The Facebook Effect on China's Renren

It was little more than a year ago that China’s Facebook, Renren, went public on the NYSE. Now the spotlight is on Facebook and its debut on NASDAQ.

There’s debate over Renren really is a China Facebook, like Baidu is a Chinese version of Google. Certainly there is a world of difference. Facebook has not entered China while Baidu competed with Google for several years in China.

Renren is the top social networking site in China, while Facebook is a leader is just about every market globally except China. With a market as huge as China’s and with so much market potential for games, social networking and social commerce, Renren’s turf is China.

Facebook likely faces a challenging time if it does enter China. Keep reading this post at Forbes.

Startup Asia Deals Count in 1/4 of Forbes Midas List of 100 Top 100 VCs

What a difference it makes to have China and India included in the Forbes’ Midas List 2012.

Of the top 100 venture capitalists who scored in this annual ranking, 12 who have funded startups in China are new on the 2012 list from last year. Two VCs active in India emerged on the 2012 ranks.

DCM and IDG Accel were among those firms that excelled with the expansion of China to the mix in 2012. The inclusion of India this year propelled Accel India and Mayfield Fund in the 2012 rankings.

The list reflects the importance of China and India as emerging hotspots of technology innovation, as well it should! China and India accounted for 17% of the total venture capital invested in 2011. Overall, the 2012 rankings highlight the growing range of dealmakers globally who have become active in China and India over the past five years.

What the dealmaker rankings also factor in is the fast increase among their funded Chinese startups that have gone public in the U.S. over the past five years. Prominent on the list of the VCs portfolios are recently listed Chinese companies Renren, Tudou, HiSoft Tech, Dangdang, Bitauto, VanceInfo and Qihoo 360.

China’s Facebook-plus site, Renren, appears on four of the VCs’ portfolio of deals. Other Chinese deals that repeat on the deal list are outsourcing company HiSoft Tech and video sharing site Tudou. From India, travel sevice MakeMyTrip was notable among the deals made by the top-100 ranked VCs.

Perhaps next year’s list can take into account the post-IPO performance of the deals! Many of those recently listed companies noted above are trading below their IPO price.

Privately held companies in China and India mattered in the rankings of the top 100 as well. From China, among the prominently cited deals are GroupOn-like Lashou and gaming portal Duowan. From India, medical device maker Perfint and online retailer Flipkart from India are notably recognized.

Here’s my tally of the 12 VC newcomers in 2012 doing deals in China, in order of their rank.
See Startup Asia tally at Forbes.

Silicon Dragon Beijing 2012: Serial Entrepreneurs Set up Shop in China

If at first you do succeed, try, try again! That must be the motto of a growing group of startup founders in China who just won’t quit! More and more young entrepreneurs are racing to do their second or third startup in China’s highly energized markets — before this opportunity to catch the wave is gone.

The first generation who made it with Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, Sina and Renren are moving on to do their second or third startup in China. It’s one more sign that China’s Silicon Valley is growing up fast! and becoming more and more like the original.

In the Valley, I often meet entrepreneurs who are on to their next new venture. Ask them their track record and most will admit that they have at least one failure among the bunch. The culture of moving on, despite failure, is one reason why Silicon Valley has thrived. Now, this same mindset is catching on in China, and as the fear of failure goes away, we may see another golden era for startups in China that outdoes the first wave from 2004-2008.

Read more at my Forbes post.

Silicon Dragon Beijing 2012 will spotlight these trends at our May 31 program featuring venture investors Hurst Lin of DCM, Neil Shen of Sequoia Capital and CEOs Joe Chen of Renren and Andy Tian of Zynga China – all examples of serial success.

Startup Asia Tips for Entrepreneurs: Kai-Fu Lee

The following is an excerpt from my Startup Asia interview with Kai-Fu Lee, founder of Innovation Works, in China. Based on his experience as former president of Google China and now head of his own incubator and venture fund in Beijing, he shares three key lessons for the next generation of Chinese entrepreneurs.

Startup Asia writer Rebecca Fannin with
Kai-Fu Lee of Innovation Works

Any advice for tomorrow’s entrepreneurs coming up in China?

My first advice is don’t think your idea will change the world, but understand the trend. That’s much more important. If you are growing in an explosively growing trend, you just have to do a good job and it will take you to the top. And if you are in a flat trend and you think are going to do something that will kill all the competitors, I think that is going against the wind and not productive. The trend is your friend.

The second trend is focus and simplify.

The entrepreneurs are all smart and they all want to do everything. They have a new idea every day, a new product, a new feature, a new market. The model to develop new companies — especially new Internet companies — is to build something simple and target a very small group of people and then experiment and grow from there. The lean startup process, for example.

