December 20, 2020: Rituals

Hello Interconnected Readers:

I have been heads down writing and publishing the four-part “Global by Nature” series, so I’ve neglected the Interconnected Weekly issue for many weeks -- breaking a ritual. Thus, the six stories commentary you will find below -- three from English sources, three from Chinese sources -- will cover a broader time range than just last week. Going forward, I will also be intentionally highlighting more posts from other quality newsletters -- an untapped well of knowledge and insight that rarely surfaces if you only pay attention to institutional media outlets. (You will see a great post on China’s autonomous driving industry from The China Guys newsletter in this issue.)

[If you’d like to skip ahead to the six news stories and commentaries – three from English language sources, three from Chinese language sources -- here are this issue’s items:

• “Driving to the Future: Beijing’s Bet on Autonomous Vehicles” (English Source: The China Guys)
• “Tesla-Style Rally Puts Chinese Electric-Vehicle Makers on Par With GM, Ford” (English Source: Wall Street Journal)
• “Expansion into enterprise markets drives AWS re:Invent machine learning debuts” (English Source: SiliconAngle)
• “Pinduoduo: Quietly carrying a big stick” (Chinese Source: China Venture News)
• “The five important people behind Zhang Yiming” (Chinese Source: 36Kr)
• “Toyota President: If all cars run on electricity, Japan will have no electricity in the summer” (Chinese Source: Tencent Tech News)]

As we approach the end of arguably one of the most consequential years in human history, I’ve been thinking a lot about rituals in general. Rituals create rich cultures and traditions, but also mindless defaults and intellectual laziness. “Why do we do what we do” is a question that we don’t ask ourselves enough; COVID-19 has forced us to ask that question about all facets of our lives.

I’ve been working remotely in Hawaii for the last few weeks, living from one Airbnb to another. I would listen to the local Hawaiian radio stations while driving. The other day, I heard from one station that a local survey discovered that there’s a big increase in people who would be totally fine with the rituals around Christmas disappearing forever. These rituals include traveling, cooking a big Christmas dinner, hosting relatives, etc. (A quiet takeout dinner with a good movie would be just fine.) Most of the people who expressed this view, unsurprisingly, are mothers and females in general, who do most of the work to make those things happen. Rituals tend to elevate the imagery, while ignoring the people and work that made the imagery possible.

With the rituals of Christmas and New Year being changed, what will Lunar New Year look like next year? Will the “largest annual human migration” still be as large? Looking beyond the holidays, what will the ritual of going to the office, heading to the gym, people-watching in coffee shops (my personal favorite), or visiting aging parents look like? None of us really know.

Some old rituals will die, while new rituals get created, but we don’t need to wait for a global pandemic to constructively destroy or create.  Seven years ago, the year I left the White House to go to law school, I started a holiday email blast to all my friends, ex-colleagues, and other acquaintances with unfiltered personal updates in a “highlight <> lowlight” format (since I don’t believe anything is either 100% good or bad). It was meant to just be a way to stay in touch, since I move around a lot, but over the years it has become the one thing my friends look for and appreciate every year. It’s a new ritual. (After I finish writing this issue, I’ll be working on that email.)

I think it’s healthy to regularly question old rituals, which can be a ritual of the body or of the mind. That process requires not only learning new things, but also un-learning old things.

One of my personal goals for 2021 is to do more un-learning. I look forward to sharing that journey with you.

Happy holidays,

Kevin

P.S. since next week is Christmas Week, I will not be publishing next Thursday and Sunday. The next post will be on December 31st.

Before you go on, please check out last week's deep dive post: "Open Source, Open Stats, Open Development"

“Driving to the Future: Beijing’s Bet on Autonomous Vehicles” (English Source: The China Guys)

My Thoughts: This post from a couple of months ago provides a good overview analysis of the autonomous vehicles landscape in China with two leading companies -- Baidu and Didi. (The China Guys team does good work. You can check out their newsletter HERE.) One term that we will see a lot more of is MaaS (Mobility-as-a-Service), which is both a market, a product, and a tech stack to enable self-driving and more comprehensive connectivity in vehicles. This is an area that China may be leading the world soon, not necessarily because its central government wants it, but because its consumers want it. “Connectivity” -- being able to connect to WeChat, download apps, watch online entertainment, etc. directly in a car -- is a high-priority feature for the Chinese consumers when shopping for a car. In addition to Baidu and Didi, I would also put Tesla and XPeng on the “watch list” of China’s autonomous vehicles market. As I discussed in “Tesla, China, the “Tech Cold-War”, Tesla is aggressively hiring technical talent to do “original engineering” in China, much of that is self-driving related. XPeng is also known to be making heavy investments in its self-driving tech stack. Though if you ask Elon, those “investments” are just stolen old code.

“Tesla-Style Rally Puts Chinese Electric-Vehicle Makers on Par With GM, Ford” (English Source: Wall Street Journal)

My Thoughts: Stolen code or not, the Chinese EV makers’ stock prices have been skyrocketing, making the category one of the most popular speculative targets for retail investors, as this WSJ article has shown in its interviews. Of course, we’ve also had Nikola and Fisker, so Chinese companies aren’t the only ones riding the “Tesla tailwind” (and later suffering from the eventuality of gravity). With Joe Biden pledging to return to the Paris climate accord on the first day of his presidency, how EVs fit within the geopolitical dynamics among nations will become that much more interesting. The gas-powered vehicles of the present and past are dominated by American, German, and Japanese car makers. My hunch is China will be among the top three in EVs manufacturing, whether the other countries like it or not.

“Expansion into enterprise markets drives AWS re:Invent machine learning debuts” (English Source: SiliconAngle)

My Thoughts: Because of the pandemic, AWS’s marquee annual event, re:Invent, was a virtual conference that lasted three weeks! (It’s more like a virtual nerdy summer camp about cloud computing.) It’s impossible to read about all the announcements from a re:Invent, though I do recommend SiliconAngle’s coverage if you want to try. I share this one SiliconAngle article, because it highlights an astounding fact: 92% of cloud-based TensorFlow and 91% of cloud-based PyTorch run on AWS. TensorFlow and PyTorch are two of the most popular machine learning frameworks. Both are open source. TensorFlow came out of Google, PyTorch came out of Facebook, yet developers appear to be running them mostly on AWS. As I discussed in-depth in “Global by Nature (Part I): Developers”, developers are the most important demographic in the era of a technology-driven Globalization 2.0. They have a global persona and outlook, and will increasingly decide what technology gets used where. AWS has been developer-focused since its early days -- an approach that’s paying off handsomely.

“Pinduoduo: Quietly carrying a big stick” (Chinese Source: China Venture News)

My thoughts: Pinduoduo quietly rolled out its own payment product, Duoduo Wallet, with an eye to finally expand into financial services. It acquired the required payment license a year ago by buying a company called Fufeitong, who had the license. The big launch will happen in the upcoming Lunar New Year, where Pinduoduo secured an official partnership with the New Year Banquet TV Gala to promote Duoduo Wallet via a red packet giving program. This playbook was pioneered by Tencent during the New Year Banquet TV Gala in 2015, when it promoted its then-new, now-ubiquitous WeChat Pay. Currently, most of the payment processing on Pinduoduo is done through WeChat Pay. Tencent is also Pinduoduo’s second largest shareholder, adding more intrigue to this anticipated launch.

“The five important people behind Zhang Yiming” (Chinese Source: 36Kr)

My thoughts: Over the last year, ByteDance has become one of the most consequential tech companies in the world, and its founder and CEO, Zhang Yiming, is now one of the most important entrepreneurs to watch. When a company becomes this important, it’s hard to imagine its humble beginning, but all companies had a humble beginning. This article details the story behind the five angel investors who initially helped breathe life into Zhang Yiming’s first creation, Jinri Toutiao. Most investors at the time hated the idea, chalking it up to another Netease or Sohu that had a low ceiling and no chance. The only institutional investor who backed ByteDance was SIG’s China fund (SIG is, of course, Susquehanna International Group, a massive fund founded in Pennsylvania in 1987). The first check was a measly $80,000. When ByteDance was struggling, SIG put in another $1 million in equity investment along with another $1 million in bridge loan to keep the dream alive. Only when the Russian billionaire Yuri Milner’s DST Global invested in ByteDance did the company land on solid financial footing to grow. The rest, as they say, is history.

“Toyota President: If all cars run on electricity, Japan will have no electricity in the summer” (Chinese Source: Tencent Tech News)

My thoughts: At least one person is not super enthusiastic about a full-blown adoption of EVs. That person is Toyota President, Akio Toyoda, who in his end-of-year press conference explicitly dampened politicians’ enthusiasm for passing legislations to quickly phase out gas-powered internal combustion engine (ICE) cars. Toyoda’s target is most likely the Japanese politicians, who plan to announce new regulations that would prohibit new ICE cars from being sold starting in 2035. This line of criticism does not mean Toyota is against EVs. In fact, the car maker plans to launch six EV models in the near future. But generating and storing electric power is still a challenging problem. This article specifically mentioned Tesla, which has been tackling this problem for quite some time with products like the Powerwall.

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