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YC China and Qi Lu

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: YC China and Qi Lu

#51

Post by fsloth »

ulfw wrote: post #44

I find it funny how YC is focusing only on places where the majority of the world won’t or can’t easily work (US visa policy is atrocious and getting worse every year + raising xenophobia in recent times) and China isn’t an easy country to navigate if you don’t speak Mandarin, let alone succeed in as a foreigner (for a variety of reasons). Asia and Europe are big places as are Canada and Australia. Time to think broa…

1. It's not about empowering everyone on the planet, it's about creating companies which become billion dollar unicorns

2. The probability of Unicornism is directly related to the size of the market you can access. US is the biggest single market on the planet.

3. Accessibility of markets: While EU is the second largest single market [0] US companies have entered european markets just fine. On the other hand, to operate in china, it's best to be a chinese company. Hence, to fund growth on a global scale going native in china is an obvious move.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_countries...

Re: YC China and Qi Lu

#52

Post by shard972 »

jumelles wrote: post #45
gdsdfe wrote: post #35

Hahaha people talking about ethics are silly ... This is business in a market, potentially, at least 3x bigger than the current biggest market! Are you nuts? Everybody's gonna do business in China! Everybody! In some form or shape.

Caring about human rights is silly?

If you want to make it in China then yea, you probably shouldn't be too hung up on human rights. It's not some universal concept that has applied throughout the world for our existence so it's quite rude to pretend like China has to bow to these systems of human rights we developed without china's input.

Re: YC China and Qi Lu

#53

Post by dragonwriter »

jumelles wrote: post #45
gdsdfe wrote: post #35

Hahaha people talking about ethics are silly ... This is business in a market, potentially, at least 3x bigger than the current biggest market! Are you nuts? Everybody's gonna do business in China! Everybody! In some form or shape.

Caring about human rights is silly?

Caring about human rights is not silly.

Expecting capitalists (the economic class, not the ideological faction) to put human rights over returns on capital is, if not silly, at least naively optimistic.

Re: YC China and Qi Lu

#54

Post by fsloth »

jumelles wrote: post #30
ardy42 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I worry about what sort of concessions tech companies have made and will make to gain access to the Chinese market. Especially since the PRC government is getting much more aggressive in forcing Western companies to kowtow to their political stances even in their operations outside of China. Mercedes-Benz was forced to apologize for posting a Dalai Lama quote on Instagram [1], and a Marriott employee was fired afte…

Agreed 100%. To me it's madness that Marriott and Benz wouldn't stand up for the right to speak one's mind.

I'm pretty sure Marriott and Benz stand up firsthand to their owners and in their list of priorities access to chinese markets is more important than human rights.

Given our worship of capital I'm amazed global emancipation of slavery ever happened. But I suppose that was only because new financial markets and industrialization created lots of better opportunities for capital investment than slave labour force - hence the market for slaves dwindled.

Re: YC China and Qi Lu

#55

Post by echevil »

ulfw wrote: post #44

I find it funny how YC is focusing only on places where the majority of the world won’t or can’t easily work (US visa policy is atrocious and getting worse every year + raising xenophobia in recent times) and China isn’t an easy country to navigate if you don’t speak Mandarin, let alone succeed in as a foreigner (for a variety of reasons). Asia and Europe are big places as are Canada and Australia. Time to think broa…

It’s not hard to understand if you just take a look at stats in the past few years on where recent startups are founded, and where VC money goes.

Language barrier is not an issue for YC - they can just hire mandarin speakers like Lu Qi. I’m sure YC China would get mostly Chinese employees.

Re: YC China and Qi Lu

#56

Post by jumelles »

shard972 wrote: post #48
jumelles wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why should minor issues like government "stealing knowledge" (whatever that is) be some big issue? Because that's not at all the only issue; the ruling party actively suppresses dissent, stifles speech, and allows little to no disagreement. Minorities and dissenters are locked away with no trial. Censorship is rampant. There's a lot more to worry about than just IP theft or corporate espionage.

Ok even if i don't like those actions a startup shouldn't worry about those issues. I might have political views but I don't bring them to work. If something is so bad then that's for the governments to sort out, we are just here to do our best to make profitable companies.

Large companies have vastly more influence on governments than regular people. It's unethical to just turn a blind eye to "those actions." Companies have leverage and should use it.

Are you seriously willing to work for anyone, their politics and actions be damned? Have you heard about the concept of the "Good German"?

Re: YC China and Qi Lu

#57

Post by est »

jumelles wrote: post #32
toomuchtodo wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Than you be pragmatic and make concessions.

We should never, ever make concessions when it comes to human rights.

Elon Musk needs to hear that. Stop doing business with Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund!

Re: YC China and Qi Lu

#58

Post by natch »

[deleted] wrote: post #41
telltruth wrote: post #24

Sam, this exec BS doesn't look good on you. If Qi Lu is the "one of the most impressive technologiest" you have known then I would say you can be impressed pretty easily. Qi Lu is the guy who couldn't do a squat with Yahoo so he jumped ship to Microsoft. His main achievement there was to rename their product to "Bing". Finally not getting anywhere for almost a decade, he finally got pushed out and so he jumped on the…

[deleted]

Bunnie Huang would be awesome. I'm talking about the role, though. Not necessarily the titles. (Edit: That's not a diss... it's just my ignorance. I mean as far as I know Bunnie would be great for the titles too, but I just can't defend that position because I don't know enough about that level of position). I suspect the titles were just Qi Lu's ask, not a requirement for the position(s).

Admittedly Bunnie is mostly a hardware guy but I think he would also have connections and sensibilities in software and China is pretty big on hardware too.

Re: YC China and Qi Lu

#59

Post by IntelMiner »

shard972 wrote: post #48
jumelles wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why should minor issues like government "stealing knowledge" (whatever that is) be some big issue? Because that's not at all the only issue; the ruling party actively suppresses dissent, stifles speech, and allows little to no disagreement. Minorities and dissenters are locked away with no trial. Censorship is rampant. There's a lot more to worry about than just IP theft or corporate espionage.

Ok even if i don't like those actions a startup shouldn't worry about those issues. I might have political views but I don't bring them to work. If something is so bad then that's for the governments to sort out, we are just here to do our best to make profitable companies.

Companies should, and do, take an active role in the world around them (both positively and negatively)

Re: YC China and Qi Lu

#60

Post by echevil »

varsitywork wrote: post #50
shard972 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lord help us if the Chinese government somehow gets its hands on a superior weapons tech, or smarter AI. Why wouldn't they get their hands on that? With companies like HPE existing as now defacto chinese companies I just don't see how anyone can see this as a if rather than a when. > We're literally handing the Chinese government some of the Western world's greatest knowledge and inventions. Isn't this great though…

> Why wouldn't they get their hands on that? They wouldn't because most of the western democratic countries are now actively preventing China from stealing their technologies. US with the empowered CFIUS, with the latest defense bill. Germany just prevented 2 key companies from being taken over by China. France drafted anti-takeover measures (aimed at China) amid foreign investment boom. EU is actively seeking to put…

Lol, what makes you think they can’t invent their own
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