The third thing is, don’t go it alone.

So many Chinese entrepreneurs want to be that big boss. That is very Chinese to want to be the big boss, and everybody is your underling. But in the road to build a startup it is so challenging and lonely and there are so many downers, you want a partner who can encourage you and work with you and help lift each other up to go through the troubles. And you also want someone whose skill set complements you, and who has implicit strong trust with you to take it to the next level. Almost all our entrepreneur proposals are a one-person show. I would encourage more two or even three people working together.

See the Startup Asia video for other out-takes from my interview with Kai-Fu Lee, who by the way, wrote the foreword to my latest book, Startup Asia. Stay tuned next for his view on serial entrepreneurs, which happens to be the theme of our Silicon Dragon Beijing 2012 event on May 31.

Read more posts at Forbes.

Startup Asia tour shines on India

My tour of India's innovation hubs is generating some press. Check out the media coverage here:
Wall Street Journal @ LiveMint
FirstPost

In the first six days of the trip, I traveled from Mumbai to Delhi back to Mumbai and then to Bangalore! Check out some photos from the Startup Asia events here:

Startup Asia Tour

On February 21, I will be in Mumbai again, this time to moderate a Startup Asia panel discussion on India's rise in tech entrepreneurship. Panelists are venture investors Sandeep Singhal of Nexus Venture Partners, Shailesh Lakhani of Sequoia Capital and Hemir Doshi of IDG Ventures India. On stage, I will also interview Indian entrepreneurs Alok Kejriwal of Games2Win and Dippak Khuran of Vserve Digital Services.

Famed inventor and investor Kanwal Rekhi was on my VC Circle panel in Delhi 

 

Startup Asia Mumbai 2012
February 21, 2012, 8:15-11:15am
Orchid Hotel, near domestic airport
Mumbai
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Days 1 & 2 of Silicon Dragon ventures in India

Day 2 in India and already what an amazing experience! Yes, I’ve been here before . . . so I have some idea of what I'm getting into

Late yesterday morning, while I was fighting jetlag, my PC crashed and all my files disappeared. As luck would have it, a call to my good contact at Tie Mumbai managed to find a willing and able IT guy to rescue me. By mid-afternoon, this well-trained Indian software engineer showed up at my hotel, and in less than one hour – I am not kidding – my computer was back, better than before. Turns out my trusty laptop had picked up a nasty virus. A download of some malware fix-it software cleared up the problem fast! Wonder why Norton didn't find it.  And we got the low memory problem solved too on my PC by dumping a bunch of http files.

The evening was time to celebrate that all was not lost. After an hour-long ride from my hotel in south Mumbai, I arrived at the Grand Hyatt in Mumbai and attended the opening dinner, poolside, for NASSCOM speakers.  There, I got an earful from a who's who of high tech in India about what’s wrong and right about entrepreneurship in India.

This morning (Valentine’s Day), I checked in at Apex ‘Summit, where I got to witness legendary entrepreneur and investor Kanwal Rekhi speak candidly about his outlook for the venture ecosystem here. Afterward, Rekhi was surrounded by young entrepreneurs who hung on his every word of advice (I’m chairing a panel he’s on at VC Circle in Delhi, Feb. 15, so more on this topic later on).  

Then, today I managed to miss my flight from Mumbai to Delhi. We got stuck in a horrible traffic jam while passing through some of the worst slums I’ve seen in India.  At the airport, I would have had time to make the flight – if only I’d realized that you have to print your flight reservation and show the print-out to get a boarding pass. So much for high tech!

Jet Airways put me on the next flight -- with a change fee! -- and I passed the time on the airport Wi-Fi – which by the way, you get access to through by a code sent SMS to your Indian mobile phone.

China Venture Hangover: Bottle or Pills?

Venture capitalist Tim Chang says 2012 may bring a “return to normalcy” for deal making in China. But he’s not ready to predict yet whether deal makers will “reach for the bottle or take their medicine” now that the bubble has popped in an overheated China venture market.

“In 2010, the market was overheated, everyone was drinking the kool-aid and pumping it by the gallon. The story for every deal was ‘it doesn’t matter if your startup is profitable, just get revenue doubling every year and we will take it public, and we can worry about getting profitable later.’

But in early 2011, that story fell apart,” said Chang, speaking at a recent Startup Asia event held in tech-central Silicon Valley.

Read more at my post at Forbes:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/rebeccafannin/2012/02/01/china-vc-hangover-reach-for-the-bottle-or-the-pills/