Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Beijing is Silicon Valley's only true competitor

recode.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 161 posts

Re: Beijing is Silicon Valley's only true competitor

#41

Post by bx_ »

Apocryphon wrote: post #35
doppp wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I highly doubt there is a "lack of competition" in China. For each and every one of those "Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Youtube, Gmail, Dropbox, Vimeo, SoundCloud" you mentioned, there are a hundred similar companies. In fact, I'd argue that competition is rife and more ruthless in China than in Silicon Valley. The moment you have a good idea, ten companies will appear the next day hot on your h…

On the other hand, the customer base is also much larger in China.

With that said, reputation and word of mouth is everything in China. Before an app like Didi was the king, people were changing ride share apps every month. New deals, new coupons, new rumors, etc... The tide changes really fast here. Didi just happened to be the only app that could hang in there.

Regardless of how many people there are, if 10 people online say something is not worth using, no one else is going to use it.

Re: Beijing is Silicon Valley's only true competitor

#42

Post by fighting »

50CNT wrote: post #17
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.

Jiayou! But I think there has to be innate demand for it, and for the right reasons, not just because it is cheap and available.

Re: Beijing is Silicon Valley's only true competitor

#43

Post by bx_ »

50CNT wrote: post #17
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.

Why Kylin and not Xubuntu or Lubuntu?

Re: Beijing is Silicon Valley's only true competitor

#44

Post by joe_the_user »

It don't know if the author noticed that the news out of China for the last year has largely signaled the disintegration of the Chinese development model, with the state relentless intervening basically everywhere to prevent the collapse of the stock market, prevent capital flight, prevent the massive bankruptcy of various firms, prevent worker unrest from economic dislocation etc.

With contradictions of the Chinese economy now becoming visible to the rest of world, even if the Chinese state continue to distort it's statistics, the idea that the Chinese tech sector is oh-so-vibrant-and-healthy seems much less plausible. The tech sector depends on the Chinese internal market and that just doesn't look good or healthy or competitive - especially not competitive. Western companies are shut out but it's pretty clear native companies need connection to stay healthy too.

Re: Beijing is Silicon Valley's only true competitor

#45

Post by sandGorgon »

the title is clickbait. If we are looking at Asia then India is the more relevant competitor. With a huge Valley-returned entrepreneur community as well as being open for Silicon Valley to do business, I am betting that India will grow faster. Indeed Ola and Flipkart's senior management comes from Facebook and Google at this point ... and were forced to innovate faster and harder when Amazon and Uber entered India. This happens across all categories of startups. Sure China has a larger customer segment than India at this point, but that is not something that is going to continue for long.

Oh and fundamental freedom and democratic rights go a long way to attract talent. Its not for nothing that talent chose to settle in the extremely vibrant and tolerant San Francisco area. Pretty much the exact same reason why Delhi and Bangalore drive most of the tech ecosystem in India.

The biggest problem I see with India is lack of infrastructure at the same level as China. That I admit, is going to be a make or break.

Re: Beijing is Silicon Valley's only true competitor

#46

Post by NnamdiJr »

lawyao wrote: post #29

He needs to spend way more than 3 weeks in Beijing before jumping to conclusions.

I'm curious, where exactly do you think his conclusions are wrong?

I lived and worked in Beijing for over 5yrs and I think his conclusions are in general pretty accurate. Which is fairly impressive for spending only 3wks there.

Re: Beijing is Silicon Valley's only true competitor

#47

Post by igravious »

Interesting article but I feel it's light on actual hard data comparisons.

One fact is wrong though.

> Startups can achieve massive scale quickly, because the domestic market is 1.3 billion people, which is four times the U.S. or European population.

I don't know what definition of Europe (Western maybe?) gives you 300 million people. Demographically Wikipedia says Europe had 70 million people in 210 so presumably it's over 3/4 billion now.

I feel like people don't appreciate that Eastern Europe / Russia is Europe too for a lot of definitions of Europe. The E.U. includes a lot of Eastern European countries and Balkan states and Slavic states but not all. Ukraine and Russia _are_ European in many respects, be it ballet, opera, classical music, theatre, cinema, religion, architecture, you name it. Arguably modern Turkey is the least European _culturally_ because of the influence of Islam and Arab culture but geographically Istambul is closer to Rome than London is and when the Western Roman Empire fell the seat of power shifted to Constantinople and continued on for another, I don't know, more than _500_ years anyway.

Wikipedia say Europe had 300 million people in 1916, midway during the First World War (sorry world!), exactly one century ago.

side note: I have to chuckle to myself when some point out that air pollution in China will be a limiting factor. It didn't stop the industrial revolution in the UK or US so why should it stop China? And it wasn't _that_ long ago that air pollution was a real problem for London and LA, for instance. Judging by history air pollution will be a thing of the past within one generation (25/30 years) in China. You can quote me on that.

Re: Beijing is Silicon Valley's only true competitor

#48

Post by mapt »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #7

Spend 3 weeks in China, and maybe it is clear that it is, but spend 8 years in China, and it is overwhelming clear that it is not. > 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%…

I am not a trans-Pacific entrepreneur, so take this with a grain of salt.

From what I can tell, China's most fundamental problem is that it's taken an inherently protectionist stance on large businesses and investment, one which is completely incompatible with the sort of business done in Silicon Valley, which requires heavy international cooperation, recruiting, business mobility, and fluid investment, as well as the opportunity for frequent, unpunished failure without consequent shunning.

As it was explained to me... If you want to do business in China and you're not a citizen, you damn-well need to find one to start a Chinese business which can transact with you formally. If you want to scale your business and you don't have a midlevel member of the Communist Party running your HR department, you damn-well need to find one who can drink baijiu with the right people. If you want to scale your business to large enterprise levels and you don't have enough bribes in the right pockets to be part of the Chinese economic planning process, you damn-well need to get there; You might not be the first to do so, even if you try.

Don't do these things, and the rug will be yanked out from under you every which way possible, from licenses to immigration to financing to every sort of red tape. The Chinese Communist Party may have liberalized its way into a functioning domestic economy, but it's not willing to take its central planning thumb off the scale or permit full capitalist investment without political influence. The consequences of this mentality extend beyond tolerable levels - if the central plan is that this new startup BaoJao is the greatest thing ever, why would they permit your competitor to try and defeat it? The default stance is doubt about you and your enterprise, particularly if you represent foreign involvement.

One of the enduring differences between Silicon Valley and the rest of US capitalism is the lack of noncompetes, which is a step forward relative to the rest of the country for thriving competitive enterprise, but China is not two steps back, it's fifty steps back.

Re: Beijing is Silicon Valley's only true competitor

#49

Post by igravious »

turingbook wrote: post #22

Native Beijing guy here. I'd like to answer any question about the city or the startup ecosystem.

Is Beijing the biggest tech hub in China? Silicon Valley is really a long corridor of tech between two cities, SF and San Jose. Is there something similar in China? Would you say that China has multiple tech hot spots or is Beijing it? Is Beijing more like New York in this respect? Do you see what I'm driving at?
Post reply on HN