The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 188 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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.”
Chan: Voice messaging in Asia is common even during professional meetings
“People will do this during meetings. They'll do it in the hallways. They'll do it in the restaurants. You're using audio input all the time.”
Chan: Chatbots slow down e-commerce; messaging should link to web views
“I think a lot of commerce actually doesn't need the conversation. And I don't think it, the dialogue, the back and forth chat is that additive. I take customer service aside from that because that's an instance where I feel like I want someone listening. I wan…”
Chan: WeChat is a mobile operating system, not a chat app
“If you think about WeChat, it, it's not Fair to classify it as a chat application, and it's not fair to draw all the conclusions that WeChat has achieved and say that all messaging apps can achieve that, because WeChat is much more an operating system. It is m…”
Chan: Chinese Startups Enter US Faster Than US Firms Enter China
“When I talk to a lot of U.S. Companies thinking about entering the Chinese market, that decision can take one or two years. When I talk to a Chinese entrepreneur who wants to enter the U.S. Market, he can have a team out here in a quarter. So Chinese companies…”
Chan: Chinese consumers prefer feature-dense interfaces over minimalist U.S. app designs
“If they have an app that only does one thing, or if there's a screen that only does one thing, That to them seems too basic, and they actually prefer the complexity and the ability to do a bunch of things per every inch of screen space versus the states where …”
Chan: China's mobile payment ecosystem is far ahead of the U.S.
“I'd say in China, I don't know if mature is the right word I would use for it, but I would say it's far more advanced than what I do see in the States and probably what's happening in India.”
Chan: Chinese transportation technology is innovating faster than Silicon Valley
“That world is also changing very quickly and maybe innovating at a pace that's faster than what I see happening in Silicon Valley.”
Chan: A WeChat partnership virtually guarantees success for startups in China
“If you have some kind of partnership with WeChat, that is Almost instant guaranteed success for any startup.”
Chan: China leads the US in messaging, logistics, and online video
“So for something like messaging, I think they're ahead. Something like logistics, I think they're ahead. Online video, I actually think they're more experimental as well.”
Peretti: Half of BuzzFeed's 2019 revenue will come outside of advertising
“He also predicted that in 2019, half of their revenue would come from outside of advertising.”
Chan: No e-commerce company closed the online-to-offline loop before Alibaba
“You see, that completion of this virtuous loop is the holy grail of advertising that no other e-commerce tech company has ever been able to achieve until now.”
Chan: The Apple iPhone would not exist without China
“Without China, the Apple iPhone would not exist.”
Connie Chan predicts Chinese mobile trends will reach the US by 2020
“I have a thesis that a lot of consumer mobile trends that we see in China today will start playing out in the US in one or two years.”
Chan: Temu operates central packaging warehouses, unlike Wish's direct-factory model
“Wish would allow people to shop on Wish, and then the factory ships directly. So it's just like a listing marketplace. Just like a Craigslist. Timu has warehouses. The factories have to ship their products to the warehouses. Someone is packing it all in a Timu…”
Chan: Personalization will overcome lack of explicit shopping intent on social apps
“I actually don't buy that like, oh, I don't have the intent of shopping when I go there. I think that changes. I think consumer behavior changes as long as the recommendations and the personalizations are good enough.”
Chan: Social and video commerce will become mainstream trends in 2023
“So social commerce, discovery commerce, video commerce, these trends are inevitable and 20, 23 will be the year it all becomes obvious.”
Chan: Asian tech trends take one to five years to reach US
“My learning is that there's usually a time lag of at least a year and generally three to five years before some of those concepts that are already mainstream in Asia become very popular here.”
Meituan captures over 50% of China hotel bookings, displacing Ctrip
“And today, they're responsible for booking over 50% of the hotel nights in China. And the previous big player Ctrip is down to low 20%.”
Super apps pair high-frequency usage with high-margin products to monetize
“They are taking a high frequency, low margin business of food delivery and tacking on low frequency, high margin businesses at low or zero customer acquisition costs.”
Super apps are here to stay and moving East to West
“You see, super apps are here to stay, and the big internet giants in the States already get it. This trend is coming from east to west.”
