7 Take-Aways from My Visit to Alibaba (273)

Welcome, welcome everyone. My name is Jeff Towsen and this is the Tech Strategy Podcast from Techmo Consulting. And the topic for today, seven takeaways from my visit to Alibaba headquarters. And this was a visit in November. I went several times last year, but November was the most recent. I sent out a article about part of it a couple of days ago. I'm gonna send out more in the next day.

But I'm trying to basically learn as much, stay as close as I can to sort of three areas. One, obviously e-commerce, that's the engine. they're really much leaner and meaner now than they were a couple of years ago. It's pretty impressive what they're doing. And then cloud, which is a other big engine, and AI, where they're I mean, they're trying to be the full stack

Google Cloud, OpenAI, international player in that space. Um, really the only one out of China who's going for the whole board internationally. There's a lot going on domestically or in Asia. So those are kind of my three areas I was digging into. I learned a lot. Also to summarize as what was going on. I've been teaching with them a little bit too, um, strategy classes, e commerce classes.

Uh they have some education stuff, which is usually not for MBAs, it's for entrepreneurs around the world. So I did some of that. I'm gonna do that again I think uh in a month or so. So anyways, that's gonna be the topic for today. And let me see. Standard disclaimer, nothing in this podcast or my writing or website is investment and vice. The numbers of information for me any me and any guests may be incorrect.

The views and opinions expressed may no longer be relevant or accurate. Overall, investing is risky. This is not investment, legal, or tax advice. Do your own research. And with that, let me get into the topic.

Okay, so let's just sort of jump into number one here. Uh first one is You know, you can really tell where management is putting their chips. I like to I like to talk to management, I like to visit campuses, I like to you get a sense when you got a company this big You know, there's real clear communication from the management to everybody. This is where we're all rowing. Everyone row in that direction.

Uh,'cause they have to communicate, communicate, communicate. And so you get a sense of what sort of the big strategic priorities are.'Cause there's a thousand projects, but uh that's kind of my standard question as always. You know, what are the two or three most important things happening this year? And if you can't get a solid answer on that, that's an interesting sort of tell about management. Usually from Alibaba, at least right now, you get a really clear answer on what they're focused on.

And big surprise number one is basically AI plus e commerce domestically. You know, e commerce is obviously the engine, domestic e commerce really. And now they're combining that with AI, which is their other big engine, and yeah, that's kind of where they are. When they talk about their drivers of growth. No, where's the money gonna come from?

But I keep hearing from management. I really like the new management now. Um, you know, they did the reorganization a couple of years ago. They broke it into six plus. business units that each had sort of their own independent PNLs. They were all going to raise capital themselves independently, or not independently, but separately, whether that was private or going public. They sort of reinvigorated management. It was sort of like a private equity strategy light.

You know, let's give a lot more authority, let's give people the chance to get rich, let's give managers the ability to jump into these smaller divisions and if they post the numbers, they can take it public, raise capital, and so on. So, you know, a lot more sort of aggressive organizational structure, which I liked. And that's the reorg, but then the question is, okay, that's half the equation. Tell me who the people in the chairs are.

You put the right person with the right incentives and the ability to work hard and get rich and rise, you know, which is kinda how private equity works. People can be incredibly impressive, but it all depends on the person. So I was waiting for the chairs to be filled, and they've been filled now. A lot of people got well not a lot, several important people got removed.

That was interesting. Usually retiring under the idea of we want to focus on family. Kinda how politicians retire. Family is apparently the priority at that moment in time. I like the people sitting in the chairs. I like Joe Tai. I like Eddie Wu. Uh these are serious people. So, you know, I've kind of been joking. It looks like the wartime CEO is back in power, you know, the wartime conciliary. So I like the team, but okay, we'll see what happens.

And then they start talking about what they're doing and the strategic priorities start getting teed up. And they've changed the plan a bit here and there over the last year or so. But the the message I keep hearing is look the big drivers of revenue that thing that are gonna make the numbers go up uh increasing consumption, which is domestic. So obviously e commerce, uh, they were kinda doing some food delivery, ulema, things like that, but that was

N it was on the side. So domestic e commerce, great, which is good because you're getting pounded by Pinduodu. And, you know, you aren't as lean and mean as you used to be. Well, they are now, in my opinion. Number two AI Cloud. big business, not the rocket ship that we see in the West. These Google Clouds, Azure, they have adoption rates. and sort of growth rates that are pretty spectacular. We don't ever really see that in China and we haven't.

It was kind of a slow growing business, slow adoption. Uh AI kind of supercharged it. And now it's finally after many years of like, why is this sector growing so slow in this part of the world? It has a lot of reasons. Like you don't If you're building stuff in China you can or Southeast Asia, Asia

You can do a lot of workarounds with people in software and things, so you don't have to buy all the software packages that you do. You don't have to use cloud like you kind of do in the US. Um anyways, AI supercharged it. it's looks good. And then the third sort of one is international. And I'm always kind of curious how they're doing international because they tend to have a lot of irons in the fire in that regard. You know, they have their international e commerce.

Cloud is going international, particularly in Asia. Middle East a bit too, which is interesting. Their AI products are going everywhere. And international B to B commerce, which I'll talk about, that looks like a big priority now, which is interesting because that that appeared about five years ago as a big thing and then it kinda disappeared. Um, now it's kinda backed. So those are the three pillars, consumption, AI cloud, international. That is in theory what's gonna move the numbers. Okay.

Within that AI plus e-commerce is, you know, the most important thing by a by a mile. So that was kind of my first thing. Good. I like to hear sort of a clean story from management. I like I like to sort of hear focus. When you hear fuzzy messages or you hear these sort of overarching goals.

and it's twenty things. No, I like to hear three things and I can directly see how the revenue number's gonna move based on those three. Like I like the linkage to be very tight. And that's kinda what I'm hearing. But, you know, we'll see. Execution is everything.

All right, point number two. domestic e commerce. You know, the story when Jack Ma reappeared and Joe Tai reappeared, and Eddie sort of I don't know why I call him Eddie, it sounds like he's my friend or something. Eddie Woo, you know, took over. That had a lot to do with Pinduo Duo and, you know, just sort of this ferocious level of competition that was happening in mainland China e commerce.

And Alibaba was taking it on the shin. I mean they were doing new retail, they were doing ulama, they were kind of all over the map. They had a very sort of diffuse we want the biggest share of wallet we can get. And yeah, they they took a couple of punches, they sort of you know The sort of the old guard came back. And we saw the same thing at J D. You know, the old management sort of took the reins again and hunkered down. It's really the older generation guys in their fifties.

um, you know, Richard Leo over at J D and then Joe Tai at Alibaba going up against, you know, Colin Huang, who was in his thirties over at Pinduo Duo. And uh Bite Dance as well, which is going into TikTok shop, which is a like crazy growth numbers. So you got kind of the old guard coming back to take on these young guys who are knocking them around pretty good. So that was the idea. You come back.

I don't know. For those who didn't follow it, there was a really fascinating what they call instant commerce war that happened in twenty twenty five in China. It was a big deal. it was really interesting. Um huge money. Huge money spent, a lot of losses. You know, it was kind of these when when people go to war businesses go to war in China People write big checks.

And the big boys lose a tremendous amount of money to protect things. And then usually at a certain point the government steps in and says, Hey, everybody stop this. Stop with all the subsidies, stop with all the price discounts, back and that's kind of what happened here as well. So for those who didn't follow this started kicked off in twenty twenty five February, where JD I like JD, you know, they basically jumped into Maitwan's business.

May Taiwan is the food delivery company. They have a bunch of services, but food delivery is kind of the, you know, the the big engine in terms of usage. The money is more in hotel reservations, but order volume and things like that has always been more uh food delivery. Well, JD jumps in to doing takeout food.

And they expand that to basically take out everything. Anything, everything in thirty minutes. That's instant commerce. We're not delivering food from KFC. You want a jacket? You want a laptop? Uh you want some general merchandise, you want some beauty products. We'll get it to your place in thirty minutes. Instant commerce. Now, this is what I like about Chinese e-commerce. It is the front. It is the frontier everywhere.

It's super innovative. People tried things all the time. You can learn a lot by just following what's going on there. And it turns out instant commerce is pretty awesome. it's really pretty great. Uh they called it J D Miao song, which is Miao's second song is deliver so deliver in seconds. Um And they really just went, well one talk about the service. The service is great.

I love instant d commerce. I think it's fantastic. I've told this before, I needed a jacket. I arrived in Hangzhou. I didn't bring the right clothing. I was cold. I couldn't go outside. Yeah, whatever it was, eight PM, nine PM on a Sunday night in a hotel in Honjo. I just went on JD and I ordered a jacket. Someone peddled up and delivered it in about twenty minutes. It wasn't over twenty, and then it was too thin, I didn't order it very great. I ordered another one.

