Xiaomi SU 7 | China Copies… But Still Wins?

Now these Xiaomi cars are better than US cars. You know the phone maker Xiaomi? So Xiaomi makes these handsets, phone handsets. They're number 3 in the world for handsets. Now what you don't know is the founder, he hasn't— up to creating cars, he hadn't driven a car for like over 10 years because he has a driver, does well for himself. Um, what ends up happening at Xiaomi is he goes to— he leaves a note on a bunch of people's cars saying, hey, I'm the CEO, can I borrow your car for a little bit? He wants to drive it, right? So he drives customer development. He does customer development on 170 cars. And he asked these people, what do you like about it? What don't you like about it? Now, these Xiaomi cars are better than US cars because Xiaomi went out of their way. Remember, Apple tried to do a car. They actually— they made handsets and now they're doing cars. And but that just shows to me that you have to actually be there in the trenches doing customer development if you want to make an amazing product.

Is electric car?

I think electric probably. I'm sure there's some hybrid.

How do you spell Xiaomi car?

Xiaomi is X-I-A-O-M-I.

It looks like your Porsche. Yeah, they just straight up rip it.

It looks like your Porsche.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It looks like a copycat of your Porsche.

Yeah. So they probably knew that was— because I do think the Porsche is—

Dude, it literally looks like your Porsche, right?

Hey, whatever works, you know? Oh, so where I want to end on this— I'd rather have the Porsche. Yeah, me too.

See, I'm different. If someone copied a Porsche or a Tesla or whatever, if I wanted one, I'd rather get the original.

Yeah, but you do well.

All right, fair enough.

Yeah, so if I—

But even when I didn't do well, I didn't want the copycats. I wanted—

Yeah, you'd probably just drive like a Honda Civic or Toyota, which are amazing.

You know why? 'Cause from a brand perspective, and I bet you a lot of consumers think this way, as a little kid, I'd rather have drove a Honda or Toyota than a quote unquote cheap replica because branding-wise, I thought it would look bad. Like this guy is just stealing or whatever, whatever you want to call it. Like it just makes you look— to me, it makes you look bad versus buying the original thing or buying a Toyota. No one judges you for driving a Toyota or Honda. I drive a Honda right now as my main driver. It works out great.

Yeah. So look, I think this all connects. We just talked about PopMart, we talked about BYD, we talked about Xiaomi. But what I find interesting is Chinese people study the US a lot and they listen, they read all the books, they listen to all the podcasts, they watch all the videos. When's the last time you studied China?

I haven't studied China.

You don't study China, right? But the thing is, there's so much that we can learn from— and I'm not saying I study China a lot, but they study us, we don't study them. You look at how they're growing like crazy on nuclear and solar power. They got the number 3 phone maker. Look at how quickly, like the way they work 996. I'm not saying everyone needs to work 996, but you look at how their cities are ran. That's why And having said that, they do have some ghost cities as well. But I saw something the other day. And imagine you're taking a train. So have you taken— when's the last time you took like a train, like the Amtrak or something like that?

I don't know, like 6 months, a year?

Have you been to Japan?

No.

Okay. So Japan, you take the Shinkansen, the trains, right? At each stop, usually you're just waiting on people getting on. In China, At each stop, you can order food ahead of it, and then someone's going to come in and deliver you your food. Imagine if you ordered food. Yeah, train order food drop-offs. They have $10,000 electric vehicles from BYD. So they're just— I feel like there's so much we can learn from how they're running things. But they learn from us, we don't learn from them. And I think when you have a competitor, like we look at our competitors, we don't look at them all the time, but we still look at them.

I look at my competitors all the time. Yeah.

So why do you do that?

Because they're bigger than me and I want to figure out why they're bigger, why they're struggling right now, and what I can learn from them to not struggle and how I can overtake them.

So you look at the bigger ones. Do you look at any smaller ones for inspiration sometimes?

I do, because the smaller ones move faster. Like I recently was looking at this smaller agency. They've picked up some large enterprises. They do creative and what they do is they constantly email people. Like companies like X or Uber or whatever it may be, and they'll send them a new creative every single week that they could just use.

Yeah, that they made custom to them. And that's how you get people to respond to your cold emails. It's not, can I do one for you? It's, I just did it for you. Here it is.

Yes.

Yeah.

So we take all that because we believe that the larger players have really gobbled up most of enterprise market. So we try to learn from them on how they went down that path and how they got there. The smaller players grow much faster and do more creative things. So it's like, How can we do what the smaller players are doing to grow faster and the larger players are doing to go more upstream? So it's in essence the best of both worlds.

Well, my point is you look at the big ones, you look at the small ones too, because there's something to learn from everyone. Whereas China knows we're bigger as the United States, but we're, we're, we're not looking at them. We should be looking at them because they are moving faster than us, in my opinion, right now. And, you know, it's when you're competing with someone that works 996 like that and all they think about is money because they don't have Again, the only god Chinese people have, and I'm Chinese, is a money god. We don't look at anything else.

So when you—

that's a hell of a competitor.