Orion Zhao of Moka on Being a Sea Turtle Entrepreneur and SaaS in China

Zara Zhang: Hi listeners! For today’s episode, we have a cross-over show with our sister podcast, Founder Real Talk, which is hosted by our managing partner Glenn Solomon based in Menlo Park. Glenn has led many of GGV’s investments in enterprise SaaS companies in the US. Founder RealTalk is a biweekly podcast where Glenn interviews founders and startup executives about the challenges that they face, and how they’ve grown from tough experiences. This episode is an interview with Orion Zhao 赵欧伦 the founder of Moka which Glenn and I recorded in Beijing.
Also, we’ve had two very fun 996 Community meetups in the last month, one in Beijing where we had over 200 attendees, and one in Shanghai where we had dinner with 40 of our listeners. We frequently host offline events where you can meet not just members of the GGV team, but also other like minded folks who are interested in tech in China. All of these events are announced in our listeners’ WeChat groups and Slack channel. You can join these at 996.ggvc.com. Enjoy!

Glenn Solomon: Hi everybody. I’m excited today to have Orion Zhao as our guest. And we also have my colleague Zara Zhang as our guest host. Orion is the founder and CEO of Moka which is a fast-growing HR SaaS startup in China. GGV invested in Orion’s company in the pre-A round in late 2016 and the company’s been growing fast ever since. Moka helps companies increase the efficiency of their hiring process by providing a CRM software solution. It currently has hundreds of customers in China including the likes of Xiaomi, Burger King, Levi’s and many other recognizable names. I’m also really excited because this is the first time we’ve interviewed a China-based founder or CEO for Founder Real Talk. In fact, we’re recording this in Beijing as we speak.

Orion is originally from China but graduated from Berkeley in 2013, so he’s now a returnee to China. He spent close to two years after his years at Berkeley working for Turo in the Bay Area before returning to China in 2015 to start Moka with his co-founder who’s also an overseas returnee from Stanford. So Orion, welcome to Founder Real Talk.

Orion Zhao: Thanks for having me.

Glenn Solomon: So first question for you, maybe start by telling us a little bit about the company. Tell us about Moka and why you decided to start it.

Orion Zhao: When I first came back to China, I actually had no idea what I was going to do. I was thinking about maybe joining a company or I could start a company. So I was looking for opportunities. I was working at Turo, so we did a lot of anti-fraud stuff. So I was looking at Ant Financial which does a lot of credit analyzing and stuff. And I realized that they don’t put a lot of emphasis on their recruiting side, their career side. That got me interested because in the US, companies all have really fancy career sites. I went to talk with a bunch of HR people in China, and I realized that they have some real pain points besides the career page such as collaboration between HR and their hiring managers and the interviewees. And also they had problems collecting all the talent banks. And lastly, they had problems analyzing their recruiting data. So I found those pain points are real. Then I looked at the market and there’s no really good product solutions out there. So I decided to build one myself.

Zara Zhang: Has it always been your plan to return to China or did it happen organically?

Orion Zhao: I think more organically. It was not planned. Long term plan, I was thinking about coming back to China eventually. But it sort of happened when I was feeling, “I feel like I learned a bit in the US already. I want to come back and see what’s going on in China.” I guess it wasn’t really planned out.

Glenn Solomon: So when you decided to start Moka, you had already come back to China and realized this problem that you just mentioned. It wasn’t like you understood that problem while you were in the US?

Orion Zhao: Yeah. I was anxious in the US. I saw the big run of financing happening in China, so I knew the market was really hot. But I didn’t know what was going on there and I had this fear of missing out. I felt like, “I’m in San Francisco. Everything’s going well. But what are the opportunities in China?” I’m trying to understand in the US but the environment’s just so different. So I decided to take a leap of faith, not knowing anything, and come back and then look for problems to solve. I originally gave myself six months to discover what to do. Actually it only took me two months to find the idea of Moka.

Zara Zhang: I had the same feeling. I think that FOMO is universal to all Chinese students who study abroad these days. You read all the news, all your WeChat Moments, all your friends doing interesting things. And everyone’s coming back.

