500 Startups’ Edith Yeung on how blockchain pushes Chinese companies to go global

Edith Yeung, partner at 500 Startups / Photo credit: 500 Startups.

This article is from an episode on Ashley Talks Podcast. This is heavily revised from the original show transcript. For the full interview, go here.

Edith Yeung is a partner at 500 Startups in Greater China. She has invested in several blockchain, mobile, and AI startups globally.

Yeung is very bullish on the blockchain space right now. And here, she shares what she thinks of blockchain’s future in relation to China and other interesting insights.

Tell us about your journey and how you came to join 500 Startups.

I was born and raised in Hong Kong, and I came to the US at 16 as an exchange student.

I started my career as a developer in Silicon Valley then spent 10 years on enterprise software. After that, I realized that enterprise was really boring and that I wanted to create my own thing. So, I started my own entrepreneur meetup group in San Francisco, which grew from five attendees to 800. It turned into a media conference business, which I ran for a couple of years.

In the process, I met Yongzhi Yang, an entrepreneur from mainland China, who was then showing me his product. He and his team were ex-Microsoft guys and they built an Android mobile browser called Dolphin. I was actually quite inspired because, before meeting Yongzhi, I’ve never met anybody from China who was so passionate about building something not to make money but to make an impact.

After six months, he convinced me to drop everything and join him. I didn’t know anything about mobile internet, but I learned a lot seeing Dolphin go from zero to 200 million installs.

I joined 500 Startups after we sold Dolphin to a Chinese gaming company, as I wanted to learn more about and do more investments. So, I’ve been with the company for three years now.

You started out as a developer. Do you encourage more women to learn how to code?

I encourage everyone, not just women, to have at least a basic understanding of coding. I think it’s a building block for a lot of things for the future. You don’t need to be great at it. Learn it as a language, like how you would learn English or Chinese, because it’s going to be a part of our lives whether we like it or not.

What do you think are the distinct characteristics of Chinese entrepreneurs that make them successful?

Work-wise, I think Chinese entrepreneurs not only work from 9 am to 9 pm for six days a week. I think they work for almost seven days a week. People work hard, and there’s never an excuse for anything that wouldn’t get done within 24 hours. It’s amazing.

I think the reason for this is that China was really poor economically for the past 20 years. And the internet space is an industry where you don’t need to have a family background to be successful. As long as you understand the industry and work hard, and as long as you’re smart and efficient, you can make something of yourself. I think that’s a big part of why all these Chinese internet companies work so hard.

How do you think blockchain will play out in China?

I think this year is about seeing more potential applications of blockchain. But at the same time, the idea of distributed systems has been around for a long time. This is not new. What is new is that there’s now an entire token economy. So, it is more for the community to be in this economy that they’ve created for themselves.

This is why I’m excited about blockchain. And because we’re still in the early days, a lot of my focus is on infrastructure-type projects, which means scalability, privacy, identity, and security.

Why are more Chinese companies reaching out to international consumers and players?

What types of projects are you currently looking for?