Twenty minutes later, another dude came up with a jacket. It's great, I still have it. Yeah, I love that stuff. Uh now consumers love this. Um And it's actually a real good strategy. Why do they love it? Obviously it's convenient. You can get it any time, is fantastic. It's operationally pretty difficult to pull off. That means you basically have to create an operational footprint of warehouses and local stores

close by to all the consumers all across China where you're offering this. So you're basically pushing a lot of inventory forward. out into neighborhoods and you're holding it there so you can deliver quickly, which you know, you only order food delivery from restaurants that are

you know, fifteen or twenty minutes from where you live. There's a circle around your home and you can ax those re access those restaurants. Well this is the same, but they have to put little warehouses or storage within those little circles for everybody. So it's a pretty big asset heavy endeavor, which JD does asset heavy operations, logistics, and whatnot. That's great. The items they're really targeting. it is high frequency, high margin.

That's what you want. You want stuff that people buy frequently. Fine, because you want to get usage. You want to get your MAUs up. You want engagement. That opens up lots of possibilities. But also you want to have a high margin product One'cause it's profitable, but two, it can accept the higher delivery cost.

You can't, you know, sell there's a reason you sell things that are infrequent and low margin in boxes that deliver in days, right? Because it's you gotta keep the cost down. So high margin, high frequency product. What does that mean in practice? It means JD leads with, you know, the through the three C's, compute consumer electronics, computers. That's the JD sort of core product category. So that uh urgent or lifestyle products.

um anything you're willing to pay for to get speed. Uh health and beauty. fever medicine, flu meds, skincare, uh nighttime things that you might need suddenly, contact lens solution, makeup Uh fresh and grocery, which is interesting, but that's kinda standard already. I would put that more in just standard food delivery.

Uh gifts and occasions, flowers. Flowers did incredibly well. Uh Metuan, which responded to what JD did, I'll talk about this, they did huge numbers of flower deliveries during holidays. That was pretty interesting. And then sort of what they call high frequency small indulgences. you know, coffee. Okay, I put that under the food category, but, you know, super discounted coffee, hay tea, bubble tea, super discounted. Cat food and litter

Huge, huge numbers. So very interesting. Okay, so they jump in. It's a great service. It's got some operational complexity to it, but it all makes sense as a service. You're not going to make a huge amount of money on this, but this is a very good core e-commerce service.

Okay, so they jump in. Maytoon sees this is a major invasion of their core market, which it is. They fight back. Uh Maitwan does a lot of flash sales, you know, and they got three plus million riders on vehicles already. So they're well positioned to fight back, which they do, and everybody's fighting back with money. discounts, discounts, free delivery, things like that. Alibaba jumps in. Very interesting because Alibaba's food delivery business, Ulema,

It's kind of been lost on the side for a long time. People have tried to get it going to take on Maitwan. It's always kinda it keeps moving around within different divisions. It was under alley pay for a little bit. Then it was moved out and then it was moved in e-commerce like the other category and you know it's kind of bit of a thing. Um well they merged that with Fresh Hippo, you know, their new retail supermarket.

And they call that Taobao Instant Commerce. And as far as I can tell, they launched a seven billion dollars subsidy program in May. So huge money. Really interesting move for Alibaba. and they ri did they did real well. I think they did great. Now the winner, big surprise, Mae Tuan. The dust settles, they got sixty plus percent of the market doing great. Um Alibaba does great.

In certain categories, you know, they're 20 to 30 percent of the market. So Ulema, which is sort of a little bit of a lost business, suddenly. It's really compelling. I mean their sign of the You could say like, look, Maitwan was sort of a successful defensive strategy. Alibaba was the successful growth strategy. And that's kind of what I heard at Alibaba was like, Yeah, we kinda won that. Maybe we didn't take the whole market, but we did real well.

So I just thought it was great for like one, management's on their game. As as much as I can tell as an outsider, I like that. They jumped into this, they won, or at least they came in second. Um they kind of finally figured out what to do with Elema. And they also kind of figured out what to do with Fresh Hippo because they were exiting new retail. You know, it was asset heavy, lots of hypermarkets.

supermarkets, hundreds of them around the country. Well, it turns out new retail didn't really work out that well, but if you sort of merge it in with this instant commerce, that's a type of new retail that actually is quite good. It's very effective. Customers love it. It's not asset light, but it ain't opening 200, 400 supermarkets and running those. So it's much lighter than that.

