Unpacking XR innovation in Greater China and globally with Alvin Graylin Wang

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.

60% of the world's population also lives here, but I would contend 80% 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 that 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. Race all day, every day, right now.

Let's go.

Jio.

And we are back. Welcome to the Rich Robinson Show. I'm your host, Rich Robinson, and this is season 1 at the speed of China. I have an old friend who is on his Final day of lockdown, day 21 in quarantine in China ahead of the Olympics and the you know all the all the stuff that's happening in China. Please give me a warm welcome to Alvin Graylin Wong, ladies and gentlemen.

Thanks, Rich. Always a pleasure to chat with you, and thanks for inviting me on your show.

Thanks for coming on. Hey. I'm going to, you know, do the typical ask of like, tell me your hero's journey and tell me what you're working on now and tell me what's in the future. But before we do, please introduce yourself and tell everybody out there what you're working on specifically right now.

Sure. So right now I'm the China president for HTC. So we're one of the global leaders in the VR/XR space and not just in hardware, but we also manage the only open platform for content distribution. We also have arts programs, software programs, development studios, as well as a lot of software technology that we work with other vendors to, to build this ecosystem. So right now, HTC in China is dominant industry leader, thought leader, as well as a technology leader. We actually provide the underlying store and operating system to pretty much all the major vendors here in China. And we are one of the top 3 players globally in this space as well. So it's been a very fun space the last 5, 6 years. I've been in the company about 6 years and I really feel VR/XR space is really about to take off with all the things that's happened over the last year with the metaverse craze, I guess.

Yeah, I think this year is your year and you've been chipping at it, like chipping away at it for more than a half decade. And I think you've really become, for my money, like the sort of premier thought leader and person out there championing and advocating it. And I'd love to dig into that, but before we do, Let's go back to yesteryear, to the origin story. And I actually didn't even know we were chatting before that you were born in China. I thought that you were born abroad and came back to the motherland, but please share how you were bitten by a radioactive reeducation camp spider back in the day.

Yeah, well, that's a bit of a long story. I'm trying to make it short, but I was born in San So I just turned 50 this year, and I was actually born right in the middle of the Cultural Revolution. So my parents were both artists. My mom was a ballerina. She helped found the Shanghai and Beijing Ballet School.

Wow.

And my father was a professor of fine arts at the Guangzhou Art Academy or Art Institute. And I guess the interesting part of that relationship is that mom— and mom is actually half American and half Chinese. So her mom was a reporter for the New York Tribune During the Sino-Japanese War and came to China, I think, in the late '30s and had my mom right before the Japanese invaded Shanghai. And when they did, she was actually left behind and she never got to see her mom again after that. So somebody should write a book or do a movie on that because I think it was very interesting what happened, especially at that period, to have a Caucasian woman, you know, have a baby with a Chinese man. And then during the war, she escaped actually being wrapped up in gauze and being told to these guards as they were going through all of the different checkpoints that she had leprosy. And so the guards didn't want to take off the gauze, and somehow she was able to get from Shanghai to Chongqing where the Flying Tigers were based in China, so the American air troop, and they flew her out of China and got her back to New York. So it is a bit of a story. So I was born right in the middle of the Chinese Revolution, or the Cultural Revolution. And in fact, the first 2 years of my life was spent in a chicken shed, or what used to be a chicken shed, because they didn't have anything on that farm to live in that was extra space. So my mom got put into a chicken shed to stay. So I've actually gone through the worst times in China, but I was very fortunate in 1980, right when Deng Xiaoping took back over and they had the opening up, we were Part of the first group of people to allow to immigrate to the US.

So Graylin, tell us about that, like your dad's story. Like he's a Caucasian?

No. So my dad's actually Hmong, but he's fully Chinese. Yeah. So Graylin is actually my mom's last name. So her, her 2 last names, her mom's last name is Gray and her father's last name is Ling. So Ling and Gray together became Graylin. When we moved from China to the US, my parents thought it was probably better For us to use a non-ethnic name because that way we have more even chances. My brother and I would have a more even chance to grow up in American society without being, I don't know, showed any prejudice. So I think that was the thinking. And so we kept it throughout my life in the States. But when I'm in China, people use my Chinese last name, which is Wang. So that's a long answer to your question.

So 1980, did you use the American connection to go back to the States or was it just like you're like you're?

Yeah. So my uncle who the brother of The dad of my mom's mom lived in Seattle. So we were able to find him after a lot of digging around and help from the consulate, the US consulate in Guangzhou where we lived, and were able to reach out to him. And he helped sponsor us to immigrate to Seattle.

Wouldn't your mom have been also like an American citizen because her mom was American, or was that— no?

Well, so I think the thing is that she was a Chinese citizen because she was born in China and her mom, they never met up again. So she kind of lost her rights, I guess. This was during the war, right? So shit happens.

Wow.

Wow.

And then you were so born and raised in Seattle and tell me about that transition, 8 years old. Like how was your experience with that?

Yeah. I mean, I think it was definitely a big change because we left everything behind. And I think when we landed in the US, we had 2 luggages and a total of $500, which was my family's life savings. And we were getting kind of small apartment, and my dad started washing dishes to try to make money, and my mom was doing translation for people. And I didn't speak a word of English. And I remember the first 6 months, I was put into this ESL class, and I had one ESL class and one math class. That was all I did. And the rest of the time, I just kind of played checkers or chess with other new immigrants. So we had this group of people that was newly immigrated. But within about a year, I started, I picked up the language. It was mostly from watching TV, actually. And by the second year, I pretty much started getting all A's, and then I haven't gotten a B, I think, all the way through college, and then all the way through grad school. So my dad said, when I landed, or maybe like a few months after we landed, my parents sat my brother and I down and said, like, we sacrificed everything to bring you guys to this country, to give you a better education, another chance to do things that we couldn't do in our home country. And so make sure you make the best out of this opportunity because you now have an opportunity to develop yourself in a place where it's more free and you can be educated.

Well, you did it.

And so given that kind of goal to say, he said, we're all put on this earth to contribute to society and to leave as much good as we can before we leave and to find, you need to find a career that you can make the most and best impact. Well, that's beautiful.

