WeChat, every mention
91 scenes, the whole family · ← back to WeChat
tap a year for its mentions
every year anyone Connie Chan 143David Pierce 41Sonal Chokshi 30Benedict Evans 21Kyle Russell 8Christina Xu 4Evan Osnos 3Frank Chen 2Michael Copeland 1Matthew Colford 1
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where WeChat comes up
Sam Altman on Sora, Energy, and Building an AI Empire
- ▶ 8:07 Erik Torenberg So what do future AI human interfaces look like, both in terms of hardware and software is the vision for kind of a WeChat, like super app?
Global Investing in Tech: Pattern Recognition, Founder Traits, Momentum | Field Notes by Connie Chan
- ▶ 12:20 Connie Chan I wrote about a super app recently where WeChat is like the best example of it in my mind, but it's really people who can go to one company as kind of that one-stop shop, like you mentioned, that is not single product, single problem-solve…
The Network State with Balaji Srinivasan
- ▶ 35:38 Balaji Srinivasan Their WeChat doesn't work.
Four Trends in Consumer Tech
- ▶ 3:47 Connie Chan In China, you also have WeChat.
a16z Podcast | All About Stablecoins
- ▶ 9:43 Sonal Chokshi In China, Connie and I wrote about WeChat, but the big story is that they were able to leapfrog the internet phase because they went straight to mobile and that enabled all these things without the legacy infrastructure.
a16z Podcast | The Evolution of Payments
- ▶ 8:20 John Collison As more people come online in more countries, as you know, things are heterogenizing where, you know, now you have a Chinese market available to you, but everyone's on WeChat Pay and Alipay rather than credit cards.
a16z Podcast | Centers of Power, War, and History
- ▶ 6:51 Matthew Colford You look at technologies like WeChat, and increasingly, uh, American, you're seeing American companies actually copy Chinese companies.
a16z Podcast | QR. AR. VR.
- ▶ 0:32 Kyle Russell You know, with your writings on WeChat, you're kind of a resident expert on that, so I'm really curious to 7 times in the scene
- ▶ 3:47 Connie Chan Um, but mini programs is something that they've launched, which I actually think is totally underappreciated. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 17:29 Connie Chan And this is where I find it so fascinating to contrast that with WeChat moments. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 17:45 Connie Chan So if you post something on WeChat and say a mutual friend of ours comments on it, I'll see it.
- ▶ 25:26 Kyle Russell Yes, there would be things using NLP, you'd talk to services, but it'd also have WeChat style kind of GUIs that show up in a conversation to kind of just make workflows more seamless or made more straightforward, but we haven't really seen…
a16z Podcast | Culture and/of Design
- ▶ 12:40 Sonal Chokshi After your piece last year, everyone's suddenly coming to you like, how do I make the next WeChat in their existing app? 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 14:11 Connie Chan So for example, um, one feature I love in the WeChat version of stickers is that you can save a custom folder of your favorite 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 20:55 Connie Chan When I'm sending a WeChat, a good chunk of my WeChat messages to people in Asia are all through audio. 3 times in the scene
a16z Podcast | Stickers! Filters! Memes! Livestreams!
- ▶ 4:16 Sonal Chokshi How did the mechanics of this work out, though, because you've locked into, with stickers, a number of proprietary ecosystems, where you have stickers on WeChat, you have stickers on Weibo, you have stickers on US apps, you have Bitmoji. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 12:35 Christina Xu I think it obviously depends on the organization, but in a lot of ways, like I saw a lot of, uh, you know, people, people's bosses sending them voice messages, uh, on WeChat, you know, and that, that's the same time.