And I just thought this whole thing was a great story. So that was kind of my point too, which says like Alibaba looks good in e commerce as far as I can tell in instant commerce. It's fantastic. It should come to Southeast Asia soon. Uh you'll s you'll see it in other markets because it looks like a real winner of a service. I like it a lot. Anyways, that's point two. Um

Point three it's just kind of the same thing. They finally sort of made a decision or exited. You know, they've been exiting the new retail space for a while. This was Daniel Jung, actually it was Al Jack Ma originally. You know, we're gonna have supermarkets as infrastructure for our commerce business because they'll be ten to fifteen minutes from everybody's home and we can use those as a point of contact.

To do all sorts of things, services, products, prepare your meals, get your hair cut, sell you products. It was sort of like a forward infrastructure footprint to get close to people and you could build on those physical locations lots of experiences. and sort of enrich the consumer experience beyond staring at a smartphone screen. Really cool idea, very expensive to build out this massive infrastructure across the country. They bought hundreds

Of the well they opened hundreds of fresh hippos, they bought Sunart, the hypermarkets, they were doing convenience stores. Anyways, Joe Tsi and Eddie Wood basically reversed all that. And yeah, we're not doing this. And they've been backing out of it. Well, it turns out they rolled it into um instant commerce, which is which is great. All right, so that's number three. Number four.

The one I was walking around their exhibition hall. They have a really good exhibition hall at the Alibaba headquarters. And they had their digital humans up, right? Digital humans fit in a couple categories. They keep evolving, but for an e-commerce company, you know, you have these virtual influencers. JD has them, uh Alibaba has them, and you know, they can sell online influencer. The one they talk about at Alibaba is Dongdong. Um Fine, it's on Tao Bao Live.

Virtual influencers are pretty fantastic. It's you know, influencing is a good business, but it's very sort of obviously labor intensive. You gotta be sort of charming and quirky and keep people's attention and it's um You know, it it's one of these games where if you're gonna play that game, there's a gozillion other people playing it, and you're on the wrong side of a power law.

You know, if you're doing YouTubing, okay, you have a lot of competition. If you get some level of success, that's gonna garner more success because people like to watch the people that have viewers. So there's a natural power loss. And most people are on the wrong side of it. Very few people succeed at YouTube. The vast majority struggle. Live influencing is worse because you're not just trying to get them to watch your videos, you're trying to watch them live.

And that's a lot harder to pull off. To get a lot of people to tune in and watch you live is much harder. Now if you can do it and you can use it to move product, you can make money. If you have five viewers on a live stream, you can make money.

To make money posting videos, you better have a hundred thousand, you know, followers of some kind. But you can get ten people to watch you live streaming, one of them might buy something. So the cash is immediate versus advertising based, you know, content. Okay. They're pretty impressive. you have a higher grade version of those which are basically luxury brand ambassadors. So that's T Mall Luxury Pavilion. If you're a more prestigious brand, you're not going to use some generic

uh virtual influencer, you want a higher end, more professional uh brand ambassador, they have one called Timu. Uh Timu. Okay, interesting. That wasn't really what got my attention. What got my attention was their digital actors. And there's one who's been around for two years called Lia or Lia Li Ye, depending English or Chinese. twenty twenty three. You know, it's a it's a digital actor.

like she's in television shows and hyper realistic and trained now using generative AI and and foundation models, trained in i acting Like I think she even has an agent and she's in T V shows and movies. And it is fantastic. Like, it is stunningly good. Twenty twenty three when this came out it was okay. But that was kind of before Chat GPT and all this stuff. Now it's amazing. So this idea of digital actors in the visuals, hyper realistic.

you know, realistic eye movements while she's having a conversation with someone else, skin texture, all of that. It's you know, it's pretty amazing. So and this Leah basically falls out of before it was a you know, was twenty twenty three, let's do a digital actor. Well, that was before they went all in on generative AI and now they have their one video image generation models. which are arguably top three, top five in the world, you know, for video generation.

uh Kling, which is Quai Show, Minimax, One, which is Alibaba, then you get Sora and some others, but so they're using their sort of world class image gen and video generation to power Leah. Uh it's amazing. Like Hollywood's in trouble. Uh Instagram models are in trouble. A lot of people are in trouble. Pop stars are in trouble. I'll I put in I sent out some links with some YouTube videos of this. I'll put them in the show notes.