That's beautiful. I mean, I think that's not a typical sort of like, it's not like any immigrant is always like pretty much like, we got to take care of the family first, but to have that kind of like, you got to give back to the world. And you've always been an amazing, good egg in the ecosystem, giving your time and energy and help to other people. So you took that advice to heart too.

No, I think, I mean, I try to live to those words because I feel like my dad kind of inspired me from That youth, that young age. In fact, last week, well, before I came back on my 3-week quarantine, I actually spent a week with him because he just had a stroke. So he lost his ability to speak and he's kind of bedridden. And it actually makes me think back to the time when we were growing up and the things that he did to influence my brother and I. We both did well. We both actually ended up getting a double E undergrad at the University of Washington, and we both went to MIT to do our double master's. And we didn't ask the parents for a single penny to support us Both went to school. So all of it was—

What's he doing?

He's actually a technology entrepreneur as well. And he's founded, I think, 4 different venture-backed companies. We both founded 4 different venture-backed companies.

Another, another underachiever.

Yeah. So one of his last companies was sold to Samsung for like, I think, $300 million, became the Samsung Pay service. And now he's now working on an EV company. So he's doing quite well. So we're both trying to leave our mark and doing Accomplishing what our dad parents had kind of set out for us forty years ago.

Beautiful, beautiful thing. So so after MIT, tell everybody about your path to now.

So from MIT, essentially during the whole time, probably even before MIT, I should probably mention a little bit because I think I actually came back to China in ninety four, and this was after spending some time working at IBM and working at Intel. Then I was able to participate in. Essentially the founding of the Intel organization in Shanghai. I was one of the first 3 expats here and helped to develop the consumer business for Intel in China. So essentially we had nothing in the consumer business. It was all PCs to enterprise and businesses, averaging price about $2,000. And then the market thought, hey, look, there's such a big consumer market that we need to be able to get computers to the home and use it for education. That was my focus. So I wrote a plan to our GM. And then he said, okay, no, this is such a good plan. Why don't you go run it? I was, I think, like 23 or something at the time. So I didn't know what I was doing. And so I started to build a team and essentially everybody that worked for me was older than me and was better educated than me. But I was very fortunate. I was being sent from headquarters. So I had the authority to drive that business. And within 3 years, we went from almost nothing to about a $300 million business in the consumer PC space. And after 3 years, I was going around to to all of the PC manufacturers at the time. Initially, all the manufacturers in China were— well, the foreign manufacturers or the people who were selling were like HP, Compaq, Dell, IBM were the major players, and they were all super expensive, only sold in business-to-business stores. And so I essentially said, look, we need to get these things to get the prices down. We need to get the channels to be able to be accessible everywhere in the world, everywhere in the country, including 3rd and 4th tier cities. And we need to get content so that people can actually use something at home. It's not just about business software and word processing. That's not enough to get people interested to bring this stuff home. So I was able to get a few dozen developers internationally that were making games and education and multimedia software and convince them to port their stuff or translate it or localize it, I guess, to Chinese language and then get local companies to help do that work for them. So I was doing these matchmaking events I was helping essentially take these things that used to cost $50, $60, $100, and I was giving them a quarter US to say, I'll give you a quarter for it, but you would've got pirated for free. So now at least you're getting a quarter and you're getting distribution. So we made these compact discs with all of these apps on it and then bundled it with our chips, which then we sold these chips to these mom-and-pop shops that were selling PCs. They were building their own PCs. We also made these low-end motherboards. We then put the PCs on there or put the chips to be sold separately. And we, by the time I left, we had about 10,000 what we called genuine Intel dealers that were mom-and-pop shops.

I mean, man, like I haven't heard that story at all. Like there's so many tears and dead bodies of corporations that come in totally tone deaf and just miss it. And you smelled it and built it. That's a fucking great success story. I never heard that story either. That's extraordinary.

I guess with all the time we spent together, we didn't talk about the past too much, I guess. But you know, I worked with companies like Legend. Legend was now Lenovo. They were, I think, number seven or something PC company at the time. And I talked to Yang Yunxin, who at the time was now the chairman, but he at the time was department manager for the PC department. And I convinced him to say, "Hey, you should do multimedia PCs because consumers really want this." And we talked and we gave him plans, and we kind of supported him to do that. And within three years, he became the number one manufacturer PCs in China on selling consumer PCs. So, and we worked with. Great Wall, Founder, Tongshu were all local companies, all became the top 4 or 5 companies because of their sales of low-cost consumer PCs. So it was a very exciting time because within just a few years, essentially it went from nobody owning PCs to most people having the ability to afford it, even though not everybody had it. And then that was also the same time the internet actually started, right? '94 was when kind of the web browsers started to happen in the West. And so the internet started happening, and now people have PCs and they had a phone line, they can actually get online. So, and then we also included these, I guess, VCD players in these PCs as part of the multimedia, so they could do karaoke at home. So it was kind of an exciting time because I felt like at least I was able to contribute a little bit to the kind of modernization of that era.

That was a big canvas to paint on at that age. That's great. Tell me about that transition back to China then, like So 8 years old, you're already speaking Chinese well and starting to read, but like, what was your continuity of like Chinese language and Chinese culture and reading and writing?

Yeah, so it was really tough because I just finished first grade, right? I think I was starting second grade when we left. So my writing was not very good and then not using it for quite a few years. I think for about like 15 years or 20 years.

But it was like the dining room table, like language, right? And like around the house.

Yeah. Exactly. So I remember within a week of me landing, I had to go do a speech in Chinese and I'm like, oh shit. And I'm like, okay, so I gotta remember microprocessor. Okay. It's just, and I had to write down the pinyin I remember for these words because I had to get on stage and try to sound professional. Yeah.

And that's the thing about Chinese too, is that like everything is like a Chinese word. Like in Japanese, they'll do something like computeru, right? They'll like But like China's like, nope, we're going to do electric brain and electric shadow for movies and everything's got its own word. Right. And then you have to all new vocabulary. Right.

