Silicon Dragon startup LatticePower raises $55M from IFC

Though I couldn't be in Beijing today for the signing ceremony at the China World Hotel, I know Sonny Wu of GSR Ventures is grinning. His deal, LatticePower, has just raised $55 million from the IFC to continue its expansion and breakthrough designs for LEDs.
Venture capitalist Sonny deserves the credit. He has been running LatticePower as CEO, a necessary step since the founder is a physicist by training. He'd rather be in the lab than in front of a PC crunching numbers.
LatticePower is Chapter 12 in Silicon Dragon, by the way. Don't say that I don't identify these innovative rising stars from China early on!

Silicon Dragon Social with Who's Who

A who's who of China venture recently attended our Silicon Dragon Social dinner in Hong Kong, co-hosted with financial group SecondMarket. The event proved so popular that we had an encore! See a selection of photos from the event, above: (l to r) Joe Zhou, Keytone Ventures with Bruno Bensaid, ShanghaiVest; Cadol Cheung, Fuel Capital; and Joey Chen, General Atlantic with David Berger, SecondMarket and Alice Au, Heidrick & Struggles.
See more photos from our Silicon Dragon PhotoStream:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/32790202@N06/sets/72157625314203833/detail/

Silicon Dragon Shanghai: November 8, 2010

Featured Event: Silicon Dragon Shanghai
November 8, 2010






Ray Zhang, Founder and CEO, eHi Car Rental (right)
Gary Wang, Founder and CEO, Tudou (above)
Gary Rieschel, Managing Director, Qiming Ventures
William Bao Bean, Partner, Softbank China & India
Tina Ju, Managing Partner, Kleiner Perkins China
Jixun Foo, Managing Partner, GGV Capital
Joe Tian, Founding Managing Partner, DT Capital
Thomas Chou, Partner, Morrison & Foerster
Intro: Egidio Zarrella, Global Partner-IT, KPMG
IPO trends: Eric Landheer, NASDAQ, head-Asia Pacific
Moderators: Rebecca Fannin, Silicon Drago
Russell Flannery, Shanghai bureau chief, Forbes

Shanghai Art Museum, Kathleen's 5
November 8, 2010, 6-8:30PM

Panel discussion, Talks, Q&A
Networking, Cocktail reception

To register, please click:
http://silicondragonshanghai2010.eventbrite.com/

In Partnership with AAMA Shanghai Angels

Sponsored by Morrison & Foerster, KPMG, NASDAQ, and Ushi.cn

Silicon Dragon: China Startups Battle the BAT

China Startups Battle The BAT
Rebecca Fannin
Forbes column, 10/18/2010
Chinese venture investing is growing ever less dependent on Silicon Valley.
Entrepreneur Joe Chen, who runs China's leading social-networking sites from his Beijing-based startup Oak Pacific Interactive, no longer looks to Silicon Valley for clues on strategy.
A Stanford MBA grad who formed and sold his first startup while still a student, Chen is rarely in the Valley anymore. That's because China's entrepreneurial roots have shifted away from there.
What concerns Chen most about keeping Oak Pacific Interactive healthy is not Silicon Valley stars Facebook, Google or eBay, but three giant Chinese brands he collectively calls the BAT--search engine Baidu, e-commerce powerhouse Alibaba and instant messaging service Tencent.
(See video)
http://www.youtube.com/user/RAFannin?feature=mhum#p/u/3/nnge-NM68Bg
These Chinese upstarts are so hypercompetitive that Chen finds himself continually aiming to outsmart these super-sized brands. But even as Chen does battle with the BAT, he has his eye on driving Oak Pacific Interactive to an IPO. See photo (right) of Joe with DCM venture investor David Chao.
In China, the action is shifting from returnee entrepreneurs--so called "sea turtles" who were educated in the U.S., got experience there and then moved back to China to start companies--and tilting toward what Chen calls "pancake turtles." Known for their ferocious eating habits and for being a Chinese delicacy, the pancake turtle is an exceptionally aggressive Chinese entrepreneur who is increasingly one-upping the returnees.
Not everyone agrees. While venture investors along Sand Hill Road may dig China, they still think Silicon Valley has a decided edge over the Mainland for innovative, if not disruptive, technologies--and will have it for at least another decade.
See Forbes column continued here:
http://www.forbes.com/2010/10/18/facebook-startups-venture-investing-intelligent-technology-china.html?boxes=Homepagechannels

