The Beertelligence Podcast

"Best advice I've ever gotten is to write down a list of what you're afraid of. Then rip the paper in half." Greg grew up in Seattle in the US & now is the CEO & founder of Dyad.com which pairs mentors & students in an open platform & consulting service. He is also an ultra, ultra marathoner, currently training for 7 marathons on 7 different continents in 7 days. As you can imagine he's quite an energetic & focused guy. So we spend quite a bit of time discussing his routines, efforts,...

"I knew it was an empty threat. First of all, it's cross borders, how are you going to sue me? You don't even know who I am." Today's guest goes by "Jim" and considers himself to be a "street vendor on the internet". What he means by that, is that often times street vendors aren't legal or licensed to sell food on the street corner. Despite their questionable legal status, often times these vendors are good people who are just trying to scrape out a living, taking just a little money here &...

"I gain through those super stressful moments, like in a restaurant, rush hour, delivering everything, I love it." Victor is a graphic design freelancer turned entrepreneur who runs Chi Studios in Shanghai. Although he wanted to design cars as a kid, he's now an owner of graphic, branding & visual design studio. Victor's parents are Chinese but he was born & grew up in Valencia, Spain. There he was one of the only Chinese kids around, growing up with people looking at him & saying 'oh...

"Philosophy facilitates a good environment for technology to do it's job" Azure Yang is a mix of UX designer and Chinese philosopher who's currently working as UX transformer for Sapient-Razorfish. Azure is Shanghaiinese, born in a more rural setting outside of the downtown city area where he was always misbehaving and trying to sneak away from his parents house. Azure comes from an artistic family and so early on thought that he would be a designer. This shifted over time as he became a web...

"Nobody should know how runners run more than Nike's running team. Why would we hire someone for that, that has to be us" PT Black is Senior Director of Brand Experience at Nike running the brand strategy & planning for greater China. He's been studying Chinese for almost 25 years and has lived in Shanghai for 17 years. On a day-to-day basis, PT Black works closely with the consumer insights and research teams for Nike in China, with his ultimate goal of using what he learns to help improve...

"Hustle all the time if you want to build something for yourself" Jan Smejkal currently works for Startup Grind as Community Director for the China and APAC region. Previously he had started with Startup Grind as a community volunteer and, because of his increasing interest and involvement, he was eventually asked to join as a full time employee. Jan grew up in a rural town in the Czech Republic. His family was hard working and stable, which gave him a good base to get involved in many...

“This was all without sponsors, without pay… we went to events, they sucked, so we wanted to make a better one” Casey Lau is one of the pioneers of the startup scene in Asia and more specifically Hong Kong, which has been his home base since moving there from Vancouver when he was 21 years old. Although he went to school for graphic design, he now splits his time between Web Summit RISE (conference), Startups HK and Blue Startups in Hawaii. He describes himself simply as a ‘Startup...

“He bought cocacola.com & sold it for $2million. And I thought, that's so stupid, I could do that.” Ryan Shuken started his life as an entrepreneur at a very young age and he now shares his years of learnings as the Program Director for Mobile Only Accelerator (MOX), a start-up accelerator that focuses on Android applications in developing countries. He and his team work mostly with start-ups that already have their product and now need to grow it in multiple countries around the world,...

"Managing people is still an enigma for me" Ronan is founder and CEO of a successful app-development agency in Shanghai called Wiredcraft, which has offices in Asia & Europe. They eventually found themselves working on projects in the international development space, such as building apps for the South Sudan referendum and other projects for both the UN & the world bank. Now they've focused more on larger corporate clients like Starbucks. He was born in the south of France and moved to...

"We were scared, like the jobs that we had, made us scared for our futures." Teng Bao is cofounder and Chief Product Officer of Strikingly (Sxl.cn in China) which is a website building tool that went through Y-combinator and has scaled from 0 to more than 1 million websites since its inception in July 2012. Teng is currently heading up product design there and got into product by way of trying to design video games when he was young. His interest in games led to coding and eventually to...

