sea turtle and local entrepreneur at HYSTA

Sea turtle in China refers to oversea Chinese return China after receiving degrees or working experience outside of China. It carries sort of very positive meaning. Usually sea turtle entrepreneur enjoy much higher reputation than local entrepreneur, I guess, due to some tactics backed by government policy to attract oversea Chinese to return home. To my knowledge, if we just look at Chinese companies on NASDAQ, over 90% of them are founded by sea turtles. There are many reasons to explain this. This absolutely doesn't mean there are no successful local entrepreneur. Actually, in the current China internet industry, several most successful entrepreneur are from local, Hongyi Zhou, Lei Ding and Jack Ma. They are very successful because they pay their full attention on local market, which is clearly restated by Lei Ding at HYSTA 2007. Netease doesn't go global because he believes Chinese market is big enough with 1.3 billion people. He really believes Chinese market has great potential.

It's also interesting to observe that Lei Ding and Wei Guo spoke Chinese during conference. Actually when I ran into Jerry Yang in the VIP room, I found his Chinese is very good. He was having picture with Zhi Tan. Both of them are around 40. However, both of them have half of hair white.

SouFun CEO Vincent T. Mo

At HYSTA, I had a brief chat with Vincent, CEO of SouFun. SouFun grows with the Chinese real estate market. It expects to IPO soon. It currently has 1200 employees, which is a really big number for me. If I'm not wrong, I remember that before Google went IPO, it had only a little over 2000 employees.
However, I felt the IPO process for SouFun is not smooth now.

Zhi Tan President of Focus Media

As the first speaker at HYSTA 2007, Zhi Tan is very different from the rest of entrepreneurs at the conference. He invested 2 million dollars in a very small elevator advertisement poster company and acquired the total 8 companies in that industry in the following one year, then his company was acquired by Focus Media fro over 100 million dollars in stock. When the deal was closed after 6 months, the deal went up to over 500 million dollars due to stock appreciation. This is just an amazing story. Like Zhi Tan repeated said, "no technology, great return in one year", which was jealously joked by Wei Guo, CEO of Digital China, that "if every business is like Zhi Tan's, the business world would be great."

I think there are many business opportunities similar in every industry in China. Almost for 90% industries in China, the market is highly fragmented. The management doesn't have vision, experience, and knowledge to run a large business. The operation is not efficient. There are a lot of consolidation business opportunities. The franchise business start becoming really popular in China in the last few years. I'm not sure how it goes.

I overheard Zhi Tan's white hair is from when he studies PhD at Boston. It seems getting a PhD degree is way harder than growing 2 millions dollars to 500 millions dollars in 18 months.

Yadong Liu, CEO of Primeton

Yadong Liu, co-founder, former Executive VP and COO of AsiaInfo(NASDAQ:ASIA), is now CEO of Primeton, which is a middleware software provider. I have to admit I haven't heard them before although I started using WebSphere in 2001 and have been working on Application Server for over five years. Yadong told me they are doing very well in the Chinese finance and telecom industry. He believes they are very good at connecting the software components using XML, which is strongly demanded by those two industries. He mentioned that Oracle Application Server doesn't have any market in China and they are likely an acquisition target from IBM. The price range would be around 20 million dollars.

a dinner talk with Mino CEO Jing Liu

Before HYSTA 2007 I heard this year's dinner would be buffet, which disappointed me since the dinner last year was so impressive. But I'm wrong. This year's dinner is no worse than last year. Since it's buffet, I was able to walk around during dinner to find interesting people to talk. Then I sat beside Jing Liu, CEO of Mino.
Jing has been a serial entrepreneur and Mino is the 4th company he founded. The first three were not very successful. But I saw Jing is well respected in the community and people believe Mino will be mostly likely a hit. When Jing was introduced to me, I asked, "what happened for your previous startup?". Jing said, "I failed three times." This is Silicon Vally. Failure is an award.
Simply say, Mino is "Skype on Mobile phones". I asked Jing, "VOIP now is like commodity. What makes you different to compete with Skype or GTalk on the phone?". Jing said, "we are looking at Enterprise market.", which makes sense. Enterprise customer always have different requirement from consumers. Jing also joked that the difficulty of being an entrepreneur without a girl friend. "No girl dates me because I have to travel a lot. It's better just marry before starting a company or marry after selling your company. ":)

