1) A interesting thing I've been following recently is the uproar around voice actors' pay in the virtual idol group called A-Soul.

A-Soul - a joint venture between ByteDance and entertainment firm Yuehua - seemed to herald a new era in entertainment, but now, maybe not. 2) A-Soul was launched in November 2020, it's a girl group made of 5 virtual idols. Like other idol groups, each member fits a distinctive type.

Their breakthrough is the amount of technology that went into their production. Their actions are lifelike and state of the art.

1) I always heard the advice to make better investment decisions and think better by writing more.

After being a VC for ~5 years and then writing solidly for 1.5 years with my newsletter, I finally grokked this advice.

Here are 5 ways writing has made me a better investor: 2) Writing makes you more focused

Writing for the public is output-driven - are you trying to explain? Are you trying to make a decision about a company? Are you trying to vibe?

What are you trying to say, and why are you saying it.

1) Let's talk about Hillhouse Capital, the heavy-weight PE house who are multi-stage cross-over investor in Tencent, JD.com, Perfect diary, Didi and Meituan before it was called that.

Some background and look at three deals that made them finance royalty: 2) Hillhouse is synonymous with its founder Zhang Lei.
Born in 1972 in Hunan, he was seen as somewhat of a drifter in his youth. When he graduated from the prestigious Renmin University, unlike his finance bound classmates, he opted to go into a mining firm.

1) A week of stockmarket freefall got the Chinese Financial Stability and Development Committee to host a special aka emergency session.

The post-meeting Shanghai and HK markets rebounds speak for themselves.

Key takeaways below: 2) On Chinese companies listing aboard:

The Chinese and U.S. regulators have maintained good communication and have made positive cooperative progress.

The Chinese government continues to support all types of enterprises to go public outside China.

1) Coming out of a year of tech regulations and against the backdrop of a trade tech war:

10 Chinese Tech takeaways from the Two sessions aka China's annual key objectives setting time.

Number 9 will not surprise you. None of these will surprise you. 2) Venture capital is good and encouraged

VC funding got some love at the meeting, Premier Li specifically said that China will 'promote the development of venture capital'. But will still be mindful of misaligned incentives caused by excessive returns seeking orgs.

1) With Russia being partly blocked from the SWIFT international payments system.

All eyes (in the Chinese financial system) are on the Chinese clearing and settlement system CIPS.

A primer on what it is and potential implications for the future of dollar hegemony: 2) In a nutshell, CIPS is China's version of CHIPS and potentially SWIFT. It settles international claims in RMB, but was been using SWIFT as its communication system since 2016.

It was created as a domestic alternative to the CHIPS + SWIFT system to bypass US scrutiny

1) Why is every sizable Chinese consumer app a super-app? Why are western tech giants like Facebook, Shopify and Google also following suit?

A theory on 'owning the funnel': 2) Every player is always working on owning the awareness-to-fulfilment funnel (or customer journey). This is a descriptive product strategy that builds on a foundational ethos of "owning the user".

Because there's one thing that matters in consumer internet: internet traffic

1) Meituan co-founder Wang Huiwen was with Meituan from inception to IPO. He retired at age 41 a billionaire.

Wang thought deeply about creating a category winning company. I found his insights on how needs evolve and how that relates to markets to be one of the best framing: 2)
- The number of human needs that can be satisfied is fewer than needs that can't be satisfied
- Within the set of needs that can be satisfied under our current state of technology, ROI-positive conditions are far less than ROI-negative needs

1) Let's talk about how to think about applying a successful Chinese tech trend to your tech ecosystem.

Let's deconstruct go through the following:
- What makes a trend take off in China
- What is easily replicable
- What isn't 2) A trend takes off in Chinese tech and stays relevant because it can get internet traffic and can make money.

Historically, only getting internet traffic mattered. But as new users dwindled, having a viable commercial model (with eventual break-even unit economics) matters.

1) Let's talk about Baidu's fall from grace - from being synonymous with Chinese tech in the form of BAT with a market cap of $110bn to now - a punchline for when a tech trend has ended.

Why did Baidu fall behind? 2) Baidu hustled hard in its early days, it was facing off Yahoo and Google who had first movers advantage in the Chinese market.

They did well in localising search and offering a suite of products such as music and forums to woo the information-hungry Chinese consumer

1) I was a SaaS-focused VC in Europe for ~5 years, and then left for China to explore the SaaS ecosystem here.

