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Beijing is Silicon Valley's only true competitor

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Re: Beijing is Silicon Valley's only true competitor

#11

Post by 50CNT »

kyledrake wrote: post #5

Funny, I gave a tech talk at the Chekku (Garage) cafe a few years ago, and even then it had a pretty impressive energy in the place. The host that set it up expected maybe 15 people to show up, over 150 did. 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, inve…

It's cool to see Cheku mentioned on here, they just celebrated their 5 year anniversary a month or so ago. Does seem like a lot of the cooler projects have left for greener pastures though, and the people that are left, ah well.

Re: Beijing is Silicon Valley's only true competitor

#12

Post by supster »

ignoramous wrote: post #6
supster wrote: post #4

It must help Chinese startups that many SV companies are blocked from competing in China. For example no competition from Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Youtube, Gmail, Dropbox, Vimeo, SoundCloud... more info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Websites_blocked_in_mainland_C...

You're undermining the fact that to build services of that scale is not trivial at all, and the fact they have managed to do it is the basis of why they are an effective competition to SV, now that they are as economically strong as the Bay Area is. Once they are done with "replicating" SV, they'd start "inventing" too. What's stopping them from that?

I'm not undermining them - simply stating that there was a vacuum created by the lack of competition. Even cloning successful services at scale is incredibly difficult, but it's not 0 to 1, it's 1 to n. Nonetheless, I agree Chinese startups are using their current leverage to innovate in really interesting new ways.

Re: Beijing is Silicon Valley's only true competitor

#13

Post by kyledrake »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #10
kyledrake wrote: post #5

Funny, I gave a tech talk at the Chekku (Garage) cafe a few years ago, and even then it had a pretty impressive energy in the place. The host that set it up expected maybe 15 people to show up, over 150 did. 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, inve…

Is that the one near Haidian book city? I had lunch there once, but I didn't notice anything.

I would try going at night.

Re: Beijing is Silicon Valley's only true competitor

#14

Post by seanmcdirmid »

fighting wrote: post #9

Lack of clean air to breathe and rampant corruption and authoritarianism seem not very conducive to a successful startup culture. There is a huge churn of chinese money trying to find places to go and get a good roi. It is not clear that this will last though. 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 computin…

The lack of good investment options has something to do with money chasing tech startups, I agree.

> Building a startup culture on a general computing foundation of massively pirated windows os is just not going to work.

This really isn't true anymore. Much of Beijing startups are built on Linux/Android, piracy of Windows seems to be way down in general.

Re: Beijing is Silicon Valley's only true competitor

#15

Post by rememberlenny »

I lived in Shanghai and worked in the startup community there from 2012-2013. Im happy to answer any questions people might have. Very interesting space. The government is taking a very active role at developing startup "infrastructure", but it looks incredibly different from anything in the West.

Re: Beijing is Silicon Valley's only true competitor

#16

Post by FreeInternet »

fighting wrote: post #9

Lack of clean air to breathe and rampant corruption and authoritarianism seem not very conducive to a successful startup culture. There is a huge churn of chinese money trying to find places to go and get a good roi. It is not clear that this will last though. 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 computin…

and nobody uses windows anymore anyway. I mean its less than 90% of pc users and rapidly declining. And linux is used on at least 1% of pc's and again, rapidly increasing.

Also, with Linux finally on windows, 2016 is the year of linux on desktop so linux >> windows

Re: Beijing is Silicon Valley's only true competitor

#17

Post by 50CNT »

fighting wrote: post #9

Lack of clean air to breathe and rampant corruption and authoritarianism seem not very conducive to a successful startup culture. There is a huge churn of chinese money trying to find places to go and get a good roi. It is not clear that this will last though. 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 computin…

I've been proselytizing linux over here. Ubuntu Kylin is pretty cool to set up for people, but the wifi cards on a lot of laptops don't take too well to it.

Re: Beijing is Silicon Valley's only true competitor

#18

Post by kyledrake »

50CNT wrote: post #11
kyledrake wrote: post #5

Funny, I gave a tech talk at the Chekku (Garage) cafe a few years ago, and even then it had a pretty impressive energy in the place. The host that set it up expected maybe 15 people to show up, over 150 did. 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, inve…

It's cool to see Cheku mentioned on here, they just celebrated their 5 year anniversary a month or so ago. Does seem like a lot of the cooler projects have left for greener pastures though, and the people that are left, ah well.

There's an endless supply of people to fill in those that leave.

Mind you, the greener pasture might just be Shanghai. Shanghai looked a lot more developed than Beijing, but I was only there for the day, so I didn't have time to really explore the city. It reminded me a lot of Hong Kong in many respects. I'd love to spend a month deep diving into the tech scene there.

Re: Beijing is Silicon Valley's only true competitor

#19

Post by throwaway_exer »

fighting wrote: post #9

Lack of clean air to breathe and rampant corruption and authoritarianism seem not very conducive to a successful startup culture. There is a huge churn of chinese money trying to find places to go and get a good roi. It is not clear that this will last though. 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 computin…

> I find it unlikely that without a free/open software ecosystem like linux or bsd

In Taiwan and China, it's common to use Linux in university and to work on Open Source projects (see OpenWebmail and Linux Virtual Server projects, for impressive successes.)

The Chinese government was pushing their Red Flag linux, but I'm not sure where that is now. Certainly Linux would be used in their home-grown CPU and superconductor efforts.

However, once students graduate, their employers are less likely to understand making Open Source contributions at the business level.

Re: Beijing is Silicon Valley's only true competitor

#20

Post by epoxyhockey »

rememberlenny wrote: post #15

I lived in Shanghai and worked in the startup community there from 2012-2013. Im happy to answer any questions people might have. Very interesting space. The government is taking a very active role at developing startup "infrastructure", but it looks incredibly different from anything in the West.

The government is taking a very active role at developing startup "infrastructure"

Could you elaborate on this statement? Are you referring to financing of startups, or more? Thank you for the offer to answer questions!

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