Like you can watch YouTube videos of pop stars that have been created by Juan. It's not perfect yet, but it's pretty close. And then I'll put I'll put some in of uh Leah so you can kinda see. And that's that's a year tool. But yeah, it's pretty amazing. So that that got my attention. Obviously if you're a merchant selling on Taobao or anything online, you want 10 or 20 of these things working for you.

You know, y you wanna do your own because you wanna be authentic and being human is is still a huge advantage. But you can have ten influencers creating content, putting out content all the time, an army of them. And that lets you sort of personalize your message to different sub segments of your customer base. So you can have 10 different influencers with different personalities for different segments of your audience base.

You wanna have fifty of them? You can do that too. It scales up pretty nicely. It's there's gonna be AI slop everywhere. But yeah, it's um that has definitely arrived.

Okay, number five. This is the one that surprised me. I like when I go visit an I get sort of turned on to something I wasn't really following or wasn't aware of. Uh yeah, this is number five. The AI plus e-commerce strategy is going international. And it's going international in B2B. I didn't really know that f well, five years ago I met with Alibaba.com, which is sort of their wholesaler right uh

a business in the US that makes chairs can buy parts of their supply from China. That's Alibaba dot com. And they were doing a big push back then to um sort of make this easier to do and I met with them out in CES in Las Vegas and we kinda did some content together and You know, what they were trying to do is make it easy to search for.

to assess and then to buy things on an app sitting in Texas from merchants' factories in China, um, just like you were a multinational, even though you might be a little company. That was the idea. And they were building tools that were auto translation, video calling that you could do with factories with auto translation. You could do assessments, you could order things, you could search and find things by searching by photos of what you wanted.

Then you can have it paid for and shipped and they would do the credit. They would hold the money in escrow. They would see that it gets everything through customs. They would sign the contract so everything's legal and, you know, in compliance with all the various regulations. So they would kinda handle everything. I thought it was a very interesting idea.

And they were pushing for the US and they did a deal with Office Office Max in the US, which has a lot of SMEs buy stuff there. And then the whole China tech blow up happened and they really went quiet. And the idea was we're not gonna just do this between B to B U S and China. We're gonna do it between all the countries. It's gonna be like we're gonna digitize global trade.

And we're gonna let all the SMEs act like multinationals and buy wherever they want in the world and ship wherever they want in the world and sell wherever they want in the world. That was the idea. It's it's basically a massive marketplace platform. that is created by digitizing global trade. So a sweeping idea, really cool idea. Didn't really take off for a couple of reasons, disappeared. Well, it looks like it's back.

Uh they're basically using AI to solve these problems. And they've launched a couple cool um apps that do this. One is called ASIO, A C C I O. And that's basically an AI agent. Well, it's not an agent, it's not doing it automatically, but yeah, pretty much. It's AI. It's an expert in sourcing. So pretty much everything I just said, you can talk to it instead of giving it a photo what you want or a keyword search, you just talk to it

I'm looking for, you know, tables that do this. I'm looking for countertops for a kitchen. And it will just go through the massive Alibaba database of merchants in China or elsewhere, find you what you want. then it will enable you to sort of talk with the company there.

assess their quality, assess if you're comfortable with them, you know, negotiate a price, real time translation, things like that. And then you can handle the shipping and the logistics and the customs and the compliance and regulation and all that. It'll handle all of it. So it's It's the same idea. It's just sort of AI driven and increasingly agent driven. Now, one of the things I like about this is it also becomes somewhat of a business advisor where you say, Look, I'm in

You know, I I'm I'm in China, I'm in Shenzhen, I'm looking to sell things into Indonesia. Uh I'm an entrepreneur, I know China, I don't know Indonesia. You can talk to the AI and it will start to take apart opportunities for you. Well, you should think about this, you should think about this, you're good at tables and desks. Maybe you should do sort of high end luxury tables in Jakarta. Now let me and it will tell you about the market and what things happen there.

So it can almost become a business advisor, which is very helpful if you've never gone you know, if you're going into a new geography, by definition you're probably not gonna know very much and you can use an advisor. So I've seen that before at at other companies. That's really cool as a function for AI. So there's ASEO, which is sort of your sourcing

uh AI. I want to say agent'cause it's not quite an agent yet, but close. The other one is Aidge. I don't know how you say AI D G E. I've just been saying A Idge, which is probably almost for sure wrong. It stands for AI for digital and global entrepreneurship. That is basically your digital co-pilot, your your digital shop manager for running an e-commerce business that sells cross border.

