Season 3, Episode 10: Tencent

Acquired

Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal

Venturecapital, Ma, Investing, Acquisitions, Startups, Vc, Investment, Business, Technology

4.8 • 2.9K Ratings

🗓️ 17 December 2018

⏱️ 113 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

We close out Season 3 and our China mini-series with a monster episode on Tencent, the Shenzhen-based social networking and entertainment powerhouse. We dive deep into the story of Pony Ma and his cofounders’ incredible journey from making software for pagers(!) to QQ, WeChat, League of Legends, Fortnite, Snapchat and even Tesla. This is one finale you don’t want to miss!

Sponsors:
Vanta: https://bit.ly/acquiredvanta

Statsig: bit.ly/statsigacquired
Modern Treasury: https://bit.ly/acquiredmoderntreasury

Carve Outs:

Ben: President Obama’s OG podcast! https://bit.ly/2BqXxHJ
David: Kara Swisher’s interview with the Google Walkout organizers: https://bit.ly/2RwuskZ
David (bonus!): Allen Iverson on the Players’ Tribune: https://bit.ly/2EkrRHQ

Transcript

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0:00.0	Also, I did have Tesla, that they invested in Tesla, and I have one other that is kind of surprising that they
0:07.5	own a good bit of or owned a good bit of.
0:10.3	Excellent.
0:11.6	Do you know that one?
0:13.0	Snap.
0:15.0	Snap. Yeah, oh yeah, there's, there's.
0:18.0	Tencent is everywhere. Welcome to Season 3, episode 10 of Acqu of acquired the show about technology acquisitions and
0:36.2	IPOs I'm Ben Gilbert I'm David Rosenthal and we are your hosts today we are covering a company that Wikipedia describes as a Chinese multinational investment holding conglomerate founded in 1998.
0:50.0	Of course, this is 10 cent.
0:52.0	All of that and so much more. All that and a bag of chips.
0:56.3	And a bag of chips. And a 12% steak and snap. David, we'll get to that later.
1:01.8	Spoilers. Well so what is 10 cents? David. We'll get to that later. Spoilers.
1:03.0	Well, so what is Tencent, besides that very long definition that feels conglomerity?
1:08.0	Well, first off, they're notoriously bad at PR, and they actually talk about this as a company. You probably don't have them in
1:14.9	your mind as one of the world's most important companies unless you're in gaming or maybe
1:19.8	social media. So starting off with that first, Tencent is the world's largest gaming company. They are a game
1:26.3	publisher and they take most of their money from games. It's where they make most money as a company,
1:31.4	but they certainly didn't start this way and we'll dig into that in a minute.
1:34.8	Tencent rivals Facebook for the world's largest social networking company by market cap.
1:40.4	It is the world's largest music service that actually IPO this week with over 800 million
1:47.8	monthly active users.
1:50.4	That music company that just IPO P. O.
	...

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