Yeah. So professional Chinese and kind of regular conversational Chinese are very different. So having to understand the wording as well as the phrasing and the formalities, it was definitely challenging. I remember I had to try to write down the keywords in pinyin of the speech that I was trying to speak and I wrote it in English. And then I would put in some of the pinyin words underneath of it so I can remember what it was. So I was doing real-time translation, kind of real-time translation in reading the English and speaking the Chinese. So it took a little while. I remember, I'm sure people were like, what the hell's wrong with this guy?

So I've heard you speak Chinese and I'm like, man, he's the best guy that I've heard who's like a, you know, American-born Chinese coming over. I guess he just has like some sort of a knack. You know, you have that like 8-year foundation. Of like, you know, in the brainstem of speaking Chinese, right?

Yeah, yeah. Although I gotta say, I lost probably 80% of it during the period I was in the States, because in the States you never use it, right? I mean, you kind of just meld into the society. And then kind of going back to your talking about China's speed, I remember when I first came to China, when we opened up the Shanghai office, just to get a landline, just to get a phone line, it was a month to wait in line for somebody to come in and then install Install one phone line for you. And it was like $1,000 or something per month to get this. And then to get a data line, it took longer and you had to get a T1 line. And it was like super expensive, like tens of thousands of dollars a month. Now, if I want to order broadband fiber to the home, I make a call, within the afternoon somebody's at my home installing it. I've got gigabit fiber to the home, right? So I mean, China has developed and changed so much in the last 30 years.

Yeah.

Wow.

So that's a great job out of UW. And then from there you went to Boston.

Yeah. So, so after Intel in China, I went back to the States for a little bit and I was put into working and doing kind of business development for Intel with Microsoft and Oracle and Netscape. And it was okay, but I felt like after the kind of Wild West freedom of having and running your own multi-hundred million dollar business in China, to then go back and be part of that Corporate hierarchy. It was just not fun anymore. And then I found out about this MIT fellowship where you can go there and get a dual degree in 2 years, dual master's, and they pay for it. And that's the thing. So there was really no better deal than that, to go into the number one school in the world and get a free education. And so I applied and was able to get in. And after I got in, my brother was going to go to Stanford. I said, don't go to Stanford, come to MIT with me.

Yeah.

He applied and got in. So we were the first brother pair to get into Sloan at the same time and graduate at the same time.

Oh, is it same class?

Yeah, same class.

Whoa, that's intense.

Wow. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And then so during MIT, so back to your original question, during MIT, actually, I was doing all the dual degree stuff, but then I also started 2 companies during this time. So there's this 50K competition. It's their business plan competition in China. MIT every year. And I was able to get into the semifinals and finals both years, and actually was able to take my plan to get VCs to give me term sheets both years. But the first year when I got the term sheet, some of the technology I had licensed for it, the company found out I was getting a term sheet and then they pulled the license and tried to do it themselves. So I got totally screwed on that. But, you know, it was a lesson learned because I didn't read the contract close enough because it had that clause, until you get funding, we can pull this license and the core piece of the technology that we were building the company on. But the second year, I was able to actually raise money on the plan that I wrote with a few other partners. And it was essentially a kind of a big data kind of AI system that allows you to look at the browsing history and purchase history of people and be able to rate them in terms of their future value to E-commerce companies and to portals.

In April. Yeah. Wow.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So we were a little bit ahead of our time, right? Because this was in 2000, right? We got funded right after the internet bubble crashed. So just to be able to get that funding was already tough, but then to then try to run an internet startup during the crash where every one of our customers were all e-commerce companies or online portals, one by one, they were going out of business. One by one, the people that we were talking to were getting Laid off. And so it was super tough, even though we got the technology working, we had systems that were allowing you to, with just a little bit of information, have a fairly high accuracy predicting the future purchase intention and value of that customer. But, you know, after about a year, our VC that funded us went out of business, closed their office, and wouldn't pay us the second part of the money that they had in 2 tranches.

The tranche. Brutal.

Real lesson learned. And, you know, what you learn during the tough times It's so much more than what you learn when everything's successful. So yeah, and this was all happening while I was having my first baby. So it was a very interesting time. So I think that was kind of what happened right after MIT. But then after I decided that, because this was mid to late 2001, I said, look, the internet winter doesn't look like it's going to fix itself anytime soon. I ran out of money. I couldn't pay the team. The team kept working, right? The whole team kept working for another like 3, 4 months. And I said, look, I can't have you guys sacrifice like this because I don't know when we can make this work. So we decided to just put everything in the archive and maybe we can come back to it at some point.

So you actually got like a triple degree at MIT in a way, right?

Yeah, the School of Hard Knocks, that was the toughest part. I think I learned maybe more in that year and a half than I did in the couple years at MIT. But MIT was an absolutely amazing experience. Amazing experience. I mean, so many smart people, so many smart professors, so much diversity of thinking. In fact, the year I graduated, remember Sloan was the number one ranked business school in the world, and MIT, the engineering school, had been the number one engineering school for the last 20 years. So it was the peak of MIT glory. So I was very happy to be part of that time.

Terrific.

So after we closed it down, essentially, I got a call from one of my old bosses at Intel, which joined a security company. This was right after 9/11. So the security space became super hot. And so I went over to Taiwan to Trend Micro, which at the time was one of the global leaders in kind of network and data security. And I started to go there and run their enterprise business and grew it like 50% in the first year. And then I was asked to run their consumer business, grew it again by like 50% in a year. So it was a completely new industry for me, but I think I was again very lucky that they trusted me. to lead something that I wasn't necessarily an expert in, but I think they believed in my kind of basic ability to see through issues of business and how to grow it and how to market it and what type of products people needed. I remember doing one of our product launches. I had gone on 45 days, went to 35 cities in like 30 countries across 4 continents. So—

Wow.

That's an amazing mini shampoo collection, but wow, that's like a Ultra marathon.

Yeah. So, I mean, you were in a different room every day, pretty much. Again, it's just so fun in terms of a young person being able to go to learn these different things at the same time. Actually, one other thing I did forget to mention was during MIT, as part of my graduate studies, I actually took 6 months off to go help Intel start their Intel On business, online services business, which is kind of like their web hosting, kind of Amazon Web Services type business. Back in 1999, and which was a brand new business for Intel as well. We spent like a billion dollars in about a year building 17 data centers, grew from 5 people when I started to over 1,000 people when I left. But I think within a year after I left, they actually shut the whole thing down because it just— Intel is a manufacturing company, it wasn't a service company, so the DNA wasn't there to actually operate it. And I think there was some decision that said, look, this isn't making money for us, don't know how to operate these things properly. So, but you know, that was actually a really interesting experience for me to kind of, again, do an entrepreneurship experience.

