Joseph Constanty on how Niu is establishing itself as a leader in the EV space

Hello and welcome to the Rich Robinson Show. I'm your host, Rich Robinson. Over the past 25 years, I've been an entrepreneur, investor, advisor, and professor here in Asia. After nearly a quarter of a century in China, I'm now based here in Bali, Indonesia, the island Of the gods, Asia is my home now. Sixty percent of the world's population also lives here, but I would contend eighty percent of the world's dynamism and opportunity is right here in the region. On the show, you'll hear candid and fun conversations with some of my friends and colleagues, people I've met along my journey: entrepreneurs, operators, experts. It will help you unlock actionable insights around the Asia region and the entrepreneurial agility that actually defines it. This first season, season one of the Rich Robinson Show, is titled At the Speed of China. Like, wait for it, at the speed of light. Things happen fast in China, and in this season one, we're gonna Take a deeper look at that, the rapid economic development over the past few decades, as well as the speed and cycles of innovation taking place all day, every day, right now. Let's go. Jai Ho! And showtime. So as we were just discussing before I hit roll 'em, Joseph, uh, this software Riverside automagically sews things together in the cloud. And you were like, automagically, I'm co-opting that in the same way that I co-opted it. And it's going to help me to describe China in the way that a lot of things happen automagically, but in the magical Middle Kingdom. So, hey, welcome to the pod. Really, really appreciate you taking the time.

Yeah, Rich, thanks for having me. I really appreciate for you reaching out and happy to chat a little bit and give some background on what I've been up to in China. And where I see things going as well. Great.

Yeah, just to start off real quick, just for those of you out in podcast land that don't know who Joseph is, just give them a little overview, please, of what you're working on now and who you are.

Yeah, sure. Well, I've spent the past 20 years, actually up until 2020, living in China in some format, whether it was with university, studying Mandarin, starting my own companies, and most recently over the past 5, 6 years, working with a really cool mobility company called Niu, where we make electric And I've been responsible for bringing the company outside of China, expansion into Europe, the Americas, and elsewhere. So it's been quite a ride. If I look back all the way to the year 2000, when I first got off a plane in Beijing to where I am now, and actually for the past 2 years, I've been living in Dubai. So kind of running our international project from here because we have a dislocated team in China, Europe, America, and elsewhere. So actually Dubai, sitting in the Middle East, is quite convenient with managing different time zones and everything like that. And the weather, the weather's always beautiful.

Indeed. Yeah, the weather and Dubai is a dynamic, fascinating place. I went there in '07 for the first time.

I'll say that Dubai right now is a lot like Shanghai in 2005.

Hey, so I love you, you know, making the parallels because I think that's a really interesting thing to do to help frame things about like where, you know, the future is here. It's just not evenly distributed as Philip K. Dick famously said. And let's talk about the past before we talk about the future and like, Tell us about your origin story and your path to 2000.

Yeah. Starting back in 2000, I was just—

Or leading up to 2000. I want to go like from 0 to 2000, as it were. It's like, where'd you grow up? And like, how'd you end up in China bitten by that radioactive—

Actually ending up in China.

Yeah.

I'll try my best to make this a quick story. So I grew up in the Philadelphia area, went to university at the University of Pittsburgh. And it was because of the University of Pittsburgh that I ended up in China. So I was actually really interested in Southeast Asia while studying as an undergrad early on in 1998, 1999. And I wanted to go to Indonesia and Vietnam where I thought really the future was going to happen. And Southeast Asia is now coming up to where it is. Unfortunately, there was no programs to go to Southeast Asia, but there was to China.

Can we stop there though? Like why Southeast Asia in the '90s? That was like, I think of it then I'm here now in Bali and I can feel it. It's like Shanghai or Beijing a long time ago, but what made you put that on your radar then? It's kind of interesting.

I was fascinated by the multiplicity of governments throughout Southeast Asia. So you had communist Vietnam, you had some kind of democracy in Indonesia and Malaysia, a kingdom slash democracy in Thailand. And I was just fascinated by how—

Wow.

This small little part of the world was so diverse. And it had also been a powerhouse centuries before. And so it had gone through a rise, a fall, and now it was kind of just in turmoil of sorts, but it was on an upward trajectory. And so that's why I was interested in it. I was like, it's a weird part of the world that no one's really paying attention to. Let me pay attention to it. Thanks for sharing. But unfortunately, there was no real good programs for university students at that time to get into Southeast Asia. Anyway, long story short, the University of Pittsburgh was a very forward-thinking university back in the '90s and actually had set up programs in China already. And we were part of like the guinea pig students to go there in the year 2000. And ended up at Beijing University in the summer of 2000 and just had a magical time. And when I was there, I saw— I remember being there and seeing the development happening right then and there. I was like, wow, no one is talking about China. At that time, China was a passing story in the New York Times or CNN.

