Beijing is Silicon Valley's only true competitor

Beijing is Silicon Valley's only true competitor
recode.net

China was and still is lacking some very important infrastructure for successful business development: a stable legal and contracts system, strongly enforced property rights, institutional access to capital, investment focused on demand rather than supply (see also ghost cities), and a well regulated stock market more based on revenue than pure speculation (not that the events of the last 10 years in the US stock markets haven't shaken my opinion on their strength).

Chinese entrepreneurs make up for these business problems the same way people that lack resources do in the states: through hard work and sheer tenacity. They're hungry for progress, and at the end of the day, that's what builds an economy.

I met some great people at Garage cafe that night, and they left a strong impression on me that Chinese entrepreneurs are going to do some really impressive stuff over the next ten years.

If you're ever in Beijing, I highly recommend spending an evening there. It was the highlight of my trip.

> Yes, they clone where they can. But cloning is starting to reach its max — there are just not enough successful ideas to clone. In addition, clones often fail in the local market due to different consumer behavior and needs.

China is still fairly closed, startups here in Beijing are 99% focused on the local market. Release a product with Facebook integration? Who even knows what Facebook is, is it like WeChat? Even in surrounding countries in China's sphere of influence that are just ramping up on the Internet now, like Cambodia, Vietnam, and Myanmar, Facebook and YouTube rule, while Chinese services are completely missing. Business models in China are oriented at copying business model X that has shown to work outside of China, and adapting it to the local market. Not because Chinese lack creative (believe me, they have plenty!), but because the VCs see it as low hanging fruit, a more pragmatic reasonable investment, especially since many of the big players are locked out.

Perhaps the low hanging fruit has been picked, but it is hard to see startups actually pivoting towards innovation, especially in the Beijing scene (maybe Shenzhen?).

> In China, there is a company work culture at startups that's called 9/9/6. It means that regular work hours for most employees are from 9 am to 9 pm, six days a week. If you thought Silicon Valley has intense work hours, think again. For founders and top executives, it's often 9/11/6.5. That's probably not very efficient and useful (who's good as a leader when they're always tired and don't know their kids?) but totally common.

This. A colleague recently transferred to a big e-commerce company in Hangzhou. They expect a lot of face time, in the office 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, but this doesn't correspond to productivity at all. It is very ridiculous. It isn't about "hunger or drive", but simply an old-fashioned throwback to the pre-00s when 6 day work weeks/12 hour days were expected from everyone, regardless of whether they were productive or not.

> The recent generation of Chinese entrepreneurs is driven too much by money and financial success ("get rich fast").

A lot of people are in it for the money, they aren't really technologist. Additionally, engineers who are decent run to and are pushed into management roles way too quickly, given that (a) your success is judged by how many people are working for you and (b) China really lacks good leadership/management. This means that practicing engineers are mostly very junior, which has its own problems.

> Finally, Chinese startups lack clean air.

San Francisco/Bay area is attractive because it is a good place to live, and was initially attractive because it was cheap (garage startups in the valley). Beijing has none of that...the housing bubble means even a small apartment costs $1 million, the air is incredibly horrible, the traffic...maybe if Beijing cleaned up its act, it could be an international draw, but that is a long way off. Beijing also has a shockingly low expat population, something like 40K in a city of 20 million.

> And, yes, China has massive issues, from freedom of speech (The Great Firewall) to competition that can get out of hand in terms of business practices.

I always find it funny when people come to visit and expect to use Facebook and Google docs. Even VPNs are seriously under seige lately, with the internet situation has gotten noticeably worse over the last two years, which I didn't think was possible.

Also, I find it unlikely that without a free/open software ecosystem like linux or bsd they will get very far. Building a startup culture on a general computing foundation of massively pirated windows os is just not going to work.