Wow. Fascinating.

Yeah.

I didn't even know that they were ahead of AWS. And, you know, AWS is the biggest contributor to net margin for Amazon, right? Because they try not to have net margin in e-commerce because they're like, your margin is my opportunity. Right. But it's fascinating. You know, like you become a pioneer, you put a billion dollars into it. But then you don't necessarily stick with it, right?

Yeah. I mean, Intel is such a good company that has so many good people. And I was so fortunate to spend my first 6, 7 years there and really build that foundation. And I would recommend that for anybody who wants to be an entrepreneur is actually to start, maybe not to go directly into a startup, but actually to get some foundation in a large company where you know how to scale and having more systematic and process-driven management models, because when you get larger, you actually do need that kind of thinking versus the kind of firefighting model that most startups are run on. But I actually did my master's thesis on data networking, kind of distributed data networking based on the work that I was doing with Intel. So I was kind of doing both things at the same time. I'm kind of rambling a little bit.

No, it's great. I love it. I see the continuity and how it builds on top of each other, right? So that's great.

Yeah. So after Intranet Micro, I actually went back to the States because I was having my second baby. And I said, look, I can't be on the road 70, 80% of the time. I need to find something more stable. So I went over to Seattle and joined WatchGuard Technologies, which is another security company, and essentially drove their kind of product and marketing business for a year. And I remember, like, this is kind of a weird company because within one year they had 3 different CEO changes, and at the end was actually bought out by a private equity fund.

Wow.

So the whole year we were just doing management shuffles and just a lot of politics inside. It was not a fun place to work, even though I felt like I contributed to a major product launch for them that 10 years later, I went back to the website. They were still using the same names and the same product kind of positioning that I wrote when I was there. So at least I felt like I left a little mark there. But after that, I said, look, I need to go back to startup because I don't feel like this big corporate stuff is really what I'm I am excited about. So that's when I actually came back to China again. So 2005, I came back to China and I came back actually initially because I was talking to a VC in Seattle and they had introduced me to one of their entrepreneurs in residence who had come from Baidu and he was thinking about doing a PC-based search engine again. And all I thought about is like, you already had Baidu and you already have Google in the States. There's no way to do that PC space. I think it is too late, but I thought again and I said, but we should do something in the mobile space because I think mobile hasn't taken off. Mobile internet hasn't taken off. And so I actually came back and spent a month in China kind of doing the scouting of what's the possible market here. And I decided, I actually found one of my old, I guess, colleagues from Intel that I worked with back in the early days in the '90s. And he had actually done his studies in artificial intelligence and native language processing. So we started brainstorming and I said, hey, look, can we do something where you can just ask the question in natural language and get a response back in natural language using a search system instead of— right now the searches on Google and Baidu is you put in a keyword and you get a list of 100 different links and you had to go find what you want. Can we get something that was like what Siri is 10 years after? We actually built that. So from 2005 to 2008, we built a system that actually became the de facto search engine for mobile that all 3 Chinese carriers were using in their platform. And we had people sitting in the carrier data centers operating it for the carriers under their brand names. And so it worked, right? You would ask something like, what's the best Cantonese food, Nanjing Lu, in Shanghai? And it would actually give you a list of here's the 3 top restaurants. If you need more, you reply more or something like that. that, right? So, and it was called M-Info. But when we also acquired another company there in China, in Shanghai called Guanxi, I don't know if you remember Guanxi. It was also an SMS service that essentially you use. It was the only English-based search service in China.

Wow.

So we had the only text-based search in Chinese and the only text-based search engine in English in China operating under this umbrella. And we had huge growth, right? Went from like a couple people to a couple hundred people Within a couple years, and was working with all the carriers. But then the carriers kept clamping down on us because we wanted to take the carrier traffic and say, "Can we monetize this? Can we sell advertising on it?" And they're like, "No, we're a government-operated company. We don't want to do advertising, and you're not going to do advertising, and you can't have our data. We're going to keep our data in our data centers, and you can't touch it." And blah blah blah. So we're only going to pay you the service fees of what it costs you to have your people. Sitting in our data centers, so every year that service fee got smaller and smaller. So it was a very tough business to be in. But to see the growth of the mobile space, right? I mean, when I got there, there was essentially nobody using text messages. To within a couple of years, there was more text messages sent in a day than like the U.S. was sending in a year, right? I mean, people were text messaging for everything. This is before the whole American Idol in the U.S. when text messages became became a big thing, right? China was actually using text messages a lot more. I mean, it was the number one kind of value-added service for the Chinese carriers, and they were making tons of money. And at the same time, there was also this thing called value-added service where you can get ringtones and get your fortune told every day, and people would charge you like an RMB per message, that kind of stuff. So that whole business was really Taking off and talking about China's speed. This was also before 3G, right? So everybody had a mobile phone. I remember when I came to China in '94, my mobile phone cost the company like $10,000, right? $10,000 for that mobile phone. It was that Nokia. No, it was a Motorola StarTAC. Yeah, I remember. And you sit down and you put your StarTAC on the table. You're like the boss, right? Like everybody around, like they're comparing who has the best. So either you had the Ericsson or the StarTAC. And if you had a Daga Da, you were like too old. This is like old school.

Oh yeah. Okay.

Okay.

That was like the new Daga Da. That was the Xiao Ge Xiao, I guess. So I don't know.

Yeah. So anyways, you know, to see the speed of adoption and to get phones down to a few hundred RMB, right? From a few tens of thousands of dollars. This is in not that long a time, right?

