Diary of a Chinese Startup Part 1 of 4        ( 中文 )

All 16 employees of travel meta-search site Go10000.com are crammed cheek by jowl into a 900-square-foot room on the tenth floor of R&DPlaza, a startup farm just off TsinghuaUniversity’s campus in northwestern Beijing.

The building, owned by TsinghuaSciencePark, is filled with fledgling businesses: chip design outfits, an online payment company, and a few dozen software and wireless plays; their rent all subsidized by the Tsinghua-affiliated incubator.

Attrition rates are high: all of Go10000’s office furniture was picked up on the cheap from a neighboring tech startup that folded.

On a recent Thursday morning, Go10000 President George Cao huddled with his R&D team—five skinny Chinese lads, all in their 20s—in front of a diagram-covered white board just inside the door. On the floor behind the board, a half-dozen motley, self-assembled servers crawl the Chinese web for the best hotel and air ticket prices.

In tightly packed rooms up and down the hall, similar scenes are played out: it’s the Beijing equivalent of the garages of Palo Alto and Sunnyvale, California.

But Room A1012 in TsinghuaR&DPlaza is a lucky garage: former tenant Legend Silicon, which designs chips for wireless digital television broadcast and set-top boxes, picked up $11 million in venture funding earlier this year and moved to upscale digs nearby.

George Cao has more modest goals, at least for now. Go10000, which he founded in October of last year and which launched this past August, only needs $1 million to $2 million, according to Mr. Cao. He’s been talking to quite a few VCs.

“Conversations with potential investors are moving along, but so far there’ve been no solid commitments,” said Mr. Cao.

Readjusting to Home

His own commitment to Go10000’s success in China, however, is rock solid. He gave up a comfortable life in the San Francisco Bay Area to return to China, bringing his wife Sally, also originally from China, and his United States-born children, 6-year-old Nicholas and 5-year-old Emily.

In many ways, the 37-year-old Mr. Cao is the quintessential Chinese new economy entrepreneur. Like many of his peers, the native of Xi’an is a “sea turtle”—the word haigui is a homophone for “overseas returnee” in Mandarin—who received his graduate education in the States and worked for a number of U.S. companies before heeding the call of the China market and paddling homeward.

There’s no mistaking George Cao for a “land tortoise”—the haigui’s opposite number, the indigenously educated Chinese. His adopted American mannerisms are obvious in his bearing, his body language, and his mode of dress, let alone his perfectly idiomatic command of English.

haigui

It’s not always an advantage. Making landfall in a China caught up in the throes of fast and far-reaching change, the turtles often find themselves very much at sea. Their westernized ways can rub less cosmopolitan Chinese the wrong way and are often taken for superciliousness or arrogance.

And when they commit some faux pas in a business setting, the Chinese won’t cut them the same slack they might for other westerners.

Mr. Cao acknowledges the adjustment hasn’t been perfectly smooth for him—and even less so for his children, who initially were shunned in school for speaking to one another in English.

But on balance, his 10 years of overseas training and professional experience prepared him well for the venture he has now undertaken. He holds a master’s degree in hospitality management from CornellUniversity’s School of Hotel Administration. He has also worked for nearly eight years designing and running revenue management systems for the hospitality industry.

Paddling Faster

However, Mr. Cao quickly discovered that the Chinese technology industry can move faster than he had expected. He originally assembled his team to do research and development for Search Party, a meta-search site that launched in May in the U.S., and was planning a similar site in China.

Mr. Cao was confident his company would enjoy a first-mover edge. “Originally I thought we’d wait until the end of 2005,” he said. “It turns out we had to move a lot faster.”

He was stunned when he learned that Qunar.com, another travel meta-search site headed by Fritz Demopoulos, a successful expatriate dotcom entrepreneur, launched in June (see Kerouac Inspires a Travel Site).

Kerouac Inspires a Travel Site

Mr. Cao, who met Mr. Demopoulos and other Qunar team members at the Travel Distribution China trade show in Shanghai in August, knows that competition will be stiff.

Qunar.com’s progress has been a good yardstick for Go10000. Mr. Cao and his team were pleased to see that their “reach per million users” on Amazon’s Alexa system—a traffic metric that China’s investment community seems to take seriously—passed Qunar’s for the first time last Thursday.

But a new and potentially greater threat has taken some of the shine off Go10000’s small victory. Last week, the omnipresent Google released a teaser for its forthcoming travel search service, prompting Chinese reporters to call up Mr. Cao and press him for a response.

Google

He wasn’t too concerned, he said. So far, Google’s service is only in English, after all, and doesn’t have nearly the breadth or depth of his own system. While the marketing people were clearly concerned, he added, his R&D boys were typically cavalier, assuring him with typical Chinese geek machismo that Google’s system was “one day’s work for one guy.”

Google’s entry into the segment, the Go10000 team concluded, was a “validation of the market,” but that didn’t mean, by any stretch of the imagination, that they were free from other threats.

Next Week: The Sea Turtle’s Entrepreneurial Guidebook

Coming back to China to start a business has yielded some pleasant surprises for Mr. Cao. “Most things turned out to be easier than I had expected,” he said.

A handy booklet called “The Overseas Student’s Compass to Starting a Business” gave him advice on registering a company, renting office space, applying for cash handouts from the government, and getting a driver’s license.

Beijing, after all, has bent over backward to lure sea turtles like Mr. Cao back to their spawning grounds. But when it comes to finding talented employees, as Mr. Cao learned the hard way, there’s no easy guidebook.

Source/来源: http://www.redherring.com/Home/14337