Pre-WTO, it was like, yeah, like, no, all of that.

And they were already building all the ring roads. Yeah, long story short was I saw so many different opportunities as I was just as a student going around the city, seeing things that I had already lived in the future in the United States and come to China, I was like, wow, let's bring some of the future over here. And that's kind of how the whole China fascination and project for me started. And yeah, I graduated university, took a job in the United States for about a year and realized that living in the US at that point in time, this is post-9/11, this is post-dot-com boom. And I'm like, this is just not the place for me. Let's go to China. Things are really happening. And I decided to move to Greater China. So I moved to Taiwan to go study Mandarin. I figured learning the language would be helpful. And shortly after that, I jumped into Shanghai and started working at a law firm. And from that law firm, I developed my own consulting firm. And from that consulting firm, started using it as like a startup studio back in 2005. We started a miniature golf course. We started online education. for overseas. We started probably the coolest project, which is actually still around, which is called Next Step, which started as an event for entrepreneurs in Shanghai because there was nothing, nothing had existed at that point. And we had a very simple tagline, which was entrepreneurs wanted. We didn't think much of it at the time because we didn't think the community was that large. But we had a following with, by the end of the first year, we had about 20,000 people offline.

Wow.

And Next Step continues on today as a formal startup studio. Yep. And Greg Prudhomme is working on that and I sit as a silent advisor and he's got a whole team and it's really sitting at the intersection of technology and F&B. And so that's an awesome project that dates back all the way to 2007. And then I went and decided to start a group buying coupon, Groupon copycat.

You and 7,000 other companies.

Yeah, it was a really great idea.

I've been there. I've been there. No, no, no judgment.

And yeah, and we started at it. We raised a bunch of money and lost a bunch of money. You know, we were competing against Meituan and Dianping and Wutuan and all those at the time. So that was a rise and fall within 2 years. Very interesting time in my life for sure. And after that, I took kind of a seat back and really wanted to take a broader perspective on what I was doing in China. Did I want to stay? Did I want to leave? And so this is like circa 2012. And that's when I decided— I met a guy named Token who went on to become the founder of New, the company I'm now working for and running overseas. I met Token and he and I decided to start a shoe company together and with one other guy named Sean. And we launched it on Kickstarter, it did wildly well. And for the next few years, we were selling shoes around the world. I learned everything about sourcing, manufacturing of footwear, distribution models around the world. We were selling in 60, 70 countries within like a year. It was pretty nuts.

Talking about zagging where other people are zigging, like you're going into like hardcore old school manufacturing, but everybody's got to buy shoes. Like, how did that come about? You got to peel that back a little bit. Like, what was the angle? Like, why shoes? And like, what did you guys do differently to be able to like carve out this niche?

There's 2 stories to why shoes, why I got into shoes. So Token had already come up with a handful of designs that he was already beginning to sell in China. And I came upon him through, he used to work at Frog Design and Microsoft, but I came upon him I got introduced to him by his former manager at Frog Design. He's like, see if you can help this guy take his brand overseas. I was like, all right, I'll give it a whirl. And we sat down and honestly, we just hit it off the first meeting. We went on, it was supposed to be a coffee for 30 minutes, it went on for hours. At that time, I was fascinated with Kickstarter and crowdfunding, and I was looking to understand Kickstarter a little bit better, and I wanted to just start with a simple product. Yeah, and it really started as an experiment that became a brand that became something larger. And that's why I got started in shoes. And we were working with really cool materials like Tyvek and cutting-edge like microfibers and stuff like that. And so it was kind of bridging this gap between old-school business and kind of this new-school techie type of clientele and the millennial customer that was looking for something that was a bit different and also had a larger mission as a part of the business.

So you're also doing like smaller batches, like kind of taking advantage of new Newer technology and then taking advantage of e-commerce and then new materials. And so that's usually like what Sequoia says is like, not why, or if it's something's going to work, it's like, why now? Right. So all those things converging together and you're like, wow, this is actually, let's reinvent a really solid category that makes a lot of money already. Right.

And look at a great parallel. You look at the company Allbirds and what they pulled off, right? So they launched, they launched shortly after us on Kickstarter and To be honest with you, our Kickstarter did much better than theirs. But what they did better than us was they were closer to the venture capital investment and the customer, the end customer.