- ▶ 14:22 Christina Xu Grandma memes on WeChat, uh, which is the stuff that my aunties and, uh, you know, my grandma sends over WeChat, um, and I love them because they're very, they're, like, pure and sincere, and they're almost like Hallmark cards. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 23:59 Connie Chan Both online, on WeChat, on a number of these apps, and it's easier to send that kind of sticker to your mom and dad, whereas you might feel more awkward or uncomfortable saying it in person. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 38:23 Sonal Chokshi Because, Connie, you've written about it in the context of WeChat, and Christina, you actually talked about a funny Tumblr, which you should tell us about. 7 times in the scene
a16z Podcast | Not all Network Effects Are Created Equal
- ▶ 8:48 Sonal Chokshi That was actually the big point of the primer we put out around WeChat,
- ▶ 44:56 Sonal Chokshi Well, that goes to then your point about the why standardization is important because you're now giving up that you're in this proprietary ecosystem like WeChat or Line and you only have their sticker set and you don't, you can't always…
a16z Podcast | We Gotta Talk Pokémon Go
- ▶ 24:37 Sonal Chokshi But the question that I have is that we are still not really deploying every aspect of the phone in the U.S. the way, like, for example, WeChat does in China, where they're using, like, the sensors and every, you know, we talk about it,…
a16z Podcast | Apple and the Widgetification of Everything
- ▶ 20:18 Frank Chen So if you think about where this takes us, then it takes us to WeChat, right? 2 times in the scene
a16z Podcast | Politics Over Pragmatism -- On China, Trump, and Smart Guns?
- ▶ 16:55 Evan Osnos The greatest example of this is WeChat. 3 times in the scene
a16z Podcast | Innovation vs. Invention at Google I/O
- ▶ 17:44 Connie Chan Yeah, and what excites me about instant apps is it really does eliminate friction for the end consumer, and it also reflects to me that Google understands something that WeChat has known for years, and it's critical to the success of… 3 times in the scene
a16z Podcast | E-commerce, Payments, & More in India's Evolving Retail Landscape
- ▶ 1:51 Sonal Chokshi So one of the interesting themes here to me, and I'm thinking about what played out with WeChat in China, is that what made the transaction model so popular is that WeChat was essentially providing a way for small business owners to create… 2 times in the scene
a16z Podcast | Bots and Beyond
- ▶ 3:04 Benedict Evans Well, if it's just a chatbot inside Messenger or WeChat or something, then you don't have to get people to go to the App Store.
- ▶ 4:12 Benedict Evans I felt like it's almost like we've been talking about when is Facebook going to copy WeChat for so long that it's like it's finally happened. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 4:19 Connie Chan It's starting to look like WeChat official accounts did back in 2013. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 12:08 Connie Chan Um, and, and if you think about WeChat, it, it, it's not 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 15:05 Connie Chan Uh, WeChat flourishes because over a third of their users already have their banking credentials tied to their account.
- ▶ 28:44 Connie Chan And, and WeChat, for example, there's, there's all kinds of rules around how often an official account can even message you.
- ▶ 33:22 Benedict Evans So I think there's another, there's another strand here to talk about maybe, which is that WeChat has achieved the point that its success is circular, that you have to be on WeChat because everyone's on WeChat. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 37:25 Connie Chan And this is an area that I think WeChat really shines, um, 2 times in the scene
a16z Podcast | Mobile Falls Hard for Virtual Reality
- ▶ 21:47 Benedict Evans Kind of conversation for another day, then you look at what's happening on handsets, and it's like, okay, Facebook trying to move the disaggregate, Facebook trying to do what WeChat, and to some extent Baidu have moved in China, which has…
a16z Podcast | 'In the Eye of a Tornado': Views on Innovation from China
- ▶ 0:35 Sonal Chokshi Among many of her other pieces, she wrote a piece earlier this year on WeChat, and in both of these cases, we're just mentioning WeChat and Xiaomi.
a16z Podcast | Things Come Together -- Truths about Tech in Africa
- ▶ 29:16 Sonal Chokshi I mean, what I am curious about is whether you see people doing a lot more stuff over messaging the way we've talked about, like what's happening with WeChat in China or WhatsApp in India and elsewhere. 2 times in the scene
a16z Podcast | The Year Mobile Began to Truly Dominate Tech
- ▶ 4:53 Benedict Evans So you have WeChat, who basically built a messaging app that is a runtime. 2 times in the scene
a16z Podcast | The Tiger and the Dragon -- On Tech and Startups in India and China
- ▶ 8:36 Anu Hariharan In terms of unique product innovation specific to the country, you know, I've not seen something in India like what WeChat has done in China, for example.
- ▶ 13:13 Connie Chan Um, I'm extremely impressed by both WeChat and Alipay's foray into payments.