So I had a similar experience because I came from Hong Kong. There were 6 carriers and none of them were interoperable. So you could only send a text to somebody if they had the same carrier. And how do you even know if they were the same carrier? So you just didn't send a text. And then I got to the mainland in '99, 2000. I was splitting my time. And then my assistant had a phone that cost more than her monthly salary. And she's sending texts all the time. And then you can make money from it. And then I started my first mobile game company. It was doing text-based games. Like you have to use your imagination. Oh, you got me. Right? And like, so yeah, but it was extraordinary because at that volume, like you said, right? In one day, it was millions and tens of millions and hundreds of millions of messages and then pretty soon billions, right?

Yeah. So I mean, speed of adoption of that technology curve was amazing. And then later on, the speed of adoption of mobile internet and then the speed of adoption of mobile social apps, right? I mean, all of these are getting at that China speed, the trajectory that you're talking about when something takes off. It just takes off, right? It took Tencent like 10 years to get their first 100 million QQ users. It took them like 6 months to get their first 100 million WeChat users. So it's just crazy how things quickly go. I mean, an example of more in the construction, non-technical side, but when I came to Shanghai, there was no subways and there was no elevated highways. Within one year, they built an elevated highway that went all the way from Hongqiao Airport all the way to the Bund. And it took a 2-hour commute into a 20-minute commute. They moved out a million people from their homes in that one year and created like a 30-mile elevated highway, right? I remember when I lived in Boston, it took like 15 years to go 1.5 miles on the Big Dig.

Big Dig.

Right, $50 billion in overrun. And this happened in one year, 20 miles dislocating, right? Not just moving them a little bit, like Dislocating a million people, moved them to outside the city, gave them apartments outside the city, and just said, okay, we're going to renovate this space and they're going to take over the space. And then same for the subways. There was no subways when I got there, but '97, one year, I think they built like more subway lines in like 2 or 3 years than all of the New York subway system and all of the London subway system, right? So it's crazy how quickly these things happen.

Yeah, I think it became the biggest in the world, right?

Yeah.

Like some of it is like not to be emulated, right? I mean, like eminent domain of a million people. That's not necessarily something that countries in the West can even do. Right. But I think just like the Beijing new airport, the Daxing airport, it was like on time, on budget. Like even that is like extraordinary just to be able to create the world's largest airport on time, on budget compared to maybe a German airport that might take 5x The time and the budget—that's what you really see in the West over and over again, right?

Yeah, actually, even beyond that, I think the rapid railway network in China is a great example of that China speed. Right now, I think 70 or 80 actually no, I take it back. I think 80 or 90 percent of rapid railway in the world is in China, right?

It's just in China. Spain's number two; it's a distant second. Yeah, yeah.

So it's crazy how quickly that happened in tens of thousands of miles. Construction and thousands of rail cars, right? So when the Chinese government puts their mind to something, it happens. And I'm not saying that every one of those railways are probably the most best utilization, but at least they got it done and they rode it relatively safely. I think there's only been one major accident on the railway in the last 15 years. Considering that it's going at you know two three hundred miles an hour, that's pretty amazing.

Yeah, like when we first met in the late zips, like high-speed rail was not really a thing in China, and then it's like. Now you're in the last 5, 6 years, it's been like, wow, I don't know if I wanna fly. I just take high-speed rail. It's so good, right?

Yeah. I mean, going from Beijing to Shanghai, if I have a choice, I actually prefer the rail because the rail, you can still be online, you can still make calls, and you can go directly to the airport with essentially no waiting, no real security checks. And you can get there 10 minutes before the train leaves and you're on the train and you're ready to go, right? You don't have this 2 sides, usually you have to wait an hour and a half on each side on the airport to get things done. And you don't need to do that.

And even if you want to, you can use Waimai. You can order food that's going to meet you at the station nice and hot on one stop in the middle. And then you can get like beautiful.

Absolutely. And I think taking to a more, more nearer term type of innovation that's happened in China is the EV space. I mean, right now China for the last 2, 3 years have been the dominant EV market in the world. I think like 60-something percent of all EVs in the world are sold in this one market, right? So not just from volume, but also for variety of cars and the technology. I think there was at one point something like 300 or 400 companies doing EV. Not all of them are good companies, of course. Most of them will go out of business. But I think probably about 10 or a dozen companies here that are making quality products and some of them are even starting to export. So I think that's something that is Pretty impressive. And now that Tesla's also here, I think that actually helps to drive the quality because now you have international competition with that local competition and they're able to churn out cars a lot faster than even Tesla. I mean, I, I think Tesla's an amazing company, but even against Tesla, I think the Chinese companies can move faster and they seem to take on new innovative features faster, not necessarily higher quality or whatever, but they make it work.

Yeah. Those cycles of innovation, right? And Elon Musk, I quote him in the book saying, is like, at the end of the day, The pace of innovation is all that matters. You only have so many cycles in which you can test and put it out there and get feedback and rinse repeat. And the faster you can do that, even if you don't do it that well, I think that's what Chinese companies do well is that, but we're going to do it. So it's not necessarily, you know, this sort of level of perfection that people in the West go after, but the learnings that we extract and the ability to bring on the early adopters is so valuable.

I couldn't agree more. And in fact, I think you learn more more from those early kind of mistakes than you do trying to perfect it. In fact, I think there was a professor who did an experiment. He said, okay, this is a photography class. You can take as many pictures as you want, and at the end we'll try to find something good out of it. Or you could take one picture, and so you have a choice. That picture is the one that you think represents your ability to take quality photos. And at the end of the day, all the best photos in that class All came from the people who just randomly took pictures, who was not trying to create the perfect shot, right? And I think that's really how most things happen is a cycle of innovation and iteration because you learn from real-world experience versus trying to be theoretical.

Precious about it. Yeah. Try to do it in the boardroom or do it. Oh, yes, yes, yes.

