Silicon Valley is mission-driven, pure, about making a dent in the universe. Abundance mindset. Copying is shameful.
China is market-driven, hyper-competitive, survival of the fittest. Scarcity mindset. Culture of copying.
In Beijing entrepreneurs often joke that Facebook is the most Chinese company in