Glenn Solomon: What were some of the challenges you faced coming back as a returnee. Did you feel like the time away actually took you further away from what was going on in China and really understanding the market? Or were there valuable lessons learned in Silicon Valley that you could bring back? Was it more a positive or a negative?

Orion Zhao: It’s a really good question. I think there’s positives and I think there’s also some, not negatives, but things that I need to improve more. I guess I would start with the things that I learned a lot that helped me in the US. The one thing that I learned in college was networking. I was lucky to join a business fraternity in Berkeley called Beta Alpha Psi. Through that experience I learned networking’s actually really important and I think I learned some of the skills. So it helped me to know how to network. And that goes to the downside of being a sea turtle or returnee. I have no connections here in China. I don’t know who to call to discover problems. But I do have the skills to network. So I would ask my friends, “Can you make this intro?” or “Can I talk to this person?” and then get that person to introduce me to another person. So I do have the skills, but I don’t have the resources. But I feel like my education in the US really helped me have the skill to learn, have the skill to network. Those things are more valuable and go longer term. But the resource really hinders me on recruiting. I have no connections in China, so I don’t know who are the reliable coworkers or colleagues to hire. That slowed us in the beginning. It was really hard to recruit. As I gradually built my network, now I know more people in China.

Glenn Solomon: So you eventually could overcome that challenge just by working hard at it, but it wasn’t easy.

Orion Zhao: It was not easy. I think in the first year of Moka, I probably interviewed 500 HRs who I’d never known. I would go onto recruiting websites and send my resume. They would ask me to interview for positions, and then I’d say, “Oh, actually–”

Glenn Solomon: “I want to interview you.”

Orion Zhao: Yeah. “I’m discovering these ideas. Do you have this pain point?” And I’d start the conversation that way.

Glenn Solomon: That’s creative. So, if you look at the market in China, particularly for SaaS and cloud-type solutions, how would you define what stage of the market we’re in in China? And you’ve seen the US, so how do you contrast that with the US?

Orion Zhao: I think in China, the SaaS market’s really early. In China, there’s software companies, but they’re mostly on-premise. And the SaaS wave just started in 2014 or 2015, so it’s really new and early. Whenever I go back to the US or Glenn introduces me to ATS companies who are in a similar space to us, I feel like ATS, which stands for Applicant Tracking System – that’s what we do – I feel like ATS in the US is a commodity. Everybody uses it and they understand the value of it. But in China, I have to educate the people, even for senior levels. When we talk to some CEOs, they won’t even understand the value behind the software. And then we take time, “You can really increase the efficiency. You can collect all your data and do your business in a more data-driven way.” So I think the market’s very early.

Glenn Solomon: What kind of challenges has that presented? If you’re in an early market, you can’t just rely on the fact that your customer’s going to understand what you do. They’re not going to have budget for what you sell. How do you deal with that?

Orion Zhao: I think it goes three ways. The first challenge would be raising funds. Most of the investors in China have never had success investing in enterprise companies. So most of them don’t see the upside. They don’t think it’s a big opportunity. So raising funds is challenging in the enterprise space or in the SaaS space in China. That’s number one. Number two is recruiting talent. There’s no successful SaaS business in China. In the US, you can say, “Oh, there’s Salesforce. There’s Workday.” But in China, there’s no such big companies. And talent would not come to us. They would rather go to Alibaba or they would go to Tencent, Weibo or WeChat. So the second challenge would be talent. Lastly would be acquiring customers. It takes time to educate them. And also, their willingness to pay is relatively low. But in the market we see it growing tremendously. Those are the three challenges I guess.

Zara Zhang: So who was your first customer and how did you find them and convince them?

Orion Zhao: There’s a really cool story about this. I was not even ready to launch the product in a commercial way. I think it was April 2016. I got a call from a recruiter saying, “Can I try the product or can we buy it?” I was like, “We were in beta. How did you discover us?” We were posting a recruiting post on a technical discussion board, and that recruiter also recruits people on that technical board. He saw, “According to the description of the company, this is something interesting that I want to use.” So he called me up and asked me for a product introduction, like a PPT. And I had nothing. I had no introduction stuff. I made that overnight and sent it to him, and after a month we closed the deal. That’s our first customer.

Glenn Solomon: That’s awesome. It also probably gave you an indication, like, “Okay. There’s a market here.”

