10x10 Shanghai Recap

Last week I traveled up to Shanghai, China to speak at the 10x10 event: bringing in 10 tech “pioneers” to speak for 10 minutes each to a crowd of entrepreneurs. I put pioneers in quotes, since there were 9 pioneers plus me speaking.

It was a great way to connect with the startup scene in China. The event was sponsored by Chinaccelerator, an early stage startup accelerator that has 10 companies in a cohort right now. I met with most of the 10 companies and was very impressed; most, but not all, were doing mobile or social media startups. People in the West understand that Facebook and Twitter are banned in China, but forget that there are local (but censored) alternatives.

The home grown Chinese versions of Facebook and Twitter are booming. The most popular being Weibo, which is the “Chinese Twitter.” There are just as many Weibos as there are Tweets and most of the companies in the accelerator are trying to leverage that. (Just a side note, my Weibo account is: SteveForte.)

Some of startups consisted of only Westerners, some were only local Chinese, and some were a mix. I am mentoring one company that has a local Chinese co-founder and an American co-founder.

The sessions were great. One of the speakers said that Silicon Valley is about making money and that China is about acquiring users. While there may be 500 million internet users in China, most don’t have a credit card and only access the internet on their mobile phone or at an internet café. I find the similarity in the rush for users in China to the thinking of the startup and investment community in the USA in 1999 striking. That said, it is great to see so much action going on.

I did my talk on the “New New Startup Economics” which was about how it costs much less to start your business today than it did a few years ago and an order of magnitude less than 10 years ago.

Here are my slides: