William Bao Bean, general partner at SOSV, named the world’s most active seed investor by TechCrunch Crunchbase, has his eye on travel but is aware that the potential for new technology to really disrupt the industry is hard.
William Bao Bean: “Travel is a closed insular industry, there’s a lot of history and baggage.
“Travel is a closed insular industry, there’s a lot of history and baggage. The incumbents really don’t want it to happen – it’s not in their interests to open up too much. It’s also hard to compete against the likes of Priceline that spends US$6 billion on marketing or Ctrip, which is so dominant in China.”
He however sees opportunities for “innovating around travel for companies that solve specific problems”.
Bao Bean said that SOSV, which groups seven accelerators, does about 150 investments a year, out of which there may be two to four in travel. In total, SOSV’s portfolio includes 700 investments, with the number one sector being biotech and fossil fuels. Bao Bean also founded MOX, SOSV’s Mobile-Only Accelerator, in partnership with GMobi, the largest mobile platform for South-east Asia and India.
In addition, he is also an active angel investor, doing about 40 investments a year personally.
His interests in travel range from luxury travel – one of his investments include Go Portier, the hotel concierge service used at The Siam in Bangkok – to the corporate segment through an app that offers services in 20 cities across Asia Pacific. He’s also involved in Rikai Labs, a Shanghai and San Francisco-based startup that builds chatbots that are distributed via messaging platforms like WeChat, Messenger and Slack.
Bao Bean is not afraid of testing – he tried social commerce for hotels “but it failed”. “You need decent engagement – event tickets, packages, weekend getaways, last minute trips – but it’s tough given Ctrip’s domination in the market.”
He feels startups don’t have a chance in China unless they have an “unfair advantage” and he sees opportunities for new business models built around marketing and engagement. There are still a lot of problems to solve such as giving travellers an unbeatable experience when in-destination, which is why we are excited about Go Portier.”
With MOX, Bao Bean said the mobile-only accelerator has coverage of 130 million smartphones across Asia. “We have huge amount of user data and we have granular data on travel habits, we can help bring scale to startups and help them with customer acquisition.” In exchange for access to this data, MOX takes some equity in the startups. MOX currently has 22 startups under its wing.
Bao Bean is also keeping a close eye on blockchain, the technology underpinning Bitcoin, as to how it will cause a fundamental shift in payments. “This can solve a lot of problems – paying for stuff is a pain. How can we allow Chinese people to use their smartphones to pay when they go shopping in Korea – could they load up with RMB before they travel?”
At the recent SWITCH conference in Singapore, Bao Bean said that significant sums of money were going into AI in China. He said that in the last 15 years, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists had been investing in companies that solve basic problems which have been solved pretty well. Now, like the US, he said, you have to have a revolution in tech to make an impact, “so you’re seeing massive amounts of money getting into AI”.
In July, China’s State Council issued guidelines on developing AI inside the country and set a goal of becoming a global innovation center for the technology by 2030.
Note: William Bao Bean is speaking at the WIT Bootcamp and Conference, Oct 23-25, in Singapore where he is also one of the judges for the WIT Startup Pitch.