That became like the uniform for Silicon Valley, kind of, right? Patagonia vest and like, oh, here, Allbirds shoes, right? So yeah.

They really hit it out of the park, honestly. We were trying to aim to that same type of customer and they just owned it and literally took it to where it is today. They just went IPO, right? So there is merit in where we were. I think our execution was inferior to their execution. And so by 2016, we had raised a bunch of money for that. But at the same time, my interest in footwear and where that space was going for me personally just wasn't there. And Token had already left 2 years before to go start new. So this electric moped, electric motorcycle company started as a sketch in the spring of 2014. in the offices of our footwear company. And then by 2015, Token and some of their other founders were talking to me. They're like, hey, do you want to look at what we're doing here at New? And I said, I'll give it a look. A couple months later, I was on the team and starting internet, made a huge pivot, went from—

Whole nother category. You're just like, I love it.

Yeah, I'm really— to me, it's a joke. And I had to tell my mom at different times, like, at one point, I was a miniature golf Salesman. Next I was selling flashcards, then I was selling coupons, then I was selling shoes, and now I'm selling scooters to the world. So it's, uh, you have to have a bit of humility.

It's tough enough for moms to even keep up with what their kids do, right? My mom still couldn't succinctly describe what I do, but you're always like, just as she gets the elevator pitch down, then you switch it again. Right. So, wow.

I'm pretty sure my grandmother at the time had no idea what the heck I was doing. So, wow.

Fantastic.

Yeah. So I think the kind of the thread that goes through all that is just a willingness to pivot and a willingness to reinvent and a willingness to learn is the key mantra that I keep because it's not about losing an interest in any of those projects which pushed me out of it. It was seeing that I had already learned everything that I could possibly learn in that time and in that space. And now it was time for me to kind of apply it to The next project, the next thing, and that's where I'm at here today at New. And this is the longest running piece of my story in recent history. I've been here since the beginning of 2016, so it's almost six years now. I mean, it's been quite a ride to bring a Chinese brand out of China and into the European markets, the Americas, and elsewhere. So happy to discuss.

Done so much. A lot of Chinese products going abroad, but maybe they don't have a Chinese brand name on them, but they're made in China, right? Yeah, it's interesting. I turned 54 a few months ago. And one of the things that I've really learned is that one needs to unlearn things and relearn things and learn completely new things to sort of write new scripts and software to kind of slow time down in a way. Otherwise you're just running the same scripts over and over and then everything gets really sped up and to go and do that. Is definitely painful. It hurts. Like I'm learning Bahasa Indonesia after studying Chinese for 24 years. Right. And it's much easier, but it still makes my head hurt. Right. I went surfing this morning and I didn't enjoy it. And I haven't enjoyed it the few times that I'm just not a good swimmer. I'm not good in the ocean, but I'm making myself do it until I can get to the point where I'm like, it's kind of enjoyable. I mean, I live in Bali. Exactly.

Right.

I mean, it's kind of ridiculous. I say it's kind of like in my kids too. It's like. It's kind of them growing up in Boston and not learning how to parallel park while holding the Dunkies with the other hand and giving somebody the finger and listening to the Sox on the radio and telling somebody in the backseat that the GOAT is Bill Russell and not Bobby Orr. But anyway, but yeah. And then now I'm in Web 3.0. I'm on-chain blockchain gaming, and I am the oldest and by far the dumbest person in the room. I have all my skills and experience. Yet I am a babe in the woods and I am just the vocabulary, the way things are combined. And I love it. I seek it out. I see it. And now I know that I must seek it out. Otherwise I will wither and crumble. And you've already internalized that most people are like, by the age of 30-something, I've figured something out. It took me 10, 15 years to get there. Now I'm just going to repeat that for the next 20, 30 years and get maybe marginally better or maybe get marginally worse even. Right.

I can't imagine. I mean, I think one of my key values as an individual is change. And I immensely value that. That's a very simple word, but it's a very powerful word because you can apply it to whatever it is that you're doing in life, whether it's personal or professional. I think it's something that I really kind of stick very strongly to. It's not for everyone. Not everyone is— their cup of tea is to be in a turbulent, changing environment. But for me it is, and it showcases itself through my personal and professional life over the past 20 years.

Love it. That's great. And let's talk a little bit about this scooter, because when you say electric scooter, a lot of people might think of like Bird or, but this is a scooter because, you know, I had William, the CEO, come and speak to my Peking University MBA class. And he talked about the whole story of going public and the incredible integration with smartphones and what you guys have done pushing out around the world. Why don't you give us, paint a picture?