Orion Zhao: Yes, definitely. A very strong indication.

Glenn Solomon: You mentioned one of your big challenges has been recruiting a team, but you’re over 100 people today?

Orion Zhao: Yeah. 130.

Glenn Solomon: When we invested, you were 20 or 30 people, so you’ve grown by over 100 hundred heads since we invested. You’ve obviously overcome that issue. How have you done that? And what are some of the tactics you’ve used to get the best people when you’re competing with the likes of Alibaba and companies like that for talent?

Orion Zhao: I think it still remains challenging, but there are some techniques that I can share. I guess one thing is, ask for references. I think I actually read this on some US blog or maybe Quora. You ask someone you think is very smart and ask them who would be the person they would refer, and then talk to that person. And then ask for another referral. That person will probably be pretty good. I use that technique all the time through my networks. And one thing is to be very persistent. Once you find a talent that’s really good, stay in touch and always try. They will feel like you’re very sincere about it and also very persistent about it. Over time, as the company grows in a positive way, they will eventually join. In the early days it’s really risky, but later on they will see the progress.

Glenn Solomon: It sounds like for you recruiting has been very personal. You are out there yourself, hand-to-hand combat, trying to close the best candidates. Now, about this time – 130 people, 150 people – our experience is it gets harder for the CEO, or founder in this case, to be centrally involved in every new person coming in. How are you going to scale that?

Orion Zhao: That’s a really good question. I guess I have two ways to solve that, not entirely, but to help the situation. The first one is you have to have a really strong HR team. It’s really important to have recruiters who are dedicated on recruiting, especially when you’re growing really fast. So we had this mistake earlier this year. In the first half of this year, we only had one recruiter. We didn’t know how hard it would be to recruit a huge team. We thought one person would be enough. But now we realize that’s not the case and we now have four recruiters. We quadrupled the team and it’s really helping us to move the funnel and move the needle. So the first answer would be having a really strong HR team and recruiting team. The second part is on culture and leading by example. I go out of my way to hire my direct reports. I’m very persistent. And that shows a good example to the other hiring managers. They will go out of their way to hire their direct reports. And I think having that sort of mentality and culture in the company, that hiring is not only the recruiter’s problem, but also the hiring manager’s job, is really critical.

Glenn Solomon: I’m guessing you use your own product as well, right?

Orion Zhao: I do.

Glenn Solomon: That must help.

Orion Zhao: Totally. I think it helps a lot. Actually, we successfully rediscovered some of the talent that we interviewed early on, and have them on board now. When we were only about 30 people, people were scared to join an early startup. But we still kept their records in the system, and we had all the interview comments. And when a recruiter joined us, they would look into our system and see, “Early on, Orion liked this person. Why don’t we nudge them again?” And we actually closed two of the talents.

Zara Zhang: Do you hire a lot of Chinese overseas returnees or do you prefer more local talents?

Orion Zhao: We actually don’t have too many overseas returnees in our case. We don’t really have a preference. We only look at the skill sets and stuff. But I guess on the manager level, I personally prefer to have local people because they have the connections. So it will be easier for them to recruit their team rather than like us. We had to build a network all over again.

Glenn Solomon: As you’ve been building out your team, have you hired some pretty senior-level folks?

Orion Zhao: Totally.

Glenn Solomon: What’s the market like in China for senior talent? Are you using the same techniques to find those people as well or do you have to do executive searches to find the right people?

Orion Zhao: I think the techniques are the same. But one thing I noticed is different from the US is that in the US, senior talent care about equity and they understand it. In China, they don’t understand that much. And I think the reason behind it is because not many people have made money through equity. They were mostly just earning cash. So in the China talent market, I think senior leaders have a relatively poor understanding of how equity works. Last night I was trying to explain my offer to a senior leader, a technical leadership role in Beijing. Even though he was been working for more than 10 years, he still cannot really understand how equity works, how vesting works.

Glenn Solomon: And this is a technical leader?

Orion Zhao: Yeah.

Glenn Solomon: I think there’s actually some similarities to the US. The value of equity is difficult to convey to some engineering folks in the US as well. But there’s more of a culture of people knowing that you can make a lot of money if your company does well and you’re an equity owner. That piece, people have figured out.

