SYNC 2021 Day 1 Recap: the ability to validate your ideas is the key to success,...

SYNC 2021 Day 1 Recap: the ability to validate your ideas is the key to success, says Asian entrepreneurs

SYNC 2021 Day 1 Recap: the ability to validate your ideas is the key to success, says Asian entrepreneurs

Weilin Li

posted on 14 hours ago

Featuring Brad Bao of Lime, Pei Jun of Cepton, and Zilliz’s Charles Xie.

On the first day of SYNC 2021, held by Pingwest, we talked online with five Asian entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, who shared their insights on the motivation to start a business, the tips of operating a healthy startup, and the new opportunities currently in front of them. 

Their companies focus on micromobility, lidar technology, cloud-based information security, and open-source software, etc.

Brad Bao, co-founder and chairman of Lime, started SYNC by explaining the motivation behind startups and how Asian entrepreneurs might potentially change the world. Howie Xu, VP of Machine Learning and AI at Zscaler, was the moderator. 

“Starting a business is not the way to get rich quick, and it’s actually time-consuming. It is a way to invest in yourself.” Bao said. “As for how leadership keeps pace with the development of a startup, at first, it should be the ability to figure things out, and later it requires the coordination and team management skills.”

Bao’s company Lime distributes shared scooters, bikes and transit vehicles, to reduce people’s dependence on automobiles for short distance transportation. Their presence is mainly in the US and Europe.

The company has raised a total of $945 million in funding over 13 rounds. Their latest funding was raised in May 2020, according to Crunchbase. Lime has a post-money valuation in the range of $1B to $10B as of May 2020, according to PrivCo.

Bao also said that validation is the key to their success for entrepreneurs, who are likely to be over-optimistic . “I have a memo, and it has over a hundred questions on it. I’ll see whether I can validate my ideas.”

As the next speaker, Pei Jun, CEO and Co-founder of Cepton, talked about his journey to lead the engineering team at Velodyne, and how he co-founded Cepton. Before Cepton, Pei founded AEP Technology.

Last month, General Motors selected Cepton to supply lidar for 2023 production, a milestone for Cepton. The company is about to go public by the end of this year and its valuation has surpassed $1.5 billion.

Lake Dai, Partner at LDV Partners and Adjunct Professor at CMU, talked to Pei as the moderator.

“I followed the path and kept entering a school at a higher level… There isn’t much difference (in terms of setup procedures) between my first and second company. We started from small-sized enterprises, which were like workshops,” said Pei.

The conference goes more specific in its last part. The speaker Charles Xie, CEO and founder of Zilliz, shared his ideas on how his company “makes sense of unstructured data through open source and cloud-native services”.

Zilliz was founded in 2017 and operates as a distributed team with offices in both the U.S. and China. The company is the initiator and primary contributor to the vector similarity search project Milvus.

“We’ve experienced a more diversified and energetic ecosystem of open-source software in the past five or six years.” he said. "China has seen many opportunities in this process."