Yeah, I think the best way to think about what we make right now, we started with an electric scooter, or some people know it as a moped. The best way to understand what we do is imagine if Tesla and Vespa had a baby, that would be us.

Boom! That is delicious. I love it.

Easy to kind of conceptualize. So we make these smart electric mopeds, think about them in Vespa format, and they're connected, fully connected 24/7. You can see where your scooter is, you can see its state of battery charge, all those types of things. And we are a massive player now in China, where we have been growing since 2015, where we first launched. And we're definitely number one in almost all of the markets overseas as well in the electric moped space. And so we sell directly to consumers through a network of distributors and dealers. We also work with local entrepreneurs to set up flagship stores and premium stores in cities like Milan and New York City and Miami and LA and Bogotá and Mexico City. The list goes on. And we use those direct-to-consumer retail channels to allow customers to experience our brand, take test drives. These flagship stores look a lot like a Tesla store, to be honest with you. And we've been quite successful in our growth in taking the Chinese brand outside of China. In addition to selling to end customers, you or whomever wants to own their own scooter, we also work with tons of sharing operators. So think like Lime, Or Revel out of New York City or Felix in Amsterdam. We supply them with all of their mopeds. And this is really quite cool because we're getting millions of trips in a month throughout this network of operators that are using our scooters. So we have this huge network of users both in China and Europe and the United States that are kind of have chosen to go to electric rather than using old school petrol gasoline mopeds or even moving down from a car into a moped. So it's quite exciting to see this and we're really hyper-focused on transforming urban mobility. So we're not trying to make a product for everyone and anyone. That's not really our core focus. We see that there are huge issues in cities. It's quite obvious urban transportation is a bit broken globally. There is no perfect solution, and our products are not the only solution. It's just a part of the solution. But to give you some kind of frame of reference as well is that to move yourself 1 kilometer on an electric moped is, give or take, 60 to 70 times less energy intensive than moving yourself that same 1 kilometer in a petrol car. It's 10 times less, 10 times less energy intensive than moving yourself 1 kilometer in a Tesla. So everyone thinks that we need to electrify, and it's true, we do need to electrify, but we also have to choose what we're electrifying to. Because if we want to be able to sustain global growth and global mobility, especially as we all move to cities, as something like 60%, I think according to the UN right now, it's about 62% 2% of the world's population is now living in an urban center. We can't be doing it all in cars. There needs to be alternative modes of transportation. You live in Bali, and the main mode of transportation down there is a gasoline-powered scooter, moped. And so you'll see transformations happening in Indonesia as we speak. And so I think the main kind of mission behind what we're trying to do right now at Niu, both in China and overseas, is to redefine urban mobility and showcase to people that there are alternative forms of mobility like mopeds, like electric bikes, like kick electric kick scooters that can actually help you do those short transportations that you may have in a day, 1, 2, 3 kilometers, right? And so that's why, in addition to the mopeds, we just recently launched like an electric kick scooter, because in certain markets, electric kick scooters are more adopted, kind of a mainstream product. So there's many cities throughout Europe that kick scooter is much more popular than a moped. And then of course, the rise of electric bikes, we've been seeing it long before the mainstream media picked it up, and we've been developing our own electric bikes that we're releasing right now.

Love it.

of also choosing markets, products for what markets. It's kind of an exciting time to be a part of mobility because it's evolving very rapidly and it was accelerated, obviously, like everyone says, because of COVID Yeah.

And I think a lot of people do think Tesla. So, you know, that Tesla Vespa combo is very evocative, but electric mobility, I think, is really being defined in China. It seems like there's really so much innovation and investment in that space. And now you're taking that sort of kung fu ball of power and then pushing it out to the rest of the world. Like how many markets are you guys in now?

Yeah, I think officially we're in 48, but I think we just closed a couple more markets as well.

In Indonesia? Yeah. Possible to get one of these in Jakarta?

Yeah. You can actually buy one in Bali.

Can you? Oh my goodness. That's lame that I didn't know that. I have to go.

Yeah. I should have told you before the coma. You could have had one. You could have been like riding onto the set in your—

And you guys, I also heard like Columbia, like Jesus Bautista. So he's a Peking University student, not in my class, but he's like, hey, I heard that Neo is going to come and present. And I said, okay, you can come to the class, but you can just audit it and don't ask any questions because I grade all the other students on questions. He sits in the front row and he asks William 2 questions and then he gets an internship. And now I think he helped to like open you guys up in—

Yeah, he helped. He was an intern for us for pre-COVID and he helped us open up a couple of markets.