Orion Zhao: In China, not the case.

Glenn Solomon: Interesting. So, as you think about your own life and your experiences so far, we talked a little bit about the fact that you were in the US and you came back to China. Do you think that’s making you a better leader? If you had to do it all over again, would you make the same decisions or try something different?

Orion Zhao: To the first question, I think it did make me a better leader in a lot of ways. I will come back to that later. The second question: would I make a different choice? That’s hard to say. Maybe I would stay a little bit longer in the US to have more management skills and see Turo growing bigger. I guess more experience might help, looking backwards, but it’s hard to say whether I would make the same decision. To the first question, how my experience and education in the US made me a better leader, people in the US value innovation a lot and people tend to think about how to create value long term. I think that mentality helps a lot.

Glenn Solomon: Have you had turnover in your company or have most of the people stayed who you want to keep?

Orion Zhao: We did have some turnover, yeah.

Glenn Solomon: So why do you think that’s happening? One thing I observed in China is that the war for talent is as severe as it is in the US, maybe even more. So you do see people picking up and leaving companies pretty quickly and – maybe it’s the FOMO thing – trying to find the next great thing. How do you prevent your employee base from thinking about their next job and focusing on what they need to do to help Moka build something special?

Orion Zhao: That’s a really tough question. I think probably a lot of founders have that same challenge. A couple of techniques that I think are important. First, hire leaders that are really charming and know how to lead a team. They can really have the folks under them working hard, but at the same time feeling like they are learning new stuff. Leaders who are thoughtful about training people and making people grow. That’s the number one piece, have really good managers. The number two thing to do is pay market price. When you see a person is growing and making contributions, make sure they’re also compensated well. Those are probably the only two things that I think can help the situation.

Glenn Solomon: How about culture? Do you guys intentionally build your culture at Moka and, if so, what is your culture and how important do you think that is to attracting great talent and then retaining that talent?

Orion Zhao: I think that’s a really important piece too. We really care about culture. In the very early days, me and my co-founder, we would write down what’s the culture. Over time, we would come back to see, “Is that still the right culture that we want to keep.” In Moka we have six items. First is ownership, second is excellence, third is be open, think different, customer-centric, and lastly will be candid and straight. So I think culture is critical to maintain people in the company. We do it through all-hands. We do bi-weekly all-hands. And I feel like the younger generation of Chinese talent really enjoy that. Our company’s really transparent and they won’t find that somewhere else. So that definitely helps us to retain talent. Because our company stays very transparent, people get a lot of exposure. They feel safe. They know what’s going on. They know how much money is left in the bank. They know the revenue is growing really fast. I think that’s a key element.

Glenn Solomon: Does that make it unique in China to have these all-hands frequently and have a lot of transparency? In theory it sounds good, but have you ended up having some unintended consequences of being so transparent and open? Do people leave because they get scared because they have too much information?

Orion Zhao: Some people got scared at first, but then they got used to it. That’s something that I found very fascinating, the power of culture. I have a direct report who was born in 1978, so she is 40 years old. So a lot of habits are really stubborn. She is not that open-minded. After joining the company for half a year, she started to realize that she is changing. During our one-on-one, she asked me, “It’s been a year in Moka and I’m sort of lost. I feel like I’m changed, but I don’t know whether it’s positive or negative.” And I told her that, “I think it’s a good change because you’re becoming more open. You talk with your husband more openly. You talk with your colleagues more openly. You’ve become happier than your last job.” Because in her last job, people were not supposed to say things publicly. They are supposed to say good things in public, but not bad things. So she would hide some negative emotions which made her suffer. So I feel like the power of culture is really strong.

Zara Zhang: You’re part of the post-90s generation of founders, those born after 1990. How do you manage people who are older than you?

Orion Zhao: That’s a good question. There’s some principles in management that I enjoy summarizing from time to time. One principle I really like is that the only one way to lead is to lead by example. So I act the way that I want my leaders to act. I will use the same standard to them as well. Another thing to manage them or lead them is through personal caring. I do one-on-ones a lot. I think some Chinese companies don’t do one-on-ones, but I feel like a one-on-one is really personal time where you can show that you care for that person a lot personally, their family, career growth and stuff. Those are some techniques.

