Todd Embley | Being An Expat Entrepreneur, Building Asia's First Tech Accelerator, and VC Investing in China

In this episode I, Todd Embley the regular host, was put on the hot seat and interviewed by Joseph Cooke, CoFounder and President of WPIC Marketing + Technologies. We started the show discussing how I became involved with SOSV The Accelerator VC, Sean O’Sullivan, and my good buddy Cyril Ebersweiler, and how Chinaccelerator was born in a small North Eastern city named Dalian, and how we made the tough decision to choose Shanghai over Beijing for it’s new home in order to grow and take it to the level it is at today.

Joseph then asked me to talk about our formula for sifting through thousands of applications to our accelerator program each year and what we were looking for, and then move to a more broad look at the ecosystem as a whole and how Chinese startups and founders differed from their counterparts in the West. We also touched on how amazing it was to work in digital in China between 2009 and 2016, and how WeChat was responsible for WhatsApp getting a $19 billion dollar acquisition price from Facebook which dovetailed nicely into a discussion about startup valuations in China.

We then talked about the talent pool in China and how much it grew over the years as parent’s started to feel more comfortable understanding that there was indeed a path to success for their children striking out on their own and that they wouldn’t turn into “starving artists”. We also discussed how startups in China were prone to manipulating the amounts that they raised in the media but were using it to remain not only competitive for talent but to also stay relevant in the most competitive market in the world for customer and media attention.

We ended the podcast talking about one of our best investments ever through Chinaccelerator, BitMEX, the factors that helped them become the massive success they are today, and why China was the right place at the right time for them to be so.