Talk with Qi Lu on Yahoo Search Strategy at HYSTA

In previous post, I said Google and Yahoo have different strategy based on the analysis of their acquisition. Yahoo acquired many media companies like flickr, bix etc while Google acquisition is focused on ad platform(doubleclick), content platform technologies (like jotspot and sketchup) except YouTube.
I talked to Qi Lu , who heads the Yahoo Search at HYSTA 2007 Annual Conference. I discussed with him the above observation and asked,

me: "if Yahoo develops into the online media monopoly provider and blocks Google to crawl Yahoo content, what does Google search/index?".
He answered, "we are blocking them now", which surprised me;

I asked, "from the acquisition observation, Google is really focused on search, which limits itself into search ads, while Yahoo bought so many content providers, which focuses itself on banner ads. It looks for me that search ads are more effective measured by Cost Per Click than banner ads measured by Cost Per Impression. How do you think about it?"
Qi responded, "Search ads is over. You can see it from why Google bought DoubleClick".

I asked, "isn't it just a defensive strategy?"
Qi, "of course not".

I'm not even close to internet advertisement expert so that I don't have any judgement on this. But my impression is internet advertisement is till at the very early stage because I am still seeing there are more and more innovative internet advertisement technology providers. Baynote, for example, which is founded by former HYSTA president. I think internet advertisement technologies are still infant comparing with other computer technologies like robot.

I also talked to the other Yahoo Search up management person, who made the comment that Yahoo Panama project might not meet the expectation.

HYSTA 2007 rocks Silicon Valley

Serious. I felt it. HYSTA 2007 rocked Silicon Valley. No kidding.
I was driving at 80 miles on 101 south toward Santa Clara. At the Mountain View exit, a red sexy mercedes-benz convertible passed me like crazy. I wondered what's the hurry. I'm a crazy guy too so I followed it. Well, we ended up parking side by side at the Santa Clara Convention Center, where the HYSTA 2007 was being held. But since I made a wrong turn, I didn't see the driver. Who are you? I'm very curious to know. Your licence plate is XXXXXXX. :)

Seriously, the conference room was very crowded. HYSTA 2007 is kindly enough to issue a press pass so that I had chances to talk to many speakers. I have so many things to write here that I will post a blog for each person I talked to. Here is a quick list: Qi Lu, Jing Liu from Mino, Robert I. Chen from RAE Systems, Wilson Liu from e-China Alliances, Yadong Liu from Primeton, and Vincent T. Mo from SouFun. There are also other interesting company CEOs whom I didn't have much time to talk to. But I will profile their companies and some stories I overheard later too.

Please check back!

I'm convinced by Al Gore today!

What a day! A great day! This is the greatest event in the Silicon Valley every year. This is the Annual HYSTA conference.

Of course, today's event is all about Al Gore. He announced that "he will go for 2008 presidential election". Actually, John Doerr said that. John gave a speech in 2006 HYSTA conference, which is not impressive enough to convince me that global warming is really a problem now. I did some research on global warming back in school and took a few classes on global warming causes and effects, policies, sustainable development, and etc. I know there are many controversial research results on this aspect. Researchers only observe there are strong correlation between volume of CO2 emission and global warming, but there is no sound cause/effect theory. The famous butterfly effect chaos theory scare me and a lot of researchers into agnosticists. But today, Al Gore convinced me that global warming actually is true, although he conveniently didn't mention any theory from the other side. Actually earth is a self-balancing system. For any force increasing temperature, there are other forces that will try to decrease it. More CO2 will increase vegetation, which will absorb CO2. But more vegetation will cause other effects like red tide for fishes, which will cause other things. Did I tell you I'm agnosticist?
But today Al Gore convinced me. I think I should have listened to John last year and picked up my old textbook to do something, clean energy, sustainable development, going back to World Bank, call friend Jin Yi or Feng asking them if I can help them on their clean energy ventures. :)

notes from zero2ipo conference

I recently went Zero2IPO Silicon Valley Capital Forum. It's my first time attending their event. Zero2IPO is a professional conference organizer, which means it makes money from organizing conference and selling market reports. Here are my observations:
Venture capital industry is a small circle. There were 500 attendees in this conference. Most people know each other quite well. I guess this conference is the place for them to catch up with each other. One lawyer sitting beside me told me that if it's funny that he haven't seen his neighbor for a long time since both of them travel a lot, but they met at this conference;
Since it's a "zero2ipo" conference, from my personal sample, 1/3 are lawyers, 1/3 are M&A bankers, 1/5 are enterpreneur, 1/5 are venture capitalists. 1/10 are speakers; 1/10 are journalists;
One takeaway from the panelist talk is that it's said that Chinese entrepreneur is mostly financial driven comparing with American entrepreneur. I guess VCs will like that. Am I right?