Chan: Ad revenue incentives limit the depth of YouTube educational content
“Because it's ad based, a lot of the content on YouTube can't go to the depth of absurdities that you need to really make a big impact on your life or your career. Because the creators, they have these incentives to have to create content that gets lots of clic…”
Chan: No Shopify-like platform currently exists for knowledge creators
“There aren't great platforms right now that make it as easy as creating like a Shopify website for these creators to monetize their knowledge.”
Chan: Relying solely on ad monetization is a risky consumer strategy
“Focusing on just building up page views and hoping they'll monetize with ads to me is a scary strategy in general for any consumer app.”
Chan: WeChat Moments' private engagement metrics encourage freer social sharing
“So WeChat moments doesn't have that public count of likes or comments. And therefore, at least I look at myself and anecdotally with my friends, people share in a very different mindset. So if you post something on WeChat and say a mutual friend of ours commen…”
Chan: Chinese apps are dense, not cluttered, offering higher information ROI
“I don't think they're cluttered. I think they're dense. They're very dense. There's a lot of information above the fold for any app that you open that's designed in China. But I think of it as higher ROI because I get more data, I get more information without …”
Chan: Single super-apps succeed in China by reducing user friction
“The idea that everything lives in one app is actually seen as a good thing in China because it's less friction at the end of the day.”
Chan: Typing Pinyin Chinese is not slower than English mobile typing
“A lot of people use that as an excuse though for why people don't like to type Chinese on a keyword, but I don't think that's actually the case for a lot of the top tier cities there anymore. Typing and pinging is It's not that much slower than typing in Engli…”
Chan: Chinese live streaming is the video equivalent of 1990s AOL chat rooms
“Think of it as the video format of AOL chat rooms back in the nineties. And so, and if you think of it with that lens, it really helps you understand the psychology behind it.”
Chan: Chinese live streaming apps employ hundreds of real-time moderators
“So a lot of these apps, they have teams of hundreds of people who are watching these streams live at the same time, and if they think something's inappropriate that's happening, they'll stop it immediately.”
Chan: High-frequency apps with payments can replicate WebView commerce ecosystems
“And in a sense, any app that has high frequency use case, has login, and ideally payments data tied to it could create the same WebView commerce ecosystem.”
Chan: China Drives Innovation Through Scaling and Business Models
“If you argue, though, that innovation can mean the first person to scale a company, scale a product, The first person who can figure out a distribution model or a business model that allows the product to be given to millions of consumers, then I would say the…”
Chan: Chinese startup innovation is driven by survival and scale
“When I think about China, innovation to me means survival. And I say that because there are so many people in China, 1.3 billion people. There's a huge population of entrepreneurs in China right now. And you match that with a huge abundance of capital that's a…”
Chan: Chinese tech companies launch software before full QA testing
“One thing I love about Chinese companies is they'll launch products and features Before it's fully QA tested and before it's fully ready. And so sometimes you will try products and you'll hit some dead ends here and there, or some features will be buggy, but i…”
Chan: Local marketing and distribution decide foreign markets after tech parity
“Both of them need to have a baseline level of tech and logistics is one I think where there's a lot of tech involved. On top of that though, after their baseline tech is met, I think then it comes down to marketing partnerships, Distribution and things like th…”
Chan: Global tech brands do not automatically win top Chinese talent
“It's a misconception that some people have that you're always naturally going to get the best talent just because you're a global brand. That's definitely not the case in China.”
Chan: Alibaba strictly bans hiring employees for a third time
“They have this one rule, which is if you leave the company twice, you cannot come back a third time. I think they've only broken that rule once. And the tens of thousands of people they've ever hired”
Chan: China's one-child policy makes loneliness a major driver for apps
“Anyone born after 1979 is an only child. And so loneliness is a very real problem in China.”
Chan: Calling companies the "Facebook of China" ignores distinct business models
“Business models and monetization, there's a lot of innovation happening out in China, and I think a big mistake that people make is they look at a company and they say, oh, this is the Facebook of China, this is the Yelp of China, this is the Groupon of China,…”
Chan: Chinese tech giants will ramp up US investments and scouting
“I don't think that's necessarily the strategy, but in terms of learning and investing in the States, I do think that all of these companies will ramp up that effort.”
Chan: Google Play drives under 10% of Chinese Android app downloads
“Google Play, I believe is less than 10% of Android app downloads.”
Chan: Lower-tier Chinese cities bypass physical retail directly for e-commerce
“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 di…”