In Latin America, lessons for you out in podcast land: don't listen to people when they tell you not to ask because I couldn't tell him not to ask a question once he's already in there. So good for him. It actually worked.

But yeah, Jesus was great. What a small world! Full circle.

Yeah.

But you were saying about how China is kind of taking over the space. Let me add some commentary to that, which is if you go back a decade, a little more than a decade, if you would have asked a lot of people in Europe and the United States if China would rule the mobile phone market. In a decade's time, they probably would've scoffed at you. But I was sitting in a conference in California in 2008 where the CEO of NuSoft at the time got up on stage. NuSoft is like an outsourced software company from China. And he got up on stage and said, I guarantee you that in the next 10 years, China will rule mobile phones. And here's why. You have the largest market for mobile phones. You have the supply chain for mobile phones, and you have the final manufacturing for mobile phones all being done in a very small network of urban areas in China.

And then spread some of that entrepreneurial pixie dust on top of that. And then it's just, yes.

And then magically, automagically, you have like a huge customer base that also wants to have new evolving products where in the West they were very okay with just the standardized format brick phone. And he said, this is going to be our breeding ground for the future of mobility devices. And I see a huge parallel Between that time period and what's happening now in EV space, both four wheels and two wheels in China, you have the backbone of the supply chain. You have the largest market for EV, and you have customers that are not locked into kind of the legacy products that are petrol. You have so many more customers coming online right now for the very first time buying cars, and for them, it might as well be electric. And so this is why you see the EV space developing so quickly in China: is because you have such fertile ground from. The supply chain to the customer base, and from that, when you have a huge home market, just look at Honda sixty years ago, right? Look at Yamaha sixty years ago, both in four and two wheels. They were able to dominate their home market and then go overseas. And then you just look at Hyundai and Kia thirty-five years ago; they dominated their home market and then went overseas. And the Chinese are copying the same exact script and now doing it in EV. So this is why China is able to succeed right now. Now in the EV space, both 4 and 2 wheels. I'm not writing obituary for what's happening in 4 and 2 wheels in Europe and the United States, but this is what they have to be ready for. This is what they're competing against.

Indeed.

The reality. Yeah.

And I think typically also, I think the government does have a hand in this. Like a lot of times I think entrepreneurial ecosystems will crop up almost in spite of governments around the world. Right. And they'll just. Innovates around some problems. But I think also in the public transportation with buses, as I understand it, there's just single-digit thousands of electric buses in the US, but there's hundreds of thousands in China and they're mandated by the government and subsidized. And there's also the government subsidy in Beijing. Getting a license plate is really difficult. I think you have a better chance of getting into Harvard than you do of getting a new license plate. But then if you have an electric vehicle, they'll give you a green plate and off you go, right? So there's all kinds of mechanisms in place there. So there's so many multivariate reasons that are fueling this and accelerating it. Yeah.

I mean, and yeah, I think the advantage that China has is that it's a single-party governing system, right? And it has its advantages and disadvantages. Where in the U.S., in Europe, you have competing interests in government and in business. And because of that, you have different policies that get rolled out. That's just a matter of governing systems.

Yeah, indeed. So one of the things that I I am going to talk about in the book At the Speed of China is high-speed rail and how incredibly dominant it is around China. But the fact is, okay, that's great. Let's just take a lot of land by eminent domain and just throw hundreds of billions of renminbi at this problem. And that's something that's not so replicable by other countries necessarily. But there are still some nuggets to be extracted from that about what can be learned from that. And everything about the speed of China is not positive. There's lots of the JoJo Lio culture, other things, but But I think just as there's multivariate reasons for the rise of EV industry sector, I think the speed of China has many different contributing factors that are just accelerating it for better or worse, right?

I want to ask you a question. I just thought of something as we were talking here. Do you think the speed of China, China looks fast because it's in comparison to where America and Europe are today? If we were to look at China in its current stage against the United States, let's say 1890 to 1930, I think we're moving at the exact same speed. We're just at different points in our lifespans, right? Would you not agree with that?