No. So, so after Minfo, I actually started another social network company, which that's called Firefly. It was a kind of events and AR-based social company where you can look at different— take your phone and it looks, it takes the location-based service together with what you're pointing at and overlays information to tell you what's around you, what interesting events or happenings or clubs or whatever. And that was kind of part of the startup that I did afterwards. I even had a very short stint, about a year, where I worked with another partner to do an online model agency. So he was a professional model and he knew the people in the industry, and I helped essentially to digitize that industry, to turn about 70% of the professional models in the country onto this digital network where you can do online kind of casting instead of having— because the normal way of casting is you make somebody call, you get a bunch of these models to come in, and it takes their whole afternoon to come to you, and then you pick maybe 2 or 3 out of them. So it wastes everybody's time, and sometimes you don't get what you want. We actually took all the model cards and then we added a lot of information that they didn't have, a lot of the background information on these different models. So people can pick online and see the schedule, who's available when, and they can book them directly on their mobile phone. So that was something that I worked on. And then I kind of handed it off to my partner 'cause it's not really my space, but it was a fun thing I was helping him out with. And then after that, I essentially moved on to, or I exited from the MFO kind of guanxi business. And then our common friend in Balvin called me up, and he was like, "Yeah, I have this. I'm trying to do this mobile accelerator in Taiwan. Would you be interested in kind of helping me out? Because you know you're kind of just finished some of these other things." I'm like, "Ah, well, I have some time, so why not?" So I essentially spent the three four months helping create the process, build the team, kind of hire and found the initial batch of companies together with William. And then I lived in Taiwan from during this period. And kind of during this period, I also got reached out by HTC, who was looking to hire somebody to drive their VR business. And so I happened to be there. And so I said, look, sure, I'll come meet with you guys and try out the technology. And I was able to meet Chira Wong, who is the chairman of HTC. And we started talking and really got along. And I felt like there was a good connection in terms of what she wants to do with the technology. It's not about just getting everybody addicted to gaming. And that was the thing at the time. I was like, oh, it's going to be great for gaming. But really, she wanted to do something that was beyond gaming. And I said, oh, that's actually what I did my undergrad study in. I worked with Tom Furness, who was the godfather of VR, and my senior paper with him was how do you take VR to disrupt the education industry.

Wow. Wow.

So it's kind of like going full circle. So kind of 20 years later, I'm able to realize something that I had Studied before, and I at the time wasn't ready. And when I talked to her, she's like, "Oh yeah, and your education is so important. I really want to give back to the world." And I'm like, "Oh, so this is perfect because now you have an advocate inside a company at the most senior level that really wants to do good with technology. It's not just about making money; it's not just about selling product." And that was something that I could get behind. And so she said, "So why don't you start by kind of running our China business? Because you know the industry there well, and we'll give you a little bit." more time to kind of also get familiar with the rest of the people in the company. But even at some point, we may even have you come and lead this entire business globally. And I was like, okay, that sounds fair. And so that's how I started to come here. And since then, I've kind of just been more focused in, you know, what I did for the PC industry in the early '90s. I kind of took that same playbook and said, look, we need to start building an ecosystem here. We need to figure out how do we get the products to prices that people want? How do we get more of the international content in here. And so how do we get people to experience this stuff? And we started to work with a lot of the location-based entertainment kind of VR arcades. Within a year, it went from almost no VR arcades to, I think there was something like 8,000 or 10,000 VR arcades in China, like just sprouted up over a year. And people were taking their basements or a little apartment and making each room into an arcade room and then renting it out by the hour to people. It's crazy how most of those companies went out of business, of course. But still right now, I think in China still has, I think about 3,000 or 4,000 of these VR arcades and it's still the most popular arcade location and I guess geography or country in the world right now. But based on a lot of our studies, actually the first encounter of people in China to VR, 70% or 60% of them was because they went and tried it at a VR arcade. So there's huge impact in that kind of sub-segment of The industry. We are our— the first 6 degrees of freedom VR device was launched by us. The first standalone device that does not require a cable was launched by us. The first 6 degrees of freedom hands and head standalone device was launched by us. The first app store in China that was an open app store to every other manufacturer was launched by us. The first business-to-business VR device was launched by us. Everything launched first in China. And then once we kind of got all the kinks out, then we started to roll it out in the rest of the world. So it was something that I felt quite proud that our team, a relatively small team, was really the kind of part, the innovator and the guinea pig for the company in terms of directing what products should look like and how the services should be delivered and what the customer feedback was and how to position it to the world. And so it's been an amazing kind of 6 years during this process. We also worked Heavily with the venture capital industry, so I helped to create the virtual reality venture capital lines, which is like 50 VCs and strategic investors from around the world, over $10 billion of investable capital. Wow! And we started to just facilitate investors to get together with these startups. Even HTC's accelerator experience I had with building locks, I took to this as well, where within the last five years we've invested over a hundred. 10 companies in the VR space. It was all kind of early-stage startups, really helping those early-stage companies when they need it most. And not just about giving them money, but giving them a platform, giving them a place where they can then go show off what they have. We would do joint press releases with them. We'd put them on stage at our big events. We would put them in our major roadshows. We introduced them to customers or introduced them to technology providers. So it was something that created a real community. And that community actually help each other, right? So we have like a WeChat group with over 100 of these companies in there, and they're always saying, hey, anybody know a solution to solve this problem? Or anybody have a customer that has this need? Beautiful.

That's probably the number one thing you see from like Y Combinator, right? That kind of just community there after graduation, right? So to be able to create that specifically for your industry, that's powerful. Yeah.

So in addition to just the startups, we actually then brought together the more mature companies. So I created what was at the time was the Asia-Pacific Venture Capital— Asia-Pacific Virtual Reality Alliance, which then we had about, I think, 50 or 60 companies. And then the government said, hey, we want to build an industry association. I was like, okay, sure, we'll donate this association to you. And then we essentially renamed it to Industry VR Alliance. And it's the only government-endorsed industry organization for VR in China. And I went from being the president of the Asia Pacific Alliance to becoming the vice chair of the Industry VR Alliance. And one of the government officials is actually now the chairman for the last few years. And that's the organization that now kind of defines some of the industry standards. But we try to put a more objective view into it, and we're doing all kinds of educational experimental studies to say, should it be this kind of refresh rate or not? Should it be this kind of resolution? What is the best weight balance? What is the right focal distance for the screen to the eye for best health? And so all these things. So we're really helping to take the experience that we have as a commercial player to support industry in building the healthiest and most comfortable and most efficient type of devices, as well as creating some of the industry standards to help create software interoperability. worked with China Mobile to create the global standard for XR, which is built—

And you say XR instead of AR. I'm not exactly familiar.

Yeah, so XR is just a shorthand for AR, VR, MR, because there's all these different Rs. And so we just call it XR because—

So augmented reality?