So, if you don't know how to go into a country, you gotta manage the website, you gotta do let's say you gotta do marketing from China into Indonesia.

You need pictures of your product, so it generates the photos. It translates all the text. It can write the text. It can change it into different languages. You can take a one clothing item and put it on an Indonesian model instead of a Chinese model, it'll do all those photos on itself.'Cause when you go cross border you actually I've talked about this a little bit before

when I was talking with Lazada, they had a really interesting suite of AI tools because they work in, you know, seven countries or whatever it is, six, seven or eight. I forget right now. You know, you have to change all the content, you have to change all the photos, you have to change the styles.

in multiple countries for everything you do, the workload goes up and then you've got to communicate with people and you've got to have marketing that's on message, which may be different in Vietnam than Thailand. So your marketing approach, your content, your pictures, your text, your advertisements, they're all going to be different country by country. It's kind of a lot of work. AI's quite good at all of that.

So, you know, this other tool where you can do content and design, fine. Virtual try-on image localization. You can do marketing and SEO, this virtual shop manager. So, you know, add copy generation, um, making sure you're popping up in search instance, things like that. You can do customer service.

AI agents to do customer service. Again, if you want to put a live chat agent on your site, which you should have if you're an e-commerce site, well that's very different if they're coming in from Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam. Well, you've got to have different ones. So it's translated, things like that, and then consumer insight.

that this AI basically scrapes reviews and feedback from across the web to feed ideas into you and, you know, to help you get smarter at what you're doing. That is a very cool AI tool. I mean that's the same thing it's AI plus e-commerce, but when you apply it to international and particularly B2B business, it's really pretty compelling. So AliExpress is going global.

on the B to C side. They're expanding by acquisition. You know, they got Trendiol in Turkey now. They have Duraz, they have Lazad in all these, AliExpress. And now we've got the B to B side, which seems to be ramping up. So we'll see if it takes off this time. I was really excited about it about five years ago and then it just kinda I don't know, I guess sort of fell victim to the political spotlight and no one wanted to talk China to the US for a couple of years.

Okay, last two, and these are pretty quick, I'm basically done.

Some of the apps I'm keeping an eye on, I'm looking for where I mean they got apps all over the place. So I'm kind of looking for apps that I think are gonna be their primary AI vehicles. Either new apps, which are AI based, So Quinn would be like that, you know, a chat GBT like thing. You can get Quinn if

on a web page right now. You don't have to be in China, you don't have to speak Chinese. Just go to Quinn um open it up in your browser and you can play with it right now. It's great. And they're definitely going global with that one. So some of'em are sort of AI native.

But I think almost the more interesting ones are their existing apps where they've sort of decided this is going to be the vehicle for AI. We're going to really transform this one and use this at our vehicle. And the ones I'm looking for there are uh Ding Talk. which is, you know, it's their version of WeChat. WeChat was C to C, B to C in terms of messaging. So Ding Talk sort of counter positioned in internal companies. So it's more like a Slack or an internal messenger tool.

Well, that turned out to be a really good idea, you know, ten years ago. So Ding Talk appears to be, you know, a major vertical or a major move for AI for them. And they're making it intelligent and it's turning into your personal assistant, your personal agent within business.

Ding talk's a big one. AI Dink Talk is a big one. Quark is kinda interesting. You know, their main browser is UC Browser, which is a it's a pretty standard browser. It's fine. It's nothing um Thrilling, but they have sort of a minimalist browser, which is good for mobile, and that's Quark.

So it's a little bit like Google Chrome. It's sort of a light streamlined minimalist one. People don't really talk about it very much. It looks like they're turning that into some sort of personal assistant and not just something you search the web with. Uh quark seems to be, you know, they got these sort of AI powered search tools that they're putting into that. It looks like they're you know the phrase you'll hear is it's a Swiss Army knife for productivity. So

It reminds me of Comet by Perplexity. If you haven't used Comet by Perplexity, you know, absolutely do it. It's a browser by perplexity. And everything you do when you're browsing, there's just an AI right with you doing everything. And you can open up your email and tell it to do things and it'll just it can just operate tab by tab.

