Shanghai is practically topped-out already, there's a huge amount of VC funding being spent and it's quite hard to emigrate there. Though I don't think it's about US policy so much as just good success at reproducing the Hong Kong business environment.
Hi, Just want to give a different perspective here.
It's definitely hard (japan was as well till recently)
It's possible to get it on the right track.
Tech jobs (especially depending on the province) provide incentives for a better path to something like this.
I'm directly involved with the fuzhou government deal.
My cofounder chris is quoted in the article.
We are actually getting incentives and visas for foreign talent to move to southern china.
We have a proper incorporation in china and everything setup.
As a serial entrepreneur, I consider China to be awesome right now. Not only is cash easier than ever to get (perfect storm of low domestic interest rates, government outbound forex controls, stock market scares, private sector domestic financial institution mismanagement and bankruptcies, and the widely recognized end of the era of easy real estate sector profits: the previous go-to for parking domestic assets), but overheads are low and the country has the world's most efficient supply-chain[0] (~2-3 days for anything, 24x7x365) for almost any electronics or components (perfect for hardware startups), a central location in Asia and a huge domestic market. On the flip side, international internet can be a drag (slow) and a stable visa situation, while achievable, affordable and essentially permanently secure (unlike most western countries), takes a few months to settle.
At my current startup[1] we are currently locking down a rental agreement on an office and may use the rest of the space (significant) to re-start a local makerspace concept that failed to get enough fiscal traction last year.[2] If anyone out there is working on a hardware project and looking for a low-cost base of operations, we can give you a home. In time I would love to transition to an incubator.
Previously I worked in the US (establishing the first foreign office of a London startup), for the US remotely (new SF-based startup), in the UK, China and Australia. I feel the US has a great ecosystem for investment but this is largely outweighed by hassles on visas, litigation, cost and zero life-stability for non green card holders with families. The UK is simply expensive (also with visa hassles) and other than fintech or UK university-related research spinoffs seems sub-optimal. Australia is very strong on research but overheads, lack of VC and a small and widely dispersed domestic market mean that commercialization remains a bigger hurdle than it needs to be.
HK is not a tech startup place, programmers outside of banking and finance get paid very poorly compared to Shenzhen. I lived in Beijing for 9 years and found that, besides the air pollution, everything was definitely workable. I only left because when my wife and I were expecting a baby. Beijing has gotten better recently, though still too bad for the baby, while Shenzhen has always been better and comparable to Shenzhen.
China has plenty of its own talent and has been attracting back those who went overseas. While I agree that they will need to attract worldwide talent in the long run to fully compete with the USA, they are not in a bad place ATM.
I live in Shanghai right now and the successful startups that are BASED here are all chinese clones of popular US companies, like Youku.com(you tube), baidu.com (google), taobao.com(Ebay/amazon), QQ (social networking) etc. Some cool startups who work here but have offices in other countries are Indochino.com (Custom Made high quality mens wear), Chinese learning companies, etc.
There is also a pretty decent tech scene here with some good meetups (we just had a barcamp, ruby conf and Geeks on a Plane)
Living is inexpensive, you could live for about 250-500 USD fairly easily if you enjoy the local food and drink the $.5 Tsingtao beer.
The issue with Shanghai is it seems pretty tough to bring money in and out if you are focusing on Chinese Customers though and can be expensive to get work visas, offices (the gov makes foreigners get expensive offices), good workers. The labour can be cheap, but like everywhere you get what you pay for.
I am moving back to Vancouver, BC next month where there is also an epic startup culture growing, even with some past hiccups. But if it wasn't for the company I am with right now, I would be staying here and may still come back to start something in the next few months. I do recommend Shanghai for a good startup city for sure.
China has startups, they are definitely many high in quality, but they aren’t really world class in terms of talent used (almost completely Chinese) and markets targeted (ditto). China will have trouble getting its tech companies to compete abroad when they have closed off their own market so much. Likewise, until China embraces immigration rather than emigration, talent is unlikely to flock to China in any significant numbers.
Sure, but wages are not that low anymore (at least for senior talent) while the real estate bubble can mean it costs more to buy a place than in Palo Alto. This is not even getting to education costs if you don’t have hukou. China isn’t that cheap.
Access to VC is nice, but Chinese VCs ar emote conservative than American ones, the business plans that get funded are going to be very different anyways.
I lived in Shanghai and worked at a startup for a year after college. The startup expat and startup local communities are surprisingly developed.
There are a lot of co-working spaces, hacker spaces, and start up events. For anyone interested in China, you can live in Shanghai without speaking Mandarin.
Western training in programing, design and product is highly valued. Salary offerings are lower by a factor of 10. Regardless, its easy to live and identify alternative income sources.
I'd love to answer any questions for people interested in the Chinese startup space.
There are other factors at play. For one, I have a Chinese wife who has elderly parents (not in Shanghai), for now they fare well, but we might need to look after them sooner or later. Another factor is that I have a few years contract in a startup I care much about, sure we could do remote, but this would be a blow to them. I will try to solve these and see if we can move to Taiwan or somewhere else relatively close by.
