The Negotiation

In this episode of The Negotiation, we had the esteemed pleasure of interviewing an old friend from China, Mr. Bertrand Schmitt, the co-founder and Chairman of App Annie, and co-host of the podcast Tech Deciphered. We talk about how Bertrand and his team have spent the last decade creating the industry’s most complete mobile performance platform while being based in Beijing, raising 160 million dollars in funding along the way, and why it was important that a significant part of that amount came from local Chinese investors. We look back at the evolution of mobile in China and talk about how far they’ve come in the APP industry, and discuss tech areas that China has now taken the global innovation leader in. We also talk about the two biggest mobile players in China, Huawei and Xiaomi, and what the future holds for them given the relatively harsher climate they face outside China. Enjoy.

Show Notes

Today on The Negotiation, we speak with Bertrand Schmitt, tech entrepreneur, Co-Founder, and Chairman of App Annie, and co-host of the Tech DECIPHERED podcast alongside Strive Capital’s Nuno Goncalves Pedro.
Bertrand has been involved in the mobile industry in China since 1999, through what he refers to as its period of “growing pains”. When the iPhone and the App Store came out in 2007 and 2008, respectively, Bertrand quickly saw that they solved, in one go, three big issues in China’s mobile world: discovery, distribution, and monetization. Bertrand was inspired to bring something to market that could contribute to the industry. This led to the creation of App Annie, which aimed to provide tools to business developers to better understand developments in the mobile space via data and analytics.
Mobile-only recently boomed as an industry in the Chinese market following the release of the iPhone (considered a luxury item when it first came out). Up until that point, the Chinese communicated through text, and tech giant Tencent was known for its online gaming services. The past decade has seen much innovation and the rise of new giants like Pinduoduo and ByteDance that were built on a mobile-first foundation.
Bertrand shares his experience working as a French entrepreneur in China, how the VC “culture” in China has evolved and how it differs from that of America or Europe, China’s unique mobile-related innovations, and what to expect from Bertrand’s podcast, Tech DECIPHERED. 

What is The Negotiation?

Despite being the world’s most potent economic area, Asia can be one of the most challenging regions to navigate and manage well for foreign brands. However, plenty of positive stories exist and more are emerging every day as brands start to see success in engaging and deploying appropriate market growth strategies – with the help of specialists.

The Negotiation is an interview show that showcases those hard-to-find success stories and chats with the incredible leaders behind them, teasing out the nuances and digging into the details that can make market growth in APAC a winning proposition.