It's really pretty great. I mean it's really spectacular. So I think that's what Quark is. It looks like they're they're moving down that path. Uh that's pretty cool. I'm gonna play with that one. So Ding Talk Quark Amap, their their main mapping program. Yeah, they're integrating intelligence into the mapping program. So when you're looking at the map and you're moving around, you know, it's gonna be sort of multilingual street with AI assistance built into it.

Yeah, they're using that as a major sort of interface for AI and intelligence. So A map I think is definitely on their short list. The other one's Quinn. Tongi deep deep research. That's pretty cool. I use Gemini Deep Research, you know, by Google. It's amazing. I use it for, you know, research on markets and things. I use it basically like if I had a Sort of a pre M B A

almost post MBA associate working for me and I I would give them research and then they they feed back back into whatever project I'm working on. It's almost like I've got a a junior level employee doing basic market research or whatever I name. So yeah, Tongyi Deep Deep Research is one. That's my list. I'll put it in the show notes if you want to try those. I think that's worth keeping an eye on.

And the last one. The last one is just sort of culture and philosophy. Um if you ever get a chance to go to their campus, what what you'll realize is it's a very unique culture. Um, there's messages all over the place written on the walls, which are very thoughtful about how to like work together and how to progress in life. They have statues around the campus that are sort of meaningful.

um, you know, a boat, a canoe with half the people rowing one way and half the people rowing the other way. Uh so there's there's sort of messages on how to live and I find them really interesting. Like they're very thoughtful. So They sort of crystallize in many ways. you know, the philosophy of the company.

And they have their values. They have these sort of value statements. Well, there's six of'em right now and they r they revise them every now and then. I'll put a picture of the sort of the the board where they post them, but I'll read them to you'cause they're they're great. Um Like here's a value. They put it in English and Chinese. Uh trust makes everything simple. Interesting. That's yeah, that's true. So that's interesting. Um Today's best performance is tomorrow's baseline.

That's kind of cool. Uh live seriously, work happily. If not now, when, if not me, who? Change is the only constant. Well that one's not very helpful. Uh last one Customers first, employees second, shareholders third. I mean that's that's a pretty good statement of stakeholder priorities. Anyways, I'll put'em in the list, but

If you think about that as just good life advice, you're like, okay, that's fine. If you think about how that would make you a more effective group of a hundred thousand plus e-commerce employees, You can see sort of how it plays out as a business strategy as well as like life advice. It was they have like stuff like that all over the campus. I always like to take pictures of'em, sort of mull'em over.

And I think that's a lot of Jack Maw's legacy is the culture and the teachings and how to think about these things. Anyways, that one's just fun. So I'll put that one for last.

Anyways, that's kind of it for the content for today. A bit light. Um I've actually been on vacation. I've been traveling around with my father, so um I've I've been off off seventy percent of the time over the last week or so. Uh he's he's heading home in the next day, so I'm gonna sort of get back. I owe a couple of articles for subscribers. I think I owe

two or three that I'm behind. I'll get that cleaned up quickly. Um yeah, so I've been getting up at about six a.m. going to write uh my book, which is Going really well. I'm rewriting the books. I'm I'm so I think it's I think I'm actually really happy with how it's going. So I've been doing that at six AM. Then I gotta come home and bring my father coffee and uh which is surprisingly important for him in the morning.

And then we've been going out traveling around Southeast Asia. So that's been my last week or so. So I'm a little bit off off the schedule, but I'll get back on quick. Yeah, pretty fantastic overall. It's it's been a great time. So Uh going forward things are kind of exciting. I'm going to the Philippines next week for a couple of days.

Uh meeting with some e commerce companies there, which is really fun. E commerce is really interesting in the Philippines right now. So that's kind of compelling. Uh I'm gonna go to uh the World Mobile Conference in Barcelona at the end of February, beginning of March. That's going to be great fun. I've never been to that. I've always kind of wanted to go, but it for some reason it never really worked out. So pretty excited about that.

Uh, if you're gonna be there, please let me know. Let's hang out. I'll be there in Madrid and then Barcelona for about a week. Um, sort of tha that should be great fun. Let me know if you're around. It'd be fun to to hang out, get a cup of coffee or something like that. Or as well as if you're in the Philippines, I'll be there about four days. So anyways, that's it for me and then back to China pretty quick.

That looks like the next uh couple months. So exciting. A lot going on. All right, that is it for me. I hope that is helpful and I'll talk to you next week. Bye-bye.