Cyril Ebersweiler | eCommerce Pre iPhone, Building the Worlds’s #1 Hardware Accelerator, & The Next Big Thing

In this episode of The Negotiation, we speak with a very good friend of mine, Cyril Ebersweiler, General Partner @ SOSV The Accelerator VC, who is best described as a visionary punk. We begin our conversation talking about how he ended up in China, first as an intern with Carrefour later becoming their first eCommerce Project Manager all the way back in 2002, predating the first iPhone by 5 years just to put that in perspective for you. Fast forward to 2009 which is when we first met in the North-East of China in a coastal city called Dalian. This is also where he met Sean O’Sullivan the now Managing Director of SOSV which back then was more of a super-angel fund or family office fund, whichever you prefer. I ask Cyril to tell about why the two of them decided to start investing in early-stage tech in China and what that conversation was like when even Silicon Valley was in it’s adolescence. We talk about spinning up accelerators in China as an investment model and why Shenzhen was the best place in the world to launch a hardware accelerator, due in large part to the ’shanzai’ movement which we explain in the show., and we talk about the impact crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter have had on the world of hardware startups, ending with a prediction of where the next biggest company will come from.