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

51–60 of 161 posts

Re: Beijing is Silicon Valley's only true competitor

#51

Post by jasim »

sandGorgon wrote: post #45

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. T…

Valley-returned entrepreneur community doesn't mean anything in terms of innovation. App-powered logistics companies are no longer innovative; the wave was in the realization that commerce can be driven through smartphones and the internet, and that logistics can be massively improved by a combination of location-aware devices with abundant cheap labour from under-privileged population (not a value judgement). We are still a long way from doing ground-breaking scientific research. Innovative business models can only take us so far; fundamental progress has always been driven by the courage to think new thoughts, and that typically comes from the scientific community, not the business world.

Re: Beijing is Silicon Valley's only true competitor

#52

Post by seanmcdirmid »

igravious wrote: post #49
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?

Beijing is more like the DC area, but even then the comparison is flimsy. As a long time Beijing resident, I would say Shenzhen and Shanghai have more to offer. Beijing's importance is mostly driven by the government.

Re: Beijing is Silicon Valley's only true competitor

#53

Post by seanmcdirmid »

igravious wrote: post #49
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?

Beijing is more like the DC area, but even then the comparison is flimsy. As a long time Beijing resident, I would say Shenzhen and Shanghai have more to offer. Beijing's importance is mostly driven by the government.

Re: Beijing is Silicon Valley's only true competitor

#55

Post by bnegreve »

api wrote: post #8
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...

I've been told that the great firewall is actually more about protectionism than censorship. They know they can't really contain information, but they can block or degrade foreign services to favor their own. Of course this does serve a state censorship and surveillance agenda indirectly since home grown services can be more easily controlled. As much as I can't stand Trump and could never vote for him, I do think he…

Interesting point, but to be fair China is not the only one to find ways to implement protectionism. The F35 program or even Nasa contracting SpaceX could be seen as examples of the US implementing some level of protectionism.

Re: Beijing is Silicon Valley's only true competitor

#56

Post by chw9e »

api wrote: post #8
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...

I've been told that the great firewall is actually more about protectionism than censorship. They know they can't really contain information, but they can block or degrade foreign services to favor their own. Of course this does serve a state censorship and surveillance agenda indirectly since home grown services can be more easily controlled. As much as I can't stand Trump and could never vote for him, I do think he…

Chinese social media and search platforms employee loads of people to only censor information. If any of the Western companies tried to match the level of censorship required it would dramatically increase costs of operation. If Facebook or Google agreed to censor their content to the degree that Chinese companies do, I believe they could operate in China. Google and Facebook claim to be morally opposed to censoring information, but it's unclear to me if this is really the case, or if spending the money required to self-censor is the impetus behind their "moral actions." Obviously if China got rid of the censoring then the market would be much more attractive from a profit-based view.

At the same time, if Facebook entered China today I don't know how many people would convert to using it like people from other countries do. WeChat is a really powerful player and a lot of recent Facebook Messenger features are basically pulled straight from WeChat.

Same with Youtube and Vimeo - Youku and PPTV are basically Youtube, Netflix, and HBO combined in one. Chinese users can watch Netflix and HBO shows for free via Youku and PPTV's license deals with Western content producers. Plus Chinese users watch much less user-generated content online, unless it is live-streaming.

Re: Beijing is Silicon Valley's only true competitor

#57

Post by argonaut »

Hondor wrote: post #21
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%…

It's not clear if many of these things are good or bad or if they're any worse than silicon valley. I wouldn't count any of them as serious obstacles for Beijing tech success. Focused on the local market. I often run into SV companies that I'd like to use as a customer but can't because they only serve America. Either because of IP restrictions, money transfer, shipping, or they just haven't figured out other countri…

You're rebutting almost all of seanmcdirmid's arguments by essentially saying "it's not a problem because some SV startups/companies do it too." But:

1) You don't become the next Silicon Valley through cargo-cult entrepreneurship.

2) SV is successful in spite of those things, not because of it, because SV is starting from a position of strength and inertia. SV succeeds in spite of its current problems because of the massive self-reinforcing feedback loop and culture it developed decades ago when these things were not issues.

When SV was becoming a startup hub, most of what you and seanmcdirmid talked about were not problems. Housing was cheap, software patent lawsuits were not prevalent, many people were hobbyists, and so on.

Re: Beijing is Silicon Valley's only true competitor

#58

Post by uola »

iveqy wrote: post #28

Actually, if we count unicorn companies per capita, the number two after silicon valley is stockholm. http://www.forbes.com/sites/knowledgewharton/2015/11/11/how-...

Stockholm has produced a few successful startups, but it's not a competitor to SV. It's is a global competitor in telecom systems and games (though I guess many game companies are now owned by US companies). Spotify is basically the same service as when it started, just with more users. Stockholm has no real momentum in building something of their own.

Re: Beijing is Silicon Valley's only true competitor

#59

Post by chw9e »

igravious wrote: post #49
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?

Beijing is most certainly the software center of China. I work in a Shanghai startup and when we raise funding we have to go to Beijing to find the VCs. Beijing also has the best universities in China, so the talent is there. China's version of the Paypal Mafia is more like the Microsoft Mafia. Look inside of most top software companies in China and you can almost certainly find a handful of execs who worked at Microsoft around the year 2000. Microsoft's offices were (are?) in Beijing, so most of them hung around after they left to startup or join other tech companies.

Shenzhen is the center of the manufacturing world, and as the article points out they have DJI which produces 70% of the world's drones. Essentially anyone who wants to produce something cheaply and quickly will have something being produced in or around Shenzhen. If the Internet of Things really takes off into a mainstream industry then Guangzhou and Shenzhen will become a secondary hub of innovation. I just heard recently that Cal-Berkeley is establishing an engineering graduate program with Tsinghua to be hosted in Shenzhen. For a university right outside of Silicon Valley to do this is definitely saying something.

Shanghai has a decent number of finance related startups, but people in Shanghai tend to be motivated to work in large multi-national companies. Go to a startup in Shanghai and you'll find mostly people from outside of Shanghai without the best education - not saying that it's impossible for these people to create a great company, but it's a far cry from Beijing where Tsinghua and Beijing University students are being recruited to early stage startups.

Alibaba and a few other tech companies are in Hangzhou, but that city still lacks the pre-A, A series type companies that Beijing and Shanghai have.

Chengdu in the West has offices for half of the Fortune 500, but although I've heard the local government is pushing hard to attract entrepreneurs, their startup ecosystem seems to still be lacking. It's possible that if some of these employees leave their Fortune 500 employers to startup then the city could become more of a hub in the future.

Re: Beijing is Silicon Valley's only true competitor

#60

Post by chw9e »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #27
50CNT wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Investment into incubators, co-working spaces, government projects such as tech parks, building office space, streamlining of company registration and visa's, doing official visits (XiJingPing at Cheku, China's finance minister at 3W Cafe), yeah, they're pretty involved in things.

I've heard about these places from colleagues. Every local government is starting incubators, but many of them are like ghost malls. Which is funny, because they are converting a ghost mall in Beijing Zhongguancun near my office into an incubator space....

I know someone who works at one of the government backed incubators in Shanghai and he told me that a few of the companies they have are pretty promising, but there are a lot of accepted companies who don't have much of a shot. Startup solve a national problem of having too many college graduates and not enough job opportunities, so some of the incubators just soak up some of the extra graduates with the hope that maybe they could make something useful with time. Of course, with continued government support the incubators could improve and become more focused, but for now it seems at least a few are a way to provide jobs to what may otherwise be unemployed college grads.
Post reply on HN