So interesting. So there's a number of different ways to look at it. I had one guest on who said, I feel like my rough thesis is that it's a 4 to 1 ratio of China to the rest of the world. But he said, maybe with Silicon Valley, it could be 1 to 1, but with like general US, it might be 4 to 1, but with maybe like France, it could be 10 to 1 compared to— so different geography. It's a little bit of a varying ratio and different eras in the US. I mean, that era in the 1850s, I mean, there was like dozens of Elon Musks, Westinghouse and Edison, and there were so many, you know, the flights and telephone and electricity. And yeah, there's a lot of acceleration in innovation. However, I don't believe that it was so widely distributed across U.S. society. I think that there is something inherent within the lifestyle of China. And there's one chart that I have that shows the lived experience of people over the last few decades. and how fast they subjectively feel that things have gone. And China is far and away the one nation in this global survey that is, the estimate is 32x. And then most other places are below 10 and the vast majority are below 5, right? So I think that there are definitely some parallels to different times, different eras. And that's one of the multivariate reasons. Oh, wow. It's kind of a blue ocean, a blank slate, right? Like. Go west, young man, and let's create things. Let's leverage technology. Now that the Industrial Revolution has kind of kicked in, now we can do things like telegram, you know, telegraph and telephone and other, you know, electricity, et cetera. And I think China is kind of, all right, we got our infrastructure in place. We've been through a few kind of mini boom and bust cycles and internet and like, okay, now, man, we have electric mobility and we have e-commerce and we have IoT and we have this sort of hardware sort of hub revolution down in Shenzhen and we have AR/VR and we have blockchain and we have robotics.

They got everything. You have a billion people, you can build it all, right? That's the thing.

You sort of pace and pulse for better or worse. I mean, I had one guest on in the edtech space and he was saying a company like Duolingo, which went public recently, like they had so much time. To fully bake themselves into what they were. In some ways it's a curse in China. Like, it's like, here, take this money now, run. And it's just like, what, what am I supposed to do? Shut up and run. Right. And it's just like, whoa. And just, there's things blowing up all over the place. Right. So definitely it's not all like, hey, everybody should emulate this. And this is great and awesome. It's like, wow. Like there's just like, you know, San Ren Xiang with Confucius, right? Walk down the road with one person. You're like, oh, I should definitely do that. And the other person, you're like, oh my God, I should definitely not do that. Right. Tell me some of your experiences, because I think you and I are similar in that our entire careers more or less are in China and kind of bridging China. So there's that old joke of like, hey, older fish, morning boys. And the young fish are like, morning, sir. How's the water? Pretty good. And he swims away like, what's water? Right. So, I mean, I think we're kind of indoctrinated or built up into this whole pace and pulse, but what are some of the things that you experienced as this kind of cartilage Between 2 bones, so to speak, doing the international with all the different stuff that you've done?

Yeah, I think that, I mean, to go back to the early days, let's say circa 2005, I think that China might as well have been the moon to most people not living in China at that time. Okay. And I think that was always very surprising to me as I spoke to colleagues, friends, and family back in the United States at that time. At just their complete misunderstanding or no understanding of what was happening in China, both culturally and economically. And because when I was sitting inside the borders of China, what I could see was a country that was rising and a country of normal people, not much than Americans, except for some cultural nuances that are different, to be really honest with you. I mean, everyone wanted to support their family, get a good job, Grow wealthy. The typical American dream, I think, is very parallel to what the China dream is. And I think some interesting insights back in that time as well was that as an American, we always looked at those from Asia and especially China as extremely entrepreneurial and hardworking people. It's a kind of a very strange stereotype that was kind of abound in the United States and still is very prevalent in the United States. When I got to China, what I realized though, was the entrepreneurial spirit wasn't quite strong in the mid-aughts, the 2000 to 2010, of the local community, especially in Shanghai. And the reason I learned later, because we were trying to build this community of entrepreneurs at the time, and the reason I learned later is because their minds had been zapped by their families, their parents and grandparents, that they had to go build some version of the American dream in Shanghai, which was wild to me. They had to go get a job, Get married.

Play it safe. Yeah.

Get a house, have a kid, buy a car, play it safe. And then what you see is circa 2010, 2011, 2012, those men and women who had followed that mantra kind of got tired of working for larger organizations. And that's when you begin to see this proliferation of entrepreneurialism in China grow at a super rapid rate. At the same time, you have incredible amount of capital capital coming into the China market at that time from overseas and domestically. And I think it's then it was when you really saw the birth of like the unicorn entrepreneurs coming out of China. It was like 2011, 2012. But I can tell you before that, the scene on the streets with working with local Chinese, Shanghainese, Beijing entrepreneurs was very limited. It was all a bunch of like wild, wild west cowboys of Americans and Europeans trying to make their way in China at that time. And it's from that period onwards that things began to change. So that's kind of an insight that I always find quite interesting, because everyone thinks that it's this long legacy of entrepreneurs, like, just plowing out new things. And there weren't too many. I mean, you had— obviously, you had your Jack Ma's of the world building Alibaba very early, and your Pony Ma's building stuff. But kind of homegrown small entrepreneurs, very limited at that time. So I think that's kind of one interesting insight that I can take away. But let me think a little bit more and maybe you have a couple other questions for me.

