China’s Role in 4 Investment Areas with Sean O’Sullivan, Managing General Partner of SOSV

Happy New Year everyone! Today we invited Sean O’Sullivan, Founder and Managing General Partner of SOSV, the fund behind Chinaccelerator, to start the Year 2019 for China Startup Pulse and our listeners. In this episode, Sean shared his experience in China and provided his analysis of the investment trends in biotech, food tech, hardware, and software areas. Also, he pointed out the role of China in the global technology ecosystem and the impact that US-China trade war will have on startups and investors. Sean’s entrepreneur life started in 1985 as a founder of MapInfo, bringing street mapping technology to personal computers. MapInfo went on to become a $200 million public company. He is also the co-creator of the term “cloud computing”. Now, Sean is managing SOSV, a Venture Capital firm which is running 6 accelerators in the world supporting investments in over 700 startups. Show notes: 2:20 What brought Sean to China in the 1990s 3:24 Start in Dalian 6:20 Examples in Food Tech 12:20 Chinese investors’ growing interest in Biotech companies 13:57 Investing in the education industry 16:41 Other important areas in China, such as machine learning 18:57 Hardware accelerator HAX’s Chinese portfolio 21:25 The perceptions of Chinese technologies from investors out of China 24:25 How the US-China trade war impacts the startups and investors 26:38 Sean’s opinions on the fast-growing Chinese software companies such as TikTok 28:10 Sean’s predictions about China in 2019 Many thanks to our host Oscar Ramos and guest Sean O'Sullivan , editor David and Geep, producer Eva Shi, organizer Chinaccelerator and sponsor People Squared. Be sure to check out our website www.chinaccelerator.com. Again, thanks to all of our listeners for the support in 2018 and the team is looking forward to providing more insights in 2019.