Augmented reality, virtual reality, or mixed reality. There's a lot of different confusion because when you start saying these things, People mean different things when they say these things, so we just call it XR because within the next 5 years there's going to be devices that combine VR and AR into one device. So it's not going to be— right now you have AR glasses and then you have VR goggles, and some people like, oh, and then you have these, you know, MR HoloLens stuff, right? And right now it feels like they're all different things. At the end of the day, they're really just a device on your head, and if it's clear, it's AR. If it's If it's opaque, then it's VR because you're now immersed in this environment and the entire environment is virtual. So AR just means that you're putting some virtual object on top of a real scenery, real background, right? In fact, we just launched a product about a month ago. This thing here.

Yeah. Wow. Beautiful.

It's glasses, right? This is tiny compared to—

Those are full VR glasses.

Full VR, 6 degrees of freedom.

What's the weight?

180 grams.

When you say 6 degrees of freedom, like define that.

6 degrees of freedom means that you can rotate, walk, go up and down, you can jump, you can move around an open space. 3 degrees of freedom means I can essentially rotate, I can watch a 360 movie, but I can't walk into the movie, right? So with the 6 degrees of freedom is I have a room, I can just use that whole room however I want. And if I get closer to the screen, then that screen, that keyboard gets closer to me, right? Where in a 3 degrees of freedom environment, if you move, that screen still stays the same distance It doesn't matter how you move in.

So I guess in real life we live in 6 degrees of freedom and it's just giving you the real life equivalent.

Yeah. It essentially mimics the entire real life experience because you also have 6 degrees of freedom hands, right? So you wanna be able to see your hands move around with you. When Oculus first came out, they essentially were using the Xbox controller. So you were using a game controller, using a pad and the little knobs and buttons. And you weren't moving, and you were sitting in front of a desk with a little sensor to see where you are. And you can move a little bit, but you're sitting on a chair.

So that thing—so for the people that can't see, I mean, that thing is pretty beautiful. They look like ski goggles, right? They don't look like a helmet. Like what's been the biggest change in the last six years? Like what are the major things that have been reduced? I'll give you a very direct example.

When I started in the VR space, the headset I was using was a. About 2.5 kilograms and it was about a 300 by 200 pixel resolution and it cost about $200,000 to $300,000 for that system to come together. Now you have like 100 times the resolution on this thing. You have, I think, 1/15th the weight and 1/400th the cost. 1/400th the cost.

Like, what are we gonna see then? Like, is it gonna be Basically like glasses? Is it gonna like write onto your retina? Is that the idea?

Like what? No. So there are devices today. I mean, 2 years ago I was already looking at prototype contact lenses that had a mini screen inside. You can get a black and white image. I was seeing a slight small animated image of Einstein in black and white on a contact lens that you can put on your eye, but to be able to be self-powered, to be FDA approved, to go through all that, it's going to take 10 or 15, 20 years, right? And for it to get to the cost level that people can afford. But for glasses, you already have glasses. Right now, that's more of a ski goggle type format. You already have glasses devices that are starting to get there. I mean, the prices are a little bit still high, probably in a couple thousand dollar type range. We can get that, that prices will come down, right? So by 2030, I would be very confident confident that there should be a glasses-like form factor type device that will allow you to go to both AR and VR and be selectable and probably ties to a 5G or 6G network to do most of the processing so that they can keep the power consumption as low as possible so you can have that all-day wear and the little tiny battery.

That's interesting. I hadn't really thought of that. Then when all the processing is distributed, then it's all on the server side then.

Yeah, you'll probably get to near retinal resolution with these devices. Sure. So can't say too much about what we're doing because of confidentiality reasons, but I mean, I can see what's coming down the road because I'm very fortunate in my position to be able to have a view in terms of what's happening, not just in our company, but in the industry. And things are developing super fast. I think more will happen in the next 5 years than has happened in the last 10 years. And we can see—

Well, it feels like this Christmas was the one a lot of my friends have their kids have it now, or they just bought it for themselves. It seems like this is like a pivotal year for a few reasons, like all those specs that you talked about, right? But then also like somehow consumers are like, okay, we're ready now. But then also the metaverse, like that's something where now you don't have to like seed the ecosystem. The ecosystem is being seeded with like billions of dollars of like, let's build this metaverse that's ultimately going to be something immersive. So now you're going to get pulled.

I can't agree more. In fact, if you think about it right now for the XR space, It's kind of like 2006 for the smartphone mobile internet space. You can think of it that way. The first year the iPhone sold was 2007, and they sold 6.6 million devices.

Oh, '07. Yeah.

Last year, the VR device industry is probably in the 10 to 20 million devices last year globally.

It's still kind of a toy, right? And it's like they thought the iPhone was a toy, right?

Yeah. So, but within like 3, 4 years, it was in the hundreds of millions of devices that was in the smartphone space. That was being sold. So we're in that same kind of trajectory, right? In fact, more devices in the VR standalone space sold this year than the first year of the iPhone. So if we come on that trajectory, I can definitely see VR devices getting into the hundreds of millions of devices within the next 4 or 5 years, and then into like the billion device a year type space.

Yeah, because China wasn't even really part of that equation in '07, right? There was like a handful of people that had iPhones, right? But now China, as you said, is like— China's leading it.

Yeah. Well, I mean, the iPhone was an exclusive. The iPhone was exclusive to AT&T, right? And they were subsidized. So if you think about it, you know, and it was the Android phone that actually then became the more popular device because it was more open and you could sell it everywhere. And by the way, the first Android phone was made by HTC. I don't know if you knew that. And the first Windows Phone was also made by HTC. So, you know, HTC kind of already has a real history of innovation. In the mobile space. And so we're really taking that same innovation to the VR industry.

Super exciting. Love it. Hey, that, uh, you know, your hero's journey to now. Excellent. I look forward to seeing subsequent chapters. You're still a very young man who has like incredible potential to do even more dense in the universe. So I love it, my friend. Wow.