Glenn Solomon: That sounds very compelling. So, I get to see you in the US pretty frequently. You come to the US quite a bit and I can see your networking skills at work. You do a good job of building out a broad net. You cast a wide net of people that you’ve gotten to know who are, in one way or another, helpful to you. Why have you done that? Why do you spend time in the US, what do you get out of that, and is it something you’d recommend to other founders here in China?

Orion Zhao: I totally would recommend it. Especially in SaaS, the business that we’re in, we’re years behind the US market. So those founders or senior leaders who are in the SaaS business in the US, they have seen it all. They know the pitfalls. They know where they should emphasize, where they should spend their money, where you should focus. So talking with them really helps me avoid some pitfalls. I definitely recommend it. I can give a concrete example. Recently, we were thinking about building PaaS stuff. Through talking with senior leaders at ServiceNow–

Glenn Solomon: Like platform-as-a-service?

Orion Zhao: Exactly. Platform-as-a-service. Because later down the road when we serve enterprise, they will have customization needs. So when talking with senior leaders at Workday, ServiceNow, and Salesforce, you understand how they build their PaaS systems, and that really helped us to avoid some pitfalls.

Glenn Solomon: Do you find that people are generally pretty open when you ask to talk to them?

Orion Zhao: I think so.

Glenn Solomon: That’s great;

Zara Zhang: When you first started the company, did you model yourself after any American company or was it more of an idea that came to you?

Orion Zhao: I think it was an idea that came to me. Like I mentioned, I didn’t really plan it. But after the idea came, I did look into the US market to see, “What does the market in the US look like? Is it a viable business?” So I did find companies like Greenhouse, Lever who were really hot on press back then, like 2015 when I started Moka. Those are some of the companies that we are very similar to.

Glenn Solomon: Thinking a little bit about Moka longer term, you guys are growing super fast right now, which we’re really happy about as a shareholder. How do you keep that going and what are some of the concerns you have that keep you up at night as a result of that really fast growth?

Orion Zhao: How do we keep that fast growth? I think it’s through talent. I think talent’s really, really important. We do have a good strategy going after the market because the Chinese market has a huge demand for HR software. But the thing is, building HR software is not an easy job. So I think the biggest challenge, or what keeps me up at night, is the talent. I spend 60-70 time recruiting my senior leadership. So that would be Moka’s biggest challenge and mine.

Glenn Solomon: As you think forward, if you’re able to continue to grow effectively, what does success look like? How will you know when you can say, “I’ve done what I wanted to do with Moka.”?

Orion Zhao: The vision of the company is to empower companies through HR technology. We’re going to roll out more and more offerings. After recruiting, we’re probably going to do onboarding and organization management and payroll and performance, similar to Workday’s offering. I guess a mid-term milestone, like four-year, will be to hit a scale where we’re able to IPO in the US. That’s in four years. That’s just a small step. And later, we’re just going to continue to grow and add more product offerings to the product line.

Glenn Solomon: Have you guys added new products yet from your main ATS product line?

Orion Zhao: We haven’t added a whole new suite yet, but we did add an AI feature which was pretty big on the talent rediscovery part.

Glenn Solomon: How hard is it to add a new product, particularly to a SaaS business like yours?

Orion Zhao: I think it’s pretty hard, especially in China. That’s one thing that’s different from the US in China. We pretty much have no good enterprise product guys in China because there’s no successful enterprise products. So it’s really hard to get talent. We have to train our talent. We have to tell them how to think long term, how to say no to customization needs. That’s the challenge in building enterprise software in China.

Glenn Solomon: Have you thought about trying to bring in product managers who have experience in the US, who are maybe more used to that kind of environment? Or are you yourself trying to get some more connections to really smart product people in the US?

Orion Zhao: Yeah, definitely. I think that would definitely help. Actually, one of the reasons why I was in the US two months ago was trying to recruit product and technical leaders. I think that would help, but it’s really hard to recruit people from the US because normally those senior leaders already have families. It’s really hard for them to move back to China now when they are in a stable situation. But it would be helpful and we look forward to having some senior leadership, or maybe just junior people, from the US join us on the product and engineering side.

Zara Zhang: When and how will you go global?