Initially, I was highly disappointed. But after 18 months I've coming out of the trough of disillusionment.

Here's why: 2) Answer: Chinese SaaS aka ToB ( To Business) lags behind that of the Western SaaS ecosystem by estimates of 5 to 10 years due to a combination of unwillingness to pay and high adoption barriers. However Cov-19, labour shortage and regulations have accelerated adoption.

1) Was confused about why China was even hosting the Winter Olympics since they are notoriously unprofitable.

Also, Chinese people don't ski, right? Right? Why we getting involved in something that's not entertaining or lucrative?

So I went digging. 2) The answer: China's using Winter Olympics as a focal point to drive domestic interest and spending in winter sport tourism and commerce.

So the aim is that while not much of the population is interested in winter sports before, they gonna be after the Olympics.

1) To give a clear example of how I researched, framed and synthesised.

Here's a breakdown of how I put one of my pieces together - specifically on Chinese agriculture tech.

A topic I had little knowledge about beforehand but was able to write a 1,500+ piece in a week. 2) To refresh, my process is:
- Start off with tree trunk knowledge / primers
- Have key questions you are asking
- Background mental models / similar examples
- The finding additional info
- Talk to people and then talk some more

https://twitter.com/lillianmli/status/1485261864556658689?s=20

1) Question I get asked semi-frequently is how I do research / get up to speed on a new topic.

My skills were honed from 2.5 years of management consulting and ~5 years of VC. It's been invaluable since landing in China and starting to learn about Chinese tech

Let's talk how: 2) My process is the follow:
- Start off with tree trunk knowledge / primers
- Have key questions you are asking
- Background mental models / similar examples
- The art of finding additional info
- Talk to people and then talk some more

1) So ByteDance 'disbanding' their investment team is the news of the day. While it's easy to say this is because of the new regulations around investment approvals, the reality is more complicated 2) ByteDance has bi-monthly (every two month) OKR reorgs. Yep, every two months. This means an organisation that is agile at best and chaotic at worst.
Teams spin-up and spin-down with relatively high frequency.
Re-org of a whole team, even with 100 people, is not new.

Chinese characteristics' 2021 in review with some of my most read and shared posts

lillianli.substack.com/p/chinese-char… The most widely read piece: China, Semiconductors, and the Push for Independence - Part 1 by @JordsNel

lillianli.substack.com/p/china-semico…

1) Let's talk about the generational mental model differences in China and its impact.
Rather than talking about boomers, gen x, millennials and zoomers. Chinese media segments their population by birth year ranges with monikers of post-80s generation, post-90s and post-00s. 2) This is very fine dicing of the population but highly relevant.
Given China's fast pace change, every decade saw substantial changes in living conditions and therefore massive shifts in that generation's mindsets and values.

1) Let's talk about how Xiaomi's one of the savviest and stealthiest Chinese tech investors bar none.

Their playbook involves selling mobiles close to margin to land a consumer, before upselling that customer on products they've invested in.

Almost Shopify for hardware 2) Xiaomi famously announced they would never make more than 5% in profit margin from hardware in 2018.
Because they see the phone as a distribution channel for their platform of products and services, the phones are cheap to basically acquire consumer 'traffic'.

1) Changes in the air - pulling of idol-focused community apps, wasted milk scandal, Kris Wu's arrest, government announcement condemning fan culture.

Feels like a bigger crack-down for idols or 'traffic stars' (流量明星) is imminent. 2) Idol culture, imported from Japan and Korea, has grown rapidly in China in recent years. Some reports estimate China’s idol market to be worth RMB 100 billion ($14 billion) by 2020, with YoY growth of 60%.

If your life has been going well, all the questions facing you from late twenties onwards will be hard questions, to which there are no right answers. All the low hanging fruit questions have been answered and you're just left with the ultimate questions of 'what kind of person do I want to be? What kind of life do I want to live? Who do I want to be with?'

1) Tencent's game user base is older than I thought, if regulations come out against kids playing games, they could be ok there.

"During the fourth quarter of 2020, minors aged under 18 accounted for 6.0% of our China online game gross receipts.... Among which, minors aged under 16 accounted for 3.2% of our China online game gross receipts."

From Q4 2020 report

static.www.tencent.com/uploads/2021/0…