Well, it's interesting you say that you were based in Shanghai during that time. Yeah.

The whole time.

So I, in Beijing, just because Beijing, many people don't know that Beijing is really the Silicon Valley of China. And I would contend all of Asia and Shanghai is much more like LA and New York combined in some ways. Right.

Maybe we know that Beijing and Shanghai, Ren, that we don't like each other very much, but continue on. Continue. I digress.

Well, sure, sure. But I meant that LA and New York and that they're like, it's like 2 gigantic, like cosmopolitan cities in one in a way. Right. And not necessarily the shallowness of LA, but compared to Beijing, it's definitely true.

But anyway, uh, oh, we digress. We digress. Keep going.

我是新北京人，哇，你是新上海人，竞争对手。Uh, so it's all good. I love Shanghai and I love Beijing and, uh, it's, uh, you know, I do, I love to, I do as well. I felt like Beijing was attracting because I just felt like Shanghai was a little bit more like all the MNCs wanted to be in Shanghai. So maybe that was determining it, but there was just a lot more. The seat of government is there and the telecoms are there and the universities are there and the other startups that were there in the dot-com boom, Sina Sohu, NetEase. I mean, of course you had Jack Ma in Hangzhou and then Pony Ma down in Shenzhen. But the vast majority of all the other Meituan and Baidu and all these other TikTok, it's all in the Jingling, right? But for sure, Shanghai has its extreme like buzz and juice right there, but it's just a little bit of a different kind of breed of entrepreneur in a way, right? But then also Shanghai and Beijing, it's just, they're both such large places with more than 20 million population that they're almost like their own countries. Indeed. Just tell me a little bit about when you first started getting stuff going with NIO and like being able to. Like, when was it when you guys started to do international sales? Was it baked in from the get-go or was it some— was there like, did you get China?

I think the— yeah, it's a good question. So I think from the beginning, they always envisioned the brand to go overseas, but they knew they had to win. Like I said earlier, they had to win the China market to make that a reality. And so it was early funded startup in late 2014. And by summer of 2015, full-blown factory producing thousands of scooters every single month. So in a very short period, it went from a concept to full-blown manufacturing, and not just like an outsourced manufacturing, owning their own manufacturing in 2015. And it was in that time period where they saw that they had the initial scale in China where they began to turn on the lights for beginning the plan for overseas. And that's where I really got involved. And the strategy for going overseas was very simple. We were a Chinese company, and in 2015, 2016, At that period in time, China kind of sat in a very kind of strange place in the mind of overseas customers, especially when it came to mobility, because maybe in 5 years before that, circa 2010, lots of kind of opportunistic importers in Europe and the Americas started bringing in very low-quality electric bikes and electric mopeds into Europe and into Americas. And customers were hugely dissatisfied with that first kind of onslaught of Chinese products coming in. And so we had a double duty. We were the first EV maker going into Europe of 2 and 4 wheels, kind of very traumatic period where it failed. So we had to go reestablish that Chinese companies could make good products. And more importantly, we had to establish ourselves as a brand. So we had to do double duty. And now, a lot of these other companies that are coming both from overseas, Asia, and from Europe are kind of riding our coattails in introducing an industry of electric 2 wheels, which is fine. And so, from the get-go, I knew this was going to be the problem that we had to solve. And that problem would be solved with just methodical work, with getting the right media influencers to basically verify our product as legitimate quality products and build that level of trust With the community, and it would take years to be able to really satisfy that consumer. And that's where we still are very much focused in on till this day, continuing to build that level of trust. That is our number one goal: is build good product, allow the customers to tell other customers that we have a great product, and especially allow the media to amplify that message as well. And that's kind of a huge takeaway, I think, for all Chinese brands, especially that are in consumer electronics and in EV mobility. Is that putting your billboard out there and doing all that type of work looks sexy and you might hit a couple KPIs very early on, but the long battle is won through just methodical delivery of good product and methodical work with media to build trust over time. And that's what we do. So if you go and search Neu in German or French or in Spanish, you'll literally have thousands of articles that have been in YouTube Reviews that have been done about our product, and that was a very specific strategy that we executed starting in 2016, even a full year before our products really landed in the market, and we still execute on to this day.

