), GigaDevice (~$15bn NOR flash storage chip design), and more. Before his investment career, Raymond led the turnaround of Linktone and its successful IPO on NASDAQ in 2004. He also founded RivalWatch (retail ..read more

Joseph (Jo) Phua is non-executive chairman of 17LIVE Inc, a company he cofounded and ran as CEO until June 2020. 17LIVE operates the largest live streaming platform in Asia (ex-China) with over 50m global users, led by its flagship app 17LIVE, as well as Meme Live and live stream eCommerce solutions HandsUP and FBBuy. Today, Jo shares with us his fascinating story, from selling watches in China to building Paktor (Tinder of Southeast Asia) and eventually merging it with 17 Media, resulting in one of the few and most notable internet unicorns that grew out of Taiwan + Japan. Jo discusses the op ..read more

Today we have joining us Faisal Galaria, CEO of Blippar, a pioneer in augmented reality (AR). Now Blippar has a roller coaster of a story… the one-time unicorn raised $100m+ in venture funding but struggled to find a sustainable business model, burned through its cash and entered bankruptcy proceedings, before returning as a new business based on its drag-and-drop AR content creation tool (think WordPress for AR). Faisal joins to guide Blippar’s relaunch and set it on a sustainable growth track, leveraging experiences from his time scaling Skype as an early executive, and Spotify as SVP of Int ..read more

The Harbinger interviews Chee-We Ng, founding partner of Oak Seed Ventures. Chee-we invests solely in early-stage enterprise and core technology startups, and offers strategic advice and his network in order to help them succeed. Chee-We studied Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and has been programming in C and C++ since he was fourteen. Prior to founding Oak Seed, he was a managing partner at CRCM, a venture partner at Redpoint, led Cisco Investments in China and was a McKinsey consultant. He was the seed investor in many enterprise and core technology startups including Kyl ..read more

The Harbinger interviews Tiger Fang, cofounder and CEO at Kargo Technologies, a Jakarta-based startup that aims to digitize trucking and freight logistics in Indonesia before expanding to other markets in Southeast Asia. Kargo counts among its investors Sequoia Capital, ZhenFund, Intudo Ventures, ATM Capital, Coca-Cola, as well as Uber cofounder Travis Kalanick. Kargo recently raised $31m in its Series A led by Tenaya Capital. With Tiger, we cover his journey over the past decade, initially as Managing Director at Lazada Thailand before joining Uber to manage Western China and Indonesia as Gen ..read more