Mid-career U.S. and European professionals in their 30s and 40s are making it in China and can’t get enough of the place.

Fritz Demopoulos, (pictured) 43, a Southern Californian and MBA grad from UCLA’s Anderson School of Management hasn’t mastered Mandarin, but has scored two Chinese Internet successes over the past decade. In June 2011, Baidu invested $306 million in the travel search engine Qunar he formed in 2005 and he stepped down as CEO, turning management over to Chinese staff. Demopoulos, who was born in the U.S. to a Greek dad and Austrian mother, got his start in China as business development manager for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., working alongside Wendi Deng in the late 1990s in Hong Kong and mainland China, and running information technology portal Chinabyte.com. He next joined NASDAQ-listed Chinese portal and gaming company Netease and worked closely with the CEO on a two-year turnaround. In 2001, his first China startup, sports portal Shawei, was bought by Hong Kong-based Tom Group for $15 million.

With his credentials, Demopoulos could write his ticket. He’s exploring opportunities to start another business or become an active investor, and plans to continue working in either Hong Kong or Beijing. “I don’t think I will be based at the debtor to China, ie the U.S.,” he says.

Richard Robinson, 43, hails from Boston and still drops the “r’s” with his accent though he’s long ago broken through the language and cultural barrier on a whirlwind tech startup career in China.

To continue reading this Chapter One excerpt from my recently published book, Startup Asia, see Forbes post:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/rebeccafannin/2011/12/08/go-east-young-entrepreneur/

Tech Gets Exciting in India, 5 Years Behind China

Mumbai street scene from Silicon Dragon ventures

The only other tech market in Asia that is halfway as exciting as China is India. It has the promise to close the gap with China but is no match yet. India’s mobile market is large, venture spending is vibrant, and high-profile IPOs such as MakeMyTrip are happening, with more on the way soon from up such swift up and comers as mobile ad service inMobi and PC help center iYogi.

Plus, India has proven it is rich in R&D and a lot more than outsourcing. Even so, red tape and poor infrastructure hold back the entrepreneurial spirit here. Investors Bill Draper, Lip-Bu Tan, and Sumir Chadha did the trailblazing in India. Today India’s venture leaders such as Ashish Gupta and Sudhir Sethi are looking for the next, new thing in mesmerizing India – the world’s second-fastest-growing economy and Asia’s third-largest economy.

At IDG Ventures in Bangalore, I met with Sethi, who is chairman and managing director and runs the tech media company’s $150 million India fund. It’s one of five funds in the IDG Ventures network established by Pat McGovern, the visionary founder and chairman of International Data Group in Boston. If a strategy works in one locale, then IDG works to bring the formula to startups in other places. China has proven to be a gold mine for IDG, where it’s made multimillion-dollar returns from early investments and successful IPOs of instant-messaging service Tencent and search engine Baidu. India could be next.

During a trip to India, I met founders of startups with advances for everything from detecting lung cancer at an earlier stage to recycling electronic waste in a cost-effective way, to bringing solar power to villagers, to offering superfast mobile searches, to three-dimensional online games, to robotic-powered vacuum cleaners. India’s also become a mecca for low-cost and sometimes jerry-rigged inventions—in Hindi, jugaad. Tata Motors’ tiny Nano car at an itty-bitty price tag of $2,500 and the Indian government-backed tablet computer selling for $35 are some examples. So is my favorite find: a Nokia cell phone with a built-in flashlight. India may not have a Google, Apple, Baidu, or Tencent yet, but it is moving into more technical work than writing software and answering phones.

Yet India’s entrepreneurial journey is at least five years behind China’s path. There’s no Jack Ma or Robin Li in sight or a big-time IPO like Youku. India lacks the entrepreneurial buzz and fast pace of China tech clusters. Indian entrepreneurship has been led by grassroots efforts, and the government hasn’t always been venture friendly.

If India is ever to break through, it needs to ditch an image as just for outsourcing or low-cost engineering and business services—a major challenge for the world leader of the booming $500 billion global outsourcing market. But India could eventually become a tech minipower and grab some of the limelight from China. Contemporary corporate centers such as Whitefield on the outskirts of Bangalore and the Gurgaon satellite city in Delhi showcase that India is rising.