- ▶ 33:47 Sonal Chokshi Because again, one of the threads that struck me is so fascinating about the WeChat story is the role of the conglomerate. 3 times in the scene
a16z Podcast | Fintech from the World's Financial Capital -- London
- ▶ 33:46 Sonal Chokshi Right, we actually published a very in-depth primer on WeChat, and one of the most fascinating things is how the messaging into all the services became sort of, having the credit card allowed all this traction for all these other cross…
a16z Podcast | Money, Risk, and Software
- ▶ 37:46 Sonal Chokshi That's actually, that was a big theme of, of WeChat.
a16z Podcast | Messaging As the Interface to Everything
- ▶ 0:15 Sonal Chokshi Connie is our resident China expert, and we recently wrote a sort of ethnographic deep dive on how WeChat works and what it tells us about mobile and business in China. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 0:58 Connie Chan Well, I think there's a number of things in China that make it a ripe environment for WeChat to really take off. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 2:32 Connie Chan I actually think it's a very well designed application, and so once you get used to it, it's very easy to navigate, and, um, and they've actually put a lot of thought to try and make it as clean as they can. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 5:25 Connie Chan And WeChat is actually, um, it's heavily reliant on the scanning feature. 8 times in the scene
- ▶ 7:32 David Pierce Yeah, that's actually one thing I think is so interesting about WeChat and seems to be one of the reasons that it 8 times in the scene
- ▶ 10:36 David Pierce No, I mean, I think the, the thing that really struck me about WeChat and kind of this phenomenon that grew out of it was that it started as fundamentally a messaging app. 10 times in the scene
- ▶ 15:05 David Pierce What is it that's so powerful about being in WeChat the whole time? 10 times in the scene
- ▶ 15:40 Connie Chan Is WeChat can then, um, basically have you logged into all of these official accounts and also pass on your payment credentials, and so rather than typing in my credit card information every time I'm transacting with a new official…
- ▶ 19:26 Connie Chan Like, it's very difficult to, to function now in some of the top tier cities without having a WeChat account. 18 times in the scene
- ▶ 21:07 Connie Chan Basically what you do is you go to one tab where you can see your WeChat wallet, and here you can link your banking cards or your credit card, and then once you do it once, uh, you can basically access payments throughout the entire… 7 times in the scene
- ▶ 24:26 David Pierce The idea that messaging and chat is an interface for doing really powerful things with technology, and not just typing in a text box, but all kinds of sort of conversation and messaging is fascinating, and WeChat seems to have been on that… 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 29:45 Connie Chan Yeah, I really love how WeChat focuses on the chat, the conversation element of the app as the primary use case of the app. 8 times in the scene
- ▶ 35:24 Connie Chan There is one really cool thing that WeChat did to kind of address that same exact issue is, so on the moment section when you're posting photos or posting links, they made one decision for functionality that I think is really interesting,… 10 times in the scene
- ▶ 35:24 Connie Chan There is one really cool thing that WeChat did to kind of address that same exact issue is, so on the moment section when you're posting photos or posting links, they made one decision for functionality that I think is really interesting,…
- ▶ 38:05 David Pierce This to me is the thing that's so different about WeChat from anything different. 10 times in the scene
a16z Podcast | Messaging is the Medium
- ▶ 1:49 Benedict Evans One of them was building platforms, which is what WeChat most obviously has done and a few other people has done as well.
- ▶ 3:52 Benedict Evans And so, what you saw first with WeChat, and then with, you know, Kick attempted to do this in the West as well, is you actually can build little apps inside 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 20:17 Benedict Evans You certainly couldn't do what WeChat's doing, which is actually sharing, you know, having 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 25:02 Michael Copeland So whether it's coming from, you know, Asia and, uh, uh, WeChat and others will, will keep you here and keep us up to date.
a16z Podcast | Mobile is Eating the World (and Apple is Gobbling Fastest)
- ▶ 5:09 Benedict Evans Um, but most obviously WeChat and Line in East Asia seems quite likely that Facebook's going to try and do that as well.