"When something is happening top down, you think about their reactions from bottom up. And then you're able to find the right strategy right in between." Joyce Ling is WikiCookJoyce, a food & cooking WeChat KOL influencer, when she's not managing a large team at Publicis.Sapient as VP of Strategy. Joyce lived in Taiwan before her family moved to the Bay Area. She attended the University of California Santa Barbara with a dual major in fine arts & Chinese literature. Around that time, Joyce...

"After 10 years, some investors joked you should have IPO'd or died by now." Kevin Chen is co-founder and CEO of Italki.com, a language learning social network and marketplace for connecting teachers & students for private classes. Before that, Keven also cofounded Famento, which sought to use social networking to help families record and share their family history. Kevin is a reformed finance guy who spent several years working at Merrill Lynch & Lehman Brothers in London, New York and...

"I would have been a better manager, better leader & better friend had I known the difference between compassion and empathy." Alan was born and spent most of his life in the US between Hong Kong & North Carolina. He sold his first company in 2009 and then relocated to Hong Kong to further explore Asia. In 2010 he went all-in on digital businesses after he saw Groupon explode in Chicago and helped a friend’s company that was able to partner up with Groupon in Hong Kong. As he continued to...

"In China, everything is possible but nothing is easy." Emily Chang talks with us shortly after she joined as Starbucks as CMO in China where she has worked in the hospitality industry at InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG®). Before that she was the Head of Retail Marketing, Asia for Apple where she worked 'in startup mode' to be the face of Apple brand in Greater China. Emily is a very down to earth executive who has managed to be extremely successful in the world of marketing without ever...

"WeChat is like the operating system for your life in China" Matthew Brennan has been in China for 13 years, working in many different cities and eventually finding his way to research and becoming a WeChat expert. Matt cofounded China Channel, which organizes China’s largest WeChat marketing conference series for international companies. They also produce a massive amount of content in the form of blog posts about WeChat & China tech. Matthew spends his time working as a consultant,...

"Why Finance?" "Basically because I was a shitty engineer" Rui worked 4 years as the Partner for Greater China at an early stage investment fund called 500 Startups. She spent 3 of those years in Beijing and 1 year in Mountain View where the company has their headquarters. Rui, pronounced like "Ray gun", was born in rural China and we follow her career path as she went from China to San Francisco and back again, investing in startups, raising a new fund (maybe) and figuring out her next big...

"Working in a Chinese startup is another way to read the culture." Florian (富天宇) is Head of International Expansion at Mobike and Co-Director at Startup Grind Shanghai. He has been in China for more than 7 years and started out doing factory inspections in Shenzhen. He then moved to Changchun for a year and ended up in Shanghai, where he cofounded (and exited) from a startup called WeSmart in the SAAS space that helped corporate offices save money on their energy bills. The focus of this...

"Good data work has nothing to do with technical skill" David Lennie is currently SVP of Data & Analytics at Shopify, a booming e-commerce startup that has seen steep growth recently, up more 400% since they went public in May 2015. Before Shopify, he spent almost 5 years at Netflix where he managed a team of 60 employees and delivered a big data analytics platform across all areas of Netflix. And before both of those he was head of Business Intelligence for Playboy, where he designed and...

"I like bullshittin... Some might say I'm quite skilled at it." Dan Shumow is a Senior Software Development Engineer in the Security and Cryptography group at Microsoft. One of his more notable accomplishments was when he used a mathematical proof to show how a government-created random number generator could have a built-in backdoor, which was later confirmed after the Snowden leaks came out. Dan shares many stories in this podcast, including the Snowden story, why Microsoft didn't want him...

"We wrestle bears, that's what we do in our country." Marius is a 20-year veteran of the Shanghai Food & Beverage (F&B) industry having worked in clubs, bars and even opened his own restaurant. Marius was born in Romania and moved to South London when he was 18, finding work early on in restaurants. From there he moved to China in 1999 and became a part-time DJ for 15+ years. Now, with 18 years in China under his belt, he's the CEO of Kollektiv, a group of design & photography freelancers ....