Xiaomi

“Indeed, if you then ask Chinese teenagers what brand they want, first they say they want an iPhone, then they say they want a phone from interesting new brands like Xiaomi or Meizu and Samsung is a hand-me-down phone they get from their grandmother. They all h…”

“Now, thirty nine million people in China watched this live stream at some point. Thirty nine million. And they even let people leave comments. They gave around 700 phones away.”

“Xiaomi is the first Android manufacturer that has kind of successfully built a differentiated software experience on top of Android.”

“Xiaomi is starting to think, but it's starting to go international, but only to middle income markets, only to India and Brazil and places like that, not to develop markets. Much harder for them to come to the USA.”

“In precisely the period that you have half a dozen Chinese manufacturers coming into market with really good design and strong brand, which show me is only the most obvious, and what's happening is those guys are killing Samsung, they're not touching Apple at …”

“Blaise Jones has said that a third of the features in, in me UI have come from suggestions from users.”

“What it lets Xiaomi do is do these flash sales where they say, Look, we've got a 100,000 of the Hongmi, or we've got a 100,000 of the Me Too. We're going to sell those now. You have to sign up for the right to get a ticket to have a chance to buy the phone, wh…”

“Richard Liu, who was one of the, ah, ah, one of the earliest investors has said, we never talk in terms of handsets sold. We always talk in terms of customers converted.”

“The company that Xiaomi is most like is Amazon, and when you think about the kinds of things Amazon has done to innovate you see, again, this obsession with supply chain management.”

“Xiaomi has created this sweet spot, which no one previously thought existed in the market, where that is, is a well-designed product for cheap enough to be competitive with luxury products in its same domain.”

“They bet on open source software. They bet on e-commerce. They said, you know, we're not even going to bother with the supply chain thing. We're going to ship from the warehouse. Anybody who buys a phone from us, whether it's a, you know, mom and pop vendor or…”

“Every time they ship a new version of the operating system, which is every Friday, they do it every week, and they've done it every week for years. They go out with a set of exactly the same four questions they ask the user. What was your favorite feature? Wha…”

“When you look at a company like Xiaomi, what you see is innovation in process. You see innovation in customer service. You see innovation in manufacturing. The hardware itself is the least important part of this incredible chain of supply and creativity.”

“Fast forward this, 1218 months, and you could see the reviews and the columns, and it's going to be the Samsung VR kit, the Xiaomi VR kit, and just like 12 different ones that are like the same but different, and people are going to evaluate those, and then th…”

“And in each model, they will basically the equivalent of tweeting it out This is what we're getting. This is the new model. This is everything that's going to be in there nine to 12 months and order it now to get in line, and then you're batched based on when …”

“Then you have Xiaomi in China, the second biggest phone company, and they're successful because they have a thousand super users that vote on what features should go into the new phone, and they get the phone early and can boast to people, look, I voted, and a…”

“Xiaomi is one of the big Chinese makers of smartphones. They now have a car. And it's like sort of the equivalent of a Porsche Cayenne SUV. But it's like 20,000 dollars, and it's really good.”