China is the next big empire and money is starting to flow more and more into China. In US, there is a credit crunch and in China, there is a dearth of companies to fund. Clearly, it's easier to fix the latter. I see China eclipsing US entrepreneurship scene in less than 10 years.
To provide more of a direct answer, I think that Shenzhen has really great long-term prospects as a tech/innovation hub. Very large number of investors, existing and large tech/innovation/industry cluster (consumer electronics), and long-term government incentives. You can already start to see the momentum building. I've seen major changes since first doing business there (Feb 2012) and even over the past ~2years that I've lived there.
However, the prospects of moving there are not significantly better than the US. China is opening up new classes of visas and making certain business licenses more accessible, but my general impression from being in the ecosystem and talking with locals and foreigners is that it's difficult to get a sustainable business off the ground. The immigration situation (if that is a goal) is bleak.
It makes all the difference. Major player moving away from America to China such as Peter Thiel or any other big well known VC's is significant because it suggests that Chinese market conditions are more favorable or a sizable opportunity and favorable living conditions are present in China to convince high net worth individuals to shift their life style and culture completely.
It's an entirely different situation for those who are familiar with Chinese culture and speak the language going back to China to do business. It's another for non-Chinese individuals of high net-worth to uproot their American life for a foreign one.
If some remote time in the future, when Trump's offsprings send their offspring to Beijing University instead of Harvard, then we would know the tide has turned-this new China offers more or less the same benefits and comfort America provides to it's elite.
Obviously, it's a one way street right now, in our direction.
Don't know man. Lived in China for years and people that made it to the US, tended to stay there. You just have to look at the lines that form in Shanghai in West Nanjing Rd for student/tourist visas. Of course there is a lot of people that also return, but the people I knew, just went into the banking sector and ended up depending on family connections more than education itself.
As for the cream of the crop, I can tell you I saw a couple of guys that were really outstanding in the startup scene, and one was from the Max Planck institute in Germany and the other was from a Chinese university (and not precisely Tsinghua, Fudan or Jiao Tong).
This is the most incredible thing about China. The numbers are very clear: there are about 10_000 companies are being formed each day in China [1]. The government is actually investing heavily in these new firms and they receive all kind of economic, political and social support. Meanwhile in the US and much of the West new firm formation continues to plummet [2] and labor fluidity has collapsed leading to stuck wages [3].
You can see by the comments in this thread how much this state of affairs frightens people and of course all positive news out of China must be propaganda. It's unfortunate but all signs indicate this will likely continue until it's too late and Silicon Valley finds itself on the outside looking in.
Great slides! China is such an interesting opportunity because of how quickly the landscape is shifting there. The growth rates are astronomical. I definitely feel that startups in Silicon Valley, and the west in general, are too narrow-minded. We should be thinking about how we can build global companies, not companies just for our immediate neighbors.
I have been working in Shanghai for about six and a half years now and don't think I would live anywhere else in China except maybe Hong Kong. Shanghai has a very vibrant international community with a fairly comfortable standard of living ( minus the occasional bad pollution ). There is not a significant amount of xenophobia in the first tier cities though outside of these you are generally looked at as an oddity if you count that. You will never be chinese though so some doors will always be closed to you.
It is difficult to find a job without being here but on the ground there are opportunities. If you are not here companies see that as a liability. Of foreigners abroad we have hired to work in China there is about a 50% washout rate in the first year. Being here is seen as being a more reliable hire.
Regarding visa a good company will provide a z visa for you. Anyone offering less isn't a good company. Pay is less then the states generally but cost of living is lower. As in the rest of the world there is high demand for good software developers. Check smartshanghai.com, Shanghaiexpat.com, creativehunt.com, and craigslist Shanghai for more expat focused jobs. If you are interested in fintech we are hiring through hr@itr.cn.
Overall the business China is more predatory then the states. More weight is often put on relationships then talent. Coming from the west it takes a few years to really understand this culture.
The property market in China is extremely manipulated, so you could be asked to pay SF rates in Beijing or Shanghai for space that isn't obviously worth it. And if you want to go after the international market, you can't really do that here: startups focusing on China work great, startups focusing on the rest of the world fail compared to SF given a huge lack of perspective that comes with a closed internet (e.g. what the heck is Facebook? Is that like WeChat?).
Talent...if you can find it, great! But the discount is like 70%, not 50%, that 40K USD/Year (20k RMB/month) dev is going to be junior/not that experienced in a city like Beijing.
I haven't run into these young entrepreneurs yet, though I can totally believe they exist! However, in the bigger companies, there is still deference to authority, lots of face exercises, pretension blogs, and so on. Things are totally moving here, but they are only posed to take over China; they aren't in competition with the valley.
It doesn't make a difference whether or not Peter Thiel would want to move to China or not. There are tons of VCs in China and also government funding. It also has an economy that can sustain itself.
For sure there are many Chinese moving to SV, but certainly less willing to do so than compared with a decades ago, and more common that people already in SV moves back. It doesn't mean immigration to US would be less though, when the best people don't want to come, there will still be tons of other people that do.
As an American who up and moved to China on a whim and more recently started a tech company split between Boston and Shanghai, I can only greet this news with jubilation. Life here over the last two years has become simply impossible. Good luck to you China.
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