This was a week when I started to mix more with other entrepreneurs, interviewed candidates and experienced the Gobi desert attempting to suffocate Beijng in a blanket of fine sand. The Chinese word for entrepreneur is???(qi ye jia), the first two words are the same as business, but interestingly with the addition of the word 'jia' or 'home' it becomes a pronoun for all those seeking to prove that they have the next hot idea – a linguistic clue perhaps that all Chinese have business on their mind and in their homes. On Wednesday I went to the China Entepreneurs Forum at which 90 plus hopefuls listened to Fritz Demopoulos and NickYang speak.The mix of people in the room interested me, an equal number of local Chinese, expatriates and those who should profit the most, the returning Chinese. "This forum would not have been possible even two years ago," said the founder Eric Smidth, "because the market in China has changed so rapidly to embrace entrepreneurship." Now as individual cities and even city districts compete to get new companies to register with their commercial department, the costs and improving transparency have made entrepreneurship viable. In Chaoyang district the EASWEST WOFE will cost US$4,000 and take some 3 months to process. Still a far cry from the 7 day and US$600 fees ofSingapore or near instant registration in Hong Kong, but for entrepreneurs, the footsoldiers of a country's economic army, it is possible to enter the fray. One of the comments that Nick made was that success = effort/expectation and I found this a useful way to evaluate my first 3 months in Beijing. To date I have rented an office, set up an IT network, undertaken two client projects, started the translation of the website to Chinese, attended multiple networking events and interviewed 8 candidates. I feel that my successes have been few for the efforts. Above all, I haven’t won a client in China yet – and this is the acid test of my entpreneurial vision. In low moments I counsel myself to re-evaluate my expectations – but have still institigated the ‘no client – no couch’ policy which keeps me at the desk or in my bed, with nothing soft inbetween. The difficulty with being an entrepreneur is that by definition, one has to start things and believe that they will be a success. Another word from Nick rang true "If you follow the pack, you are not an entrepreneur. If you run counter to popular opinion and are right you are a visionary. If you are proven wrong then you are an idiot." Hoping to be proven right in my expectations after reading the candidate questionnaires Nicole had sent out, I engaged in the time intensive task of interviewing this week. I found the quality of English staggering - both in the written replies to my 4 page questionnaire, but also in the articulation of concepts and expression of a desire to be in a company where the candidate can learn and grow. Each and every person, graduating or already in work, expressed a need to work in a company that would teach them new skills, and those who wanted to leave present employers would do so not only for the money, which the cynic in me didn't believe entirely, but because they felt they were not growing. 26 year olds who had studied Master's degrees in the UK were asking for RMB5-6,000 (US$625-750) The decision that I have to take now is which is the right person to hire first, a decision between a Beijing university graduate from Guandong who studied in Leeds or a Beijing women who studied a Masters in Surrey. In amongst the candidates were some expatriates, often with little Mandarin, expectating salaries three times that of Chinese graduates – I couldn’t help but see the parallels with the message Hu Jintao was telling the American press while in Seattle, it is not that the Western economies are uncompetitive in absolute terms, they are just uncompetitive in relative terms to the Chinese costs and hunger for development.
To see how a young Chinese business is developing, and with a view to some Internet tools that we need, I went to visit my friend Guosheng Qi and his company, Gridsum. A group of graduates from Tsinghua University under the considered guidance of Qi, they are offering Internet consulting, search engine optimisation and internet development. I am not an expert in development, but in the tidy office on the 6th floor of a grey, but buzzing, building I think I saw the engines of China’s present growth. Qi showed me how they could use an English language crawler to download an entire site and extract key text, while anonymously sitting in Haidian district in north east Beijing. Apparently English language Internet searching yields 3 times the content that Chinese language searches do, because English is more precise, with Chinese sentences having potentially several meanings, depending upon context. Ironically the complexity of English makes it compelling and essential for the Chinese to learn for communication, commerce and even as the source code behind their internet.
The source of the blanket of sand over Beijing this week was Inner Mongolia, one of 11 such storms to hit China this year. On Sunday alone, the big winds from the northern province brought 10 tons of sand per square kilometre, a small fraction from the 1.74m square kilometres of desertified land in the country, accounting for 18% of China’s land area. At Jian Wai SOHO, painstakingly architected in fabulously impractical white, an army of cleaners was dispatched to sweep and scrub, and I saw one woman tasked with uncovering the hundreds of white marble pebbles that lie at the base of the each tree within the SOHO plantation, armed with a washing up brush. It is a serious issue for China that the capital city is essentially being encroached upon by a large and irrestible desert. There are some 838 days left to the Olympics, and the herculean task of holding back nature to allow preparations must surely be an opportunity for an entrepreneur with vision, assuming that with all this sand in the air, they can see clearly. NOTES Currently running travel site
Qunar.Com, formerly CEO of
Shawei.Com, a sports internet company. After securing investment from Intel, Softbank and IDG, Shawei was profitably acquired by
Tom.com. Founder of Nasdaq-listed mobile content portal
Kongzhong.com started with US$500,000 in capital raised from selling their Internet portal,
ChinaRen, to
SOHO Attributed to an American academic Sloan School Taxi drivers in Beijing earn RMB3000 per month. Second from the left See their new logo as work in progress – an indication of the emphasis being put on marketing Source:
China Daily 21 April 2006 page 3
To see how a young Chinese business is developing, and with a view to some Internet tools that we need, I went to visit my friend Guosheng Qi and his company, Gridsum. A group of graduates from Tsinghua University under the considered guidance of Qi, they are offering Internet consulting, search engine optimisation and internet development. I am not an expert in development, but in the tidy office on the 6th floor of a grey, but buzzing, building I think I saw the engines of China’s present growth. Qi showed me how they could use an English language crawler to download an entire site and extract key text, while anonymously sitting in Haidian district in north east Beijing. Apparently English language Internet searching yields 3 times the content that Chinese language searches do, because English is more precise, with Chinese sentences having potentially several meanings, depending upon context. Ironically the complexity of English makes it compelling and essential for the Chinese to learn for communication, commerce and even as the source code behind their internet. 
The source of the blanket of sand over Beijing this week was Inner Mongolia, one of 11 such storms to hit China this year. On Sunday alone, the big winds from the northern province brought 10 tons of sand per square kilometre, a small fraction from the 1.74m square kilometres of desertified land in the country, accounting for 18% of China’s land area. At Jian Wai SOHO, painstakingly architected in fabulously impractical white, an army of cleaners was dispatched to sweep and scrub, and I saw one woman tasked with uncovering the hundreds of white marble pebbles that lie at the base of the each tree within the SOHO plantation, armed with a washing up brush. It is a serious issue for China that the capital city is essentially being encroached upon by a large and irrestible desert. There are some 838 days left to the Olympics, and the herculean task of holding back nature to allow preparations must surely be an opportunity for an entrepreneur with vision, assuming that with all this sand in the air, they can see clearly. NOTES Currently running travel site Qunar.Com, formerly CEO of Shawei.Com, a sports internet company. After securing investment from Intel, Softbank and IDG, Shawei was profitably acquired by Tom.com. Founder of Nasdaq-listed mobile content portal Kongzhong.com started with US$500,000 in capital raised from selling their Internet portal, ChinaRen, to SOHO Attributed to an American academic Sloan School Taxi drivers in Beijing earn RMB3000 per month. Second from the left See their new logo as work in progress – an indication of the emphasis being put on marketing Source: China Daily 21 April 2006 page 3