Inside Chinaccelerator: 10 Years of Cross Border Excellence

Happy 10th-anniversary Chinaccelerator! 🎉

Over the last 10 years, we have strived tirelessly to help founders from across the world in their entrepreneurial journey, to foster and to contribute to the ever-growing startup ecosystem, and to support early-stage startups. In the last 10 years, over 160 startups have gone through the program. Some of our outstanding startups include the likes of BitMEX, Snapask, TravelFlan, and Ushopal.

Thank you to all the alumni, founders, mentors, and the entire Chinaccelerator community for their constant support throughout our journey.

Here is to the next 10 years!

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Entrepreneurship is like steering a ship on the ocean. Pivoting occurs when the captain decides to shift the direction to accommodate changes, be it a furious storm or an iceberg.

In the startup world, it’s relatively unrealistic to believe that your first approach to address the problem is the best way, underlying the fact that there are always fast changes happening in terms of the industry, customer preferences and technologies.

The “direction” that has been shifted always entails business strategies. But not every pivot costs a fundamental change to the entire company. It can be anything from shifting the target…

Contrary to popular belief, raising venture capital is not easy. With big money flowing into lucrative startups, it is often easy to think that VCs are sitting with their checkbook ready to sign a check for any founder that walks in through their doors. But that is not the case. Even startups with revolutionary business ideas that have later gone on to become billion-dollar businesses, faced difficulties raising venture capital in their early days.

Take Airbnb for example. Today, Airbnb is valued at $18 billion after securing $1 billion recently. …

Written by Eva Shi, Communications Manager at Chinaccelerator and Producer of the China Startup Pulse Podcast.

A new, brilliant business idea doesn’t come from clueless imagination and perceptions. That’s why you need to test the market and validate your assumptions with a Minimum Viable Product (MVP).

Trouble is, many founders build MVPs in the wrong way by taking three months or even more time to launch over-designed and comprehensive apps or sites that require a lot of engineering hours, most of which end up being thrown away. That’s a waste of time and money.

So I’ve gathered some best practices…

This is an edited summary of an 8-min talk given by Shirley Mao, Head of India Investment at Xiaomi, during Chinaccelerator’s 8X8 Speakers Series event in September 2019. The views expressed by Shirley are her own and not related to Xiaomi Corporation.

You can check out the talk video here.

[Key Takeaways]:

• India has 28 languages and many users are underserved;
• There are business opportunities in India but you need to be careful with your angle;
• Make brave decisions and you might see growth;
• It is always good to follow a trend rather than testing the market by yourself alone;
• …

What Chinese startups can teach their global peers

While things start to go back to normal in China, the virus crisis continues to unfold across the globe. Silicon Valley is shutting down as local governments order people to stay in their homes. Small and medium startups are likely going to be slammed seriously, both by quarantine and the resulting economic downturn. But startups can learn from their peers in China to combat new challenges.

Recently we talked with several of our portfolio companies about the epidemic and how they were coping.

Key lessons:

1. High performing employees will showcase their value.
2. Companies managing…

“India is like an open game for every single social company in the world because its millennials have not been tapped”

— — Prakhar Khanduja

Interviewee: Prakhar Khanduja

• Indian 3x serial entrepreneur with multiple exits;
• His last two social and content startups, InstaLively (world’s first live streaming app for YouTube), and Pulse (Asia’s first university social network), were acquired by Tencent-backed Hike Messenger;
• Led the product and growth for over 150 million users;
• Now leads Indian investments at Legend Capital, which manages five USD funds and two RMB funds with AUM over RMB 45billion (about USD 640million)

The China Startup…

2019 has been a landmark year for SOSV, Chinaccelerator, and MOX.

Our parent fund SOSV raised US$277 million in the oversubscribed fourth fund. We are also ranked as #2 most active angel & seed-stage investor in the world according to Crunchbase news, only falling behind Y Combinator.

In SOSV’s global network, we have 940+ portfolio companies, for a total of 2,240+ founders from 93 different countries. Among these companies, 345 have at least one female founder. In 2018, we only had 277 companies that have female founders.

Our portfolio companies in Chinaccelerator and MOX raised a total of $96 million…