Silicon Dragon: The Steve Jobs of China

Silicon Dragon: Silicon Dragon: The Steve Jobs of China

Silicon Dragon: The Steve Jobs of China

The Steve Jobs Of China
Rebecca Fannin
Alibaba's Jack Ma shows off his marketing flair at the annual AliFest summit.
Forbes column, 9/14/2010
Hangzhou, China -- If there is a Steve Jobs of China, it is Jack Ma, the founder and leader of Alibaba, China's largest e-commerce group. No other Chinese entrepreneur has the Jobs-like star quality, strategic vision and flair for promotion that Ma does.
Each September Ma can be found on stage at his annual AliFest in Hangzhou, the Chinese city known for its scenic West Lake and the home base for Alibaba. Labeled a "Netpreneur Summit," AliFest is, in effect, a love fest for Alibaba, its maverick founder and its accomplishments, which in ten years has gone from rising Chinese Internet startup to publicly listed player with global ambitions. In 2009, Alibaba earned $148 million on roughly $573 million in revenues (RMB 3.874 billion) and currently sports an $11 billion (RMB 77 billion) market capitalization. Yahoo invested $1 billion in Alibaba back in 2005 for a 40% stake.
This year's summit, held on Sept. 10, was on Ma's 46th birthday. To help him celebrate, Alibaba put on a show of impressive speakers: California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (on his first stop of a week-long trade mission), the U.S. Ambassador to China John Huntsman, and even a rival, eBay President and CEO John Donahoe. Last year's AliFest featured basketball legend Kobe Bryant and former U.S. President Bill Clinton.
Each one of these speakers complimented Ma for building Alibaba into an online trading platform for small businesses and creating millions of jobs. All called Ma a good friend, and presented him with a gift onstage.
Schwarzenegger gifted Ma with dark sunglasses and a form-fitting leather jacket, which Ma promptly put on. On cue, some 300 Chinese journalists and dozens of international reporters from madly snapped photos and shot video.
Later, at an Alibaba press conference, Schwarzenegger posed for more photographs and fielded questions as attendees were told that Alibaba aims to create 100,000 jobs in the U.S. (mostly in California, if the "Governator" has his way) and develop a Schwarzenegger-branded scholarship to train youngsters to be entrepreneurs.
See Forbes column continued here: http://www.forbes.com/2010/09/13/ebay-yahoo-ecommerce-china-technology-alibaba.html

Making Sense of China, Google and Censorship

Making Sense Of China, Google And Censorship
My Forbes Column, July 9, 2010

I had never been called a Communist until I testified at a hearing on Capitol Hill.
The hearing in late June was on "China's Information Control Practices and its implications for the U.S." U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commissioner Carolyn Bartholomew was introducing me as an expert on China's leading search engine company, Baidu.com, and the Internet. What she meant to say was that I am a "columnist" for Forbes--a slip of tongue she immediately corrected.
That slip-up gave me an insight into the types of politically charged censorship issues that would be raised during the day-long hearing. I tried to present a balanced perspective of the Chinese Internet in a business context and point out how Baidu had modeled itself on Google and opened up the Internet to billions of Chinese. But many of the points I made about Baidu got caught in the political crosswinds over U.S.-China tensions.
The questions I was asked to address included some tough ones:
--Describe the nature of Baidu's relationship with the Chinese Government.
--Explain Baidu's censorship activities.
--How do these activities compare to those of other firms that operate in China?
--What are the implications of American involvement in China's Internet censorship activities?
--Two of Baidu's five directors are American, American investors provided much of the startup capital for the company, and U.S. institutional investors own significant stakes in it. Is Baidu, therefore, something of an American organization? If so, what is its responsibility for Internet censorship?
--Explain how Google's recent decision to scale back operations in China has affected Baidu and Chinese Internet users.
While I've covered the rise of Internet startups in China as a journalist for more than a decade, these are not the types of issues that regularly come up during my interviews with venture capital investors and entrepreneurs in Beijing, Shanghai and Silicon Valley. I'm used to reporting on the communications boom in China through a business lens.
But it soon became quite clear that the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, which is charged with submitting an annual report to Congress on the national security implications of trade and economic relations between the two countries, had a political agenda. It provides recommendations to Congress for legislative action.
Commissioner Jeffrey Fiedler started off questioning me by noting that he had invited one of Baidu's American directors--Greg Penner, general partner of Madrone Capital Partners--to testify, but Penner had declined. Fiedler pointed out that Penner moves among the higher reaches of American society and is closely connected to the Wal-Mart Stores fortune through his marriage to a granddaughter of Sam Walton.
I tried to keep focused on the cross-border China-U.S. investment issues that are central to my book, Silicon Dragon. I pointed out that Baidu owed its origins to Silicon Valley's culture of entrepreneurship and was not unlike dozens of startups developed by Western-educated and trained young Chinese who returned to their homeland as China was opening up via economic reforms. Venture capital investment in China-much of it from Silicon Valley's Sand Hill Road-peaked at $10 billion in 2008. Also, China has the world's largest Internet and mobile communications markets, and text messaging is quite routine.
Baidu, like all Internet companies doing business in China, self-censors its content on the Web. Google's recent rumblings over censorship in China--and its decision to redirect searches from inside China to Hong Kong, where it is still subject to the Great Firewall of China but no longer required to censor itself--has strengthened Baidu's financial results and share price. Internet analysts such as Richard Ji of Morgan Stanley are predicting Baidu will capture between 20% and 30% of Google's market share in China. (Google itself has 31% of the Chinese search market.)
Seated next to me at the hearing was Rebecca MacKinnon, a free speech activist and expert on Chinese Internet censorship. As Commissioner Bartholomew correctly pointed out to me during the hearing, MacKinnon's perspective did not match my own. She forcefully argued that American investors in China--institutional investors and private equity financiers alike--should own up to a broader responsibility to invest ethically, whether the issue is human rights, the environment or censorship.
The talk turned to how to deal with Chinese censorship and ethical investing. Commissioner Fiedler asked me if there should be a censorship tax on American companies that invest in countries where speech and information is restricted. My reply was greeted with a frown from Fiedler: It would have to be a very high tax to discourage investment in countries such as China where returns have been outsized in recent years as dozens of Chinese startups have gone public on the Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange.
I do agree with MacKinnon that the Chinese people would be worse off if all American companies and investors were to abandon the Chinese Internet. A policy of engagement to work for positive change, rather than withdrawal, will result in the best outcome.
Perhaps in an acknowledgment that my own statements were falling on deaf ears, Commissioner Bartholemew, a California lawyer who was previously chief of staff to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, pulled me aside to let me know that she was probably the only one on the commission who understood what I meant when I referred to "Sand Hill Road." That did make me feel more at ease for a moment. Even so, I think the issues of censorship, American companies and the Chinese Internet will be with us for many years to come.