See Forbes post, Nov. 27, 2011:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/rebeccafannin/2011/11/27/tech-gets-exciting-in-india-5-years-behind-china/

Kai-Fu talks Steve Jobs, Silicon Dragon, China angels

Kai-Fu Lee, who wrote the foreword to my new book Startup Asia, is raising a second fund of $300 million to branch out to Shanghai, having stormed Beijing with a first fund of $180 million and investment returns he says are 10 times in two years' time. Not bad progress since he left the helm of Google China to set up angel investment fund and incubator Innovation Works in September 2009.
See the video interview and read more in Forbes at my post.
Will China see a Steve Jobs soon? No, says Lee.
How about the impact of angel investors and serial entrepreneurs? It's BIG.
Watch the mobile Internet for future China innovation.

Go East, Young Entrepreneur!

Go East, Young Entrepreneur!

"The opportunity is now. In a few years, it will be too late."
Kai-Fu Lee, Founder and Chairman, Innovation Works

Read my new book, Startup Asia: Top Strategies for Cashing in on Asia's Innovation Boom
to find out how dozens of entrepreneurs and venture investors are getting ahead fast and how you can too!
Kai-Fu Lee wrote the foreword.

Startup Asia has endorsements from The Economist, Technology Review, a Columbia University professor, and numerous leading practitioners, including Dick Kramlich and Bill Draper.

The book sold out on its second day on Amazon. But I hear they're stocked up now!
Check it out.
http://www.amazon.com/Startup-Asia-Strategies-Cashing-Innovation/dp/0470829907

From Made in China to Invented in China? 'Chinov8!'

A Silicon Dragon tech economy began in 2002 with Chinese returnees—so-called sea turtles who came home to lay their eggs—who cloned Google, YouTube, and Amazon, grabbed Sand Hill Road money, and scored on NASDAQ and the NYSE. Today, homegrown Chinese entrepreneurs are snapping up venture capital from Chinese currency funds for even more clones—Beijing techie Wang Xing alone has cloned Facebook, Twitter, and a Chinese GroupOn. 

 The needle is gradually moving from “made in China” to “invented in China.” Micro-innovations tweaked for the local culture are cropping up more often. Sina’s Weibo, a hybrid Twitter-Facebook, layered in video and photo sharing before Twitter did. The long-awaited promise of disruptive technology from China is coming, too, symbolized by China’s climb to fourth place worldwide for new patent applications. GSR Ventures–funded LatticePower in Nanchang counts more than 150 patents for making low-cost efficient LED lightbulbs.

But China technopreneurs are still in those awkward years of adolescence. The next Jack Ma of Alibaba fame has yet to emerge. 

The fissures in the wall are there, for sure. Doing business in China also means dealing with corruption, fraud, lack of the rule of law, inflation, censorship of Web content, and China’s notorious counterfeiters, who have popularized a whole industry of cheap knockoff or shanzhai cell phones.

That’s a long list of ills, but the tides are shifting and swiftly. As China’s Silicon Dragon evolves as a startup frontier with multiple undercurrents, it could even one-up the original Silicon Valley and become a technology superpower. That may be only a decade or two from now.

We’ll be debating these trends at our Silicon Dragon ‘Chinov8!’ event, Oct. 6, at Rosewood Sand Hill. See http://siliconasiainvest.com/SiliconDragonCalifornia.aspx

Our expert panelists include Brad Bao of Tencent, Bill Tai of Charles River Ventures, Tim Draper of DFJ, Richard Lim of GSR Ventures plus Marguerite Gong Hancock of the Stanford Program on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship. We’ll be hearing more from our featured Chinese tech entrepreneurs Jeff Chen of Maxthon (China’s Internet Explorer plus) and Haidong Pan of Hudong (China’s Wikipedia plus), who are flying in from Beijing to speak at Silicon Dragon ‘Chinov8!’ during China’s National Day Holiday. 
Read more at my Forbes post:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/rebeccafannin/2011/09/22/from-made-in-china-to-invented-in-china-chinov8/

Silicon Dragon Second @ NASDAQ

Following are my remarks by journalist entrepreneur and author Rebecca Fannin at NASDAQ, Sept. 8, 2011, the day her group Silicon Dragon rang the closing bell. It was a tribute to the Chinese entrepreneurs in this growing Dragon community who have taken their startups public in the U.S.