Yeah, and it's so important in China that Wang Hong influencer economy just last month this lipstick king two billion dollars worth of product and influencer becomes so incredibly core, and I think people in the West. Can understand that, but maybe they look at like, oh, it's kind of a joke if you're an Instagram influencer, right? It's not necessarily taken seriously, but in China, it's really serious business. And in some ways, China was already so much farther ahead in that space that you were able to sort of understand, internalize, and leverage that and kind of bring that out to other markets. It seems they almost like didn't even know what hit them in a way because you were already so advanced and effective that you could like really make a big impact with that. Is that fair to say?

Absolutely. Yeah. I think it's pretty fair to say. I think the idea is to take it to utilize the resources of the markets that you're going into, whether that be through social media or through traditional media, but then it also comes down to a very strategic choice of all your global partners. Right. And we didn't have the legacy of like a large 2-wheel manufacturer like Honda or Yamaha or whomever else coming in from Asia. We were the new kids on the street and we were looking for other entrepreneurial-minded distributors and dealers at the same time who understood our product, who understood the market, and would allow us to kind of do a, let's call it ground warfare, to basically methodically go in city by city, dealer by dealer to get our product out there. And a few years later, we're in thousands of dealers around the world. And that didn't happen by accident. That happened by choosing the right partners, and then also choosing the right communications of the brand into the marketplaces. And the influencer market in Europe is not nearly as dynamic— or in the United States is not nearly as dynamic as it is in China right now. And so that's not something that we, we push on too heavily. We focus more on the real validated sources of authorization, of knowledge about cars and motorcycles, to really gain trust around the I think that's where we're at right now at this stage.

Interesting. And the— as far as the brand promise goes, is it the same in each market, or is there a different message in Latin America versus Europe?

I mean, the mission globally is a fairly simple one. It's basically to redefine urban mobility and make people's lives in cities better. That's the global mission. I think the, the promise that we provide to a lot of these customers, again, is fairly universal. And that promise is that We create vehicles that you can feel proud of and in your mobility choice, right? In a lot of parts of the world, in Europe, to be honest with you, a moped, a 50cc moped, 125cc scooter moped is actually looked at as like a lower class of citizens mobility.

It is.

It really is. It's crazy, but it is. You have to own a car, which doesn't make much sense, but that's just the reality of the world we live in. And so we want to kind of change that. That concept and say, actually, it's cool to ride a moped. It's fun, it's free, it's exciting. You have the wind in your hair, you get to experience life in a completely different way as you're moving through your city. So, and we carry that universally through each of our markets. I think where we go market by market in terms of definition, not of the brand but of the product, and that it's kind of a good product-market fit. And that's really why we've evolved our product range, not because we wanted to expand just out of pure design or design desire, but it's actually observing really what each market needs. And so you look down in Indonesia, Indonesia has a very different, uh, kind of— has a very different moped need than what, say, New York City does or Paris does. And so then we have to adapt our products to those markets and also adapt the messaging ever so slightly to the end user of that product, because in Indonesia, a moped scooter is something that It's, it's like a car in the United States of America. Basically everyone owns one and it is the choice.

I actually, a scooter here in Bali is a minivan as well too. You can transport 5 and all the pets and 3 weeks worth of groceries on one scooter, on a 125cc scooter. So that's one thing I learned over there.

I don't condone that type of use of scooter, but in some needs, some places, that is just the way it is.

Indeed. Wow. Great. Excellent. Hey. Joseph, I really appreciate you taking the time talking about your path to China, your China journey, and what you're working on right now. What an excellent story. I really, really enjoyed it.

Thanks, Rich. I appreciate it. And I enjoyed having the convo with you. I enjoyed it as well. And yeah, if anyone, you know, that's listening to this wants to reach out to me, please put them in touch. Happy to chat, whether it's about Nu or any of the other things that I've done in my days back in China.

What's the best, best way to get in touch with you? Would you say?

Just send me an email, josephconstani@gmail.com. That's my personal. Give it out if you want it. You find me on LinkedIn. I'm the only Joseph Constani, I think, on LinkedIn, so it's pretty easy to find. So reach out. I'm an open book. One of my other mantras is connecting people, so I'm happy—

Terrific, terrific.

To help where I can.

Wonderful. Excellent. Thank you and all the best. Yeah, thanks.

Well, Rich, thank you for having me, and, uh, we'll catch up soon. Okay.

Sounds good.

That's a wrap.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Rich Robinson Show, Season 1, At the Speed of China. Visit therichrobinson.com/show to smash that subscribe button. Please also go to iTunes, iTunes or whatever platform of choice. Rate and comment. And until next time, thank you very much. Zaijian. See ya.