Yeah, actually, before we end, I do want to give a little bit of view of what I think This technology can do for society. Because I think a lot of people still think of VR as a gaming device because their first experience with it, like you're saying, was at Christmas playing games. But really what this technology does is that it is a technology that takes away distance between people. Because you put this on and no matter where you are, you can instantly be anywhere else and with somebody on a very one-to-one personal level, right? Because you can You can see their avatar, you can see their entire body move, you can see their nonverbal gestures, you can go and shake their hand and pat them and hug them, right? And you have that shared environment that gives you the sense of empathy and understanding that you can only get with face-to-face conversations. So what we're going to, I think, see in the near to midterm is that more and more people will spend their time interfacing with other people through these devices versus Versus getting on a plane or getting on a train or getting in the car, right? And it will actually be a significant reduction in the carbon footprint.

Yeah.

Sort of making us a lot more sustainable. In fact, I think another thing it will do is that the more time we spend in the virtual world, the less things we actually need in the physical world. So, you know, that the less space we need, less things we would buy, the less clothes we would buy. And I think that actually, again, Brings down our ecological footprint. The other thing it does is that it also removes geographic borders. When you've spent years and years in China, and so now you understand the Chinese people, and when somebody says something about China, you're like, well, no, actually I lived there and this is how it really was. And because you've actually met them and you've actually talked with them. But for people who've never been to China, most of the biggest critics of China are people who've never been here.

It's true.

And now if we can remove geographic borders and take this put on this headset or glasses and you can speak with local people from anywhere, then everybody gets to understand everybody. Not about religion, it's not about what nationality, about what race, it's about who you are as a person, what your ideas are, how creative you are, what do you stand for. And that, I think, actually creates a lot more understanding, compassion between societies, between cultures, between countries, and removes a lot of the conflict, a lot of the source of conflict, right? Because every source of conflict is usually somebody who wants to make somebody else the bad guy to then unify their own country, right? And no matter you talk about religious wars or you talk about political wars or trade wars, it's the same. But people have actually had that face-to-face with the other side. They won't believe just words that are just told. They will say, based on my experience, these people are actually pretty good. I mean, they're just like me, right? I think that's one thing. The other thing is It also creates a lot more equality between people. Right now, we're very fortunate that we were able to go to the right place, get the right education, grow up in a country that gave us opportunities. But there's a lot of people who maybe grew up in a place where they couldn't get out of the slums or their parents didn't have money for them to go to school. But with this, you put on a headset, you can get the best education from the best professors in the world for free, essentially.

Right.

Because right now, most of that stuff is on internet. But, you know, if you put this on, you're actually in the classroom, right? That's another level.

Super simple.

The other thing though is that it also allows us individually to stop judging each other by physical traits, right? I mean, people judge each other on the color of their skin, on their background, on what they're wearing, their age, whether they're taller or short, whatever, right? If you're represented by your avatar, you can make it look whatever way you want, and people are going to listen to what you say and not about that first impression. It's unfortunate, but human nature is that we actually judge people of how we feel about them before they even say their first words when we meet new people, because we just look at them and we're like, oh, okay, so he's that kind of a person. Oh, he's from this. But when you don't have that perspective on that kind of— not necessarily prejudice, it's more of a heuristic, right? Because in some ways, in some negative way, it could be prejudice, but it could also be Like, oh, he went to MIT, he must be super smart. Not necessarily, right? So just, it could be the other way as well. So then you actually give people a chance because you don't have that predetermined evaluation, right? So it gives everybody an opportunity to contribute to society, to have an opportunity to work in a job. And you could be anywhere in the world and work in especially information jobs, right? Data-related, white-collar jobs. You don't have to sit in Silicon Valley or New York or Shanghai or Beijing to do this work, right? That creates an opportunity for a lot more people to find occupation and careers and ability to contribute when they aren't physically located in the centers of innovation or the centers of information. So that, I think those kinds of things are really where I see the bigger impact. And then lastly is education, right? Kind of going back to what I studied, 30 years ago is that VR/XR is the best educational medium that you can imagine. It is like the Holy Grail of education because it gives you that immersive, full-brain, full-body experiential learning that our brain had evolved over the last 5 million years to learn with, right? And so whatever complex topic, if you can physically touch it and manipulate it, you find a way to understand it instead of just reading some text or watching somebody on the board write out some formulas, and you can actually see the physics of that happening. Or you can see going back in history— a history class used to be super boring for me, but if I could go back and see how the pyramids were built, if I can go back and see how the different dynasties of China or the American Revolution, when it really happened, and be at that place when the Gettysburg Address, right?

Yeah, I mean, like, that mechanic is used in movies all the time when you have some fantasy movie and then you get immersed into the reenactment of it, and you're like, you're there, right? That— but that's coming.

And but watching a movie, you're still distant from it, right?

No, no, but like within the movie they use that mechanism of like 3D immersion, right? And like that's gonna be silly that we don't have that in the future. It's like, of course, so evocative. It's like we learned sitting around a campfire and people would like show you like, eat this flower, don't eat this flower, this one will heal you, this one will kill you, right?

Yeah. And based on all of the studies out there, education is the number one factor of determinant of future success in your career, right? So if we can give everybody in the world a quality education, that gives everybody an equal chance to be successful, equal chance to be successful, and an equal chance to contribute, right? So I think that's really what's most exciting about me. In fact, last week I just read Ray Dalio's new book about the, the New World Order, and he said key factor of success of a country is how educated That country is. And so this then motivates every government to then subsidize this technology to get their population to be as educated as possible. In fact, the more educated you are, the less violent you are, the more you want to think instead of talk about it, instead of fight about it, right? So this really, if we use this technology right, it gives us an opportunity to create not just a new world order, but But a new global society that I think will be a lot more positive, a lot more peaceful, and a lot better quality of life for most people out there.

Well said. Beautiful. Love the mission and vision, my friend. That's great. Excellent. Wow. Alvin Graylin Wong, ladies and gentlemen, give it up. That's great. Thanks so much.

No, thanks. Thanks for inviting me, Rich. It's always a pleasure to chat with you and enjoy your stay in Bali. I hope to come visit you in the future. Check out the beach sometime.

Please do. Indeed. Yes. Thanks.

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 or whatever platform of choice, rate and comment. And until next time, thank you very much. Zaijian.

Cheers, y'all.