I’m very excited to be here today at NASDAQ with so many friends, colleagues and members of the fast-growing Silicon Dragon community. Thanks to NASDAQ and to Sidley Austin for your partnership and for making Sept. 8 a special day we can long remember – and not just because 8 is lucky in China.
Standing here today and getting ready to ring the closing bell gives me have a sense of what it is like for those Chinese entrepreneurs I’ve covered to actually go public on NASDAQ. I’m thinking of Robin Li who took Baidu public here in 2005 and then posed in front of that big NASDAQ neon sign at this Times Square headquarters. Robin is now one of China’s billionaires as the head of China’s search engine. And I’m thinking of Gary Wang of Tudou who went public here a few weeks ago and rang the closing bell. I recall interviewing Gary for the first time in Shanghai in 2006 when his video sharing site was new and picking up its first financing from venture investors. And yes, I’m thinking of Joe Chen of Renren, China’s Facebook-plus, who is now busily running a public company. Standing here on stage with me is David Chao of DCM who was an early backer of Joe’s startup and who was with Joe on stage when Renren went public this past May.
While Silicon Dragon is not about to go public any time soon -- well, who knows? Maybe someday we might! I do get inspired by the entrepreneurs I interview and profile! What we have done is play our part in documenting the historic rise of China’s entrepreneurs and their coming out party internationally. And we have helped to create a community linked across borders – from Beijing and Shanghai to Silicon Valley – by having gatherings such as the one we will have at 5pm today here for experts to exchange ideas and hopefully benefit from the learning.
While investing in China hasn’t really hit Main Street yet in my hometown of Lancaster, Ohio, (hi, Mom!), it’s no longer considered so foreign or even so risky – despite some recent accounting scandals we’ve read about in the press with U.S.-listed China companies and controversial reverse mergers. I know some here in the audience who have profited from well-timed buys and sells of shares Chinese companies that were financed by Sand Hill Road’s venture elite. So it is possible to get solid returns that can match those from US companies.
As a journalist and an author profiling China’s entrepreneurial leaders and up and comers, it wouldn’t be right for me to invest in those companies I cover. Sure, I have my favorites. It’s based on instinct and impressions of the founders themselves as well as hard-won access to the inner workings of their startup strategies.
I’m glad I’ve had this opportunity to be one of the few journalists documenting this unfolding story of China’s advances from ‘made in China to invented in China’ – the theme of my first book, Silicon Dragon. As I say this, my second book is off to the printers. Book 2, Startup Asia, takes the China story into India, Vietnam and other Asian hotspots and profiles the next generation of Asian entrepreneurs who stand a chance of ringing the closing bell.
This is work I love to do and do naturally, with no boss telling to me what to do (I am my own worst boss) something I’m sure all the entrepreneurs I’ve come to know in China, India and beyond could relate to and then some.
To quote one of the more famous Chinese entrepreneurs I’ve written about -- Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, who is now a billionaire from taking his Chinese startup public – “when I am myself, I am happy and have a good result.”
That rings true. Let’s all celebrate by ringing the bell!

Silicon Dragon Rang the Closing Bell

NASDAQ news September 08, 2011 Silicon Dragon, a news, events and consulting group, visited the NASDAQ MarketSite in New York City's Times Square. In honor of the occasion, the force behind Silicon Dragon, Rebecca Fannin rang the Closing Bell. This news, events and consulting group was founded by journalist and author Rebecca Fannin in 2009. The group publishes international newsletters for entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, programs business conferences for startup founders and investors in New York, Silicon Valley, Beijing, Shanghai and Singapore, and provides editorial content for multinational tech and financial companies, including KPMG and Sony. Silicon Dragon testified as an expert witness on China's Internet before a U.S.-China Commission in Washington, D.C. Silicon Dragon draws upon a rich library, from Ms. Fannin's extensive reporting in Asia for nearly two decades for Forbes, CEO, HBR.com, The Deal, Red Herring and several other business publications. The content resources include two books penned by Ms. Fannin: Silicon Dragon (McGraw-Hill, 2008) and Startup Asia (Wiley, forthcoming Oct. 2011).