Orion Zhao: That’s a tough question. We’ve been thinking about it. We think the US market’s very interesting, but our product’s still not at the stage of maturity. It’s still iterating very fast. So maybe three to five years, but it’s really hard to say. And building the local sales team and marketing team will be a big challenge. I have to have the China market done first and then maybe think about the US or global.

Glenn Solomon: So for now, it’s focus on the China market, win China, and then go from there?

Orion Zhao: Yes.

Glenn Solomon: I think that makes a lot of sense. It’s hard enough for companies in mature markets to go global, and you’re in a market where it sounds like you have a lot of work to do to keep growing it. The good news is, it’s wide open. So you could get very big just focusing on China. And as you expand into new products, that should give you the opportunity to really become quite a big company.

Orion Zhao: Yeah.

Glenn Solomon: The metrics that companies use in the US to measure success with SaaS, both internally and for the financial markets and investors, are pretty well known now. And you guys have adopted a lot of those metrics. Do you think that makes you unique in China or do you think Chinese companies have caught on to what the US SaaS market’s metrics people care about?

Orion Zhao: I think it does make me sort of unique. That’s one thing that GGV definitely helped us with a lot. I don’t think a lot of founders in the China market understand how those metrics work. So I think GGV having a global view definitely helped us to know what to measure. For example NPS, ARR, retention churn, LTV, CAC, all those things I measure and we do it rigorously. So when I go out fundraising, we’re quite unique to the investors in China. They rarely see this very detailed, very rigorous metrics monitoring.

Glenn Solomon: So you’re teaching them versus the reverse?

Orion Zhao: Yes. Sort of.

Glenn Solomon: That’s great. Orion, this has been awesome. We’re at the stage of the episode where we’re going to go to the hot seat questions. Zara and I are going to fire some questions at you. Just say the first thing that comes to your mind. First one, tell us about an entrepreneur or a founder that you have respect for and why.

Orion Zhao: I think Bill Gates. He gave me the inspiration for entrepreneurship.

Zara Zhang: What’s a book or another piece of content that you enjoy reading that you recommend to other founders?

Orion Zhao: I think High Output Management by Andy Grove.

Glenn Solomon: That’s a great one. An oldie but a goodie. How about for those listeners who may be coming to China some day, what’s a good place you’d recommend to come visit when you’re in China? Apart from the Moka headquarters.

Orion Zhao: Yeah. Moka headquarters would be a recommendation. I think the Forbidden City is a very cool place to visit.

Glenn Solomon: In Beijing?

Orion Zhao: Yeah. In Beijing.

Zara Zhang: What types of roles are you hiring for at Moka and how can people reach out if they’re interested?

Orion Zhao: Oh, thanks. We’re hiring a lot on the product side, so product managers and also engineers and designers. If they’re interested, they can reach us at hello@mokahr.com.

Glenn Solomon: And if you apply through that, you’re going to be in the Moka ATS.

Orion Zhao: Yes.

Glenn Solomon: Awesome. Orion, thank you so much for spending time with us on Founder Real Talk. This is a great episode and a great way for our listeners to get initiated into the China market. Thank you.

Orion Zhao: Thanks for having me.

Zara Zhang: Thank you.

HANS TUNG: Thanks for listening to this episode of 996.

Zara Zhang: GGV Capital is a multi-stage venture capital firm based in Silicon Valley, Shanghai and Beijing. We have been partnering with leading technology entrepreneurs for the past 18 years from Seed to pre-IPO. With $6.2 billion in capital under management across 13 funds, GGV invests in consumer new retail, social, digital internet, enterprise cloud and frontier tech.

GGV has invested in over 290 companies with more than 45 companies valued at over $1 billion. Portfolio companies include Airbnb, Alibaba, Ctrip, Didi Chuxing, DOMO, HashiCorp, Hellobike, Houzz, Keep, Slack, Square, Toutiao, Wish, Xiaohongshu, YY and others. Find out more at ggvc.com.

We also highly recommend joining our listeners’ WeChat group and Slack channel where we regularly share insights, events and job opportunities related to tech in China. Join these groups at 996.ggvc.com/community.

Hans Tung: If you have any feedback on this podcast or would like to recommend a guest, please email us at 996@ggvc.com.