- ▶ 25:19 Benedict Evans Does Apple, is Apple looking at WeChat and thinking, hmm, that's interesting.
a16z Podcast | Enough with the Old Stuff -- Time for New Questions in Mobile
- ▶ 13:53 Benedict Evans And then when you go to, you know, when you go to China, then you have WeChat and Baidu maps and all sorts of other things, which you're providing again, these new kind of, these new kind of sites of aggregation and discovery and, and,…
a16z Podcast | Google I/O -- A Three-Hour Tour (in 30 minutes)
- ▶ 26:40 Benedict Evans Um, and then you've got WeChat bundling everything up into an app again. 2 times in the scene
a16z Podcast | China and Tech
- ▶ 1:12 Connie Chan Um, Tencent is the creator of one of my favorite mobile apps called, uh, Weixing, which in English is called WeChat. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 5:27 Connie Chan Um, I actually think it's, it's a positive that you can learn and see what's working in China, because China's just a land where there's so much experimentation going on, and there are lots of startups going after every single industry,… 5 times in the scene
a16z Podcast | Apple and Google Won the Mobile OS War, But a New War Has Already Begun
- ▶ 24:18 Benedict Evans You see companies like Line and WeChat in particular being very aggressive in trying to turn their messaging systems into, um, social platforms, application platforms, engagement and identity platforms, um, on top of a smartphone also and…
When Advertising Isn't Enough
- ▶ 4:38 Connie Chan This is the revenue distribution for Tencent, one of China's most successful consumer internet companies, the makers of the globally famous WeChat. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 5:07 Connie Chan And so on WeChat moments, your equivalent of your Facebook newsfeed, they've capped the number of ads to just two per day.
- ▶ 5:29 Connie Chan So today I want to walk through a couple examples outside of WeChat that can describe to you the power of revenue diversification.
Online to Offline 2.0: Experiments and Examples from China
- ▶ 1:58 unnamed speaker When you're shopping in the supermarket, you use WeChat, a mini program, and you check out as you go. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 9:35 unnamed speaker Right now, you can use WeChat not just to chat with your friends, but to unlock the bicycle next to you, to order food at a restaurant,
- ▶ 9:46 unnamed speaker Ally Pay or WeChat payments as mechanisms to pay in this cashless society.
Beyond a Zero-Sum Game: Tech Innovation and China
- ▶ 12:59 Connie Chan Because WeChat from day one encouraged people to use QR codes to add friends. 2 times in the scene
Rise of the Super App: Mobile-First Product Ideas from China
- ▶ 0:46 Connie Chan Now WeChat is often the poster child of this concept. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 3:37 Connie Chan In fact, navigating through WeChat or Alipay or Baidu Maps is actually sometimes easier than my iPhone home screen because I don't have to even press the home button.
- ▶ 5:18 Connie Chan Again, WeChat is often used as the poster child for this phrase, and they talk about how in China you can use WeChat for everything. 6 times in the scene
A Whirlwind Tour Through Tech Trends in China
- ▶ 2:18 Connie Chan And the main app that has been driving this dynamic, this mobile first seamless society in China is WeChat. 5 times in the scene
- ▶ 2:53 Connie Chan I can open my WeChat app, look for a doctor with the right specialty, get their reviews, figure out how much they charge, and then actually even book my appointment all on my smartphone. 5 times in the scene
- ▶ 4:36 Connie Chan In these examples, you can see how WeChat is connecting the online and the offline world. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 6:26 Connie Chan Alipay and WeChat payments are the dominant payment players here in this digital landscape.
- ▶ 7:16 Connie Chan As a result, in China, brands and businesses are all very eager to have people pay online through Alipay or WeChat payments.
- ▶ 7:45 Connie Chan This is an example of what advertising looks like on WeChat.
- ▶ 9:28 Connie Chan And to promote this in Shanghai, they printed QR codes and pasted them on bus stops and told people to go find this QR codes and scan it with WeChat. 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 15:06 Connie Chan What's important here is that these stores are connected to their WeChat accounts. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 23:35 Connie Chan For communication, everyone is plugged in and using WeChat to connect the online and the offline.
- ▶ 23:42 Connie Chan That connection is made possible by payments and QR codes largely powered by Alipay and WeChat payments.
Mobile Is Eating the World, 2015
- ▶ 19:45 Benedict Evans 2014, at least eight hundred billion photographs were shared on social networks across Facebook, Snapchat, um, WeChat, and the other major networks.