Chan: Lower-tier Chinese cities bypass physical retail directly for e-commerce
Connie Chan · a16z Podcast | China and Tech · Jan 2, 2019 · at 16:49
Connie Chan, partner at Andreessen Horowitz, explains urban infrastructure gaps driving rapid e-commerce adoption in non-tier-one Chinese cities.
0:00 / 0:26exact quote · 26.6s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Something that's misunderstood about China is that the second and third tier cities are very different than the first tier cities, and oftentimes if you go to a third or fourth tier city, they don't have a local mall, a local drugstore that's within driving distance or walking distance, and so some of those places, they're really skipping and going not, Not from just having a village, and they're going to a mall, but they're skipping the mall portion, and going straight to buying online.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Connie Chan
Chan: Massive market sizes justify venture funding for competing startups
“Because the market's so big The pie is so large that it does actually warrant that crazy risk taking, that even if a company is already doing well, I might just give a ton of money to another competitor because if they win, the pie is so much bigger.”
Chan: EdTech startups should build mobile apps before websites
“This is probably a contrarian view, even in Silicon Valley, but I would build for mobile first, and I would build your app before you build your website, because it will drastically unlock different ways of thinking.”
Chan: Upfront subscriptions are a flawed business model for EdTech
“For this category, I don't think subscription is necessarily the best model. Because for me to sign up for a subscription, I have to think I'm going to take more than one class, right? I mean, why not instead let me pay per course, and for other courses, if yo…”
Chan: Chatbot adoption failed due to missing use cases, not discovery
“My concern is that the issue around bot usage and adoption is not actually the discovery piece. It's that the great use cases for the bots haven't been created yet. And that's more a function of Facebook educating developers or developers coming up with the ri…”
Chan: Photo tools benefit from unbundling, social networks require single apps
“It makes sense for a photo editing company to break that up into multiple apps because from a user metric standpoint, I will download four or five of them. But for a company like Facebook, I only want one if it's the same exact network of people.”