Hi, this is Chris Dixon. This is the A16Z podcast. I'm here today with my colleagues, Benedict Evans and Connie Chan, and we're going to talk about tech and China.

So, Connie, you spend a lot of time thinking about China. I think just because a lot of people who might be listening to this don't really understand the landscape there, could you just give like a quick overview? Who are the big companies? What do they do? What are they working on?

The big companies people have historically talked about would be they call them the bat companies. B

stands for Baidu, A stands for Alibaba, and T stands for Tencent. But on top of that, there are some emerging companies

like Chi Hu that are growing very quickly that are worth paying attention to as well. I think these

three companies are actually quite misunderstood, unfortunately, out here in the West. For example,

I read a lot of articles that talk about Tencent, and they say that advertising is their main business model.

But people don't realize if you just look at their financial statements, advertising is less than 10% of their revenues.

And 80% of their revenues are coming from games and value-added services.

So these are like in-at payments on games and things like that?

Yeah, yeah. They actually are very active in gaming.

Tencent is the creator of one of my favorite mobile apps called Wei Xing, which in English

is called WeChat.

It's one of the most innovative messaging apps that I've seen for a long time that a lot

of Chinese now consumers are using to do a number

of things outside of just communicating to their friends and family. They're using it to order

taxis, to send money, to order food from restaurants, to follow celebrities, to get local

traffic, all sorts of things. Alibaba is the other company I mentioned. They have a number of huge properties. T-Mall and

Talba are probably the two most well-known ones that are massive players in e-commerce.

Allie-wing is also a cloud product that they have as well as Al-A-Pay, which is somewhat similar

to PayPal here in the States.

Baidu is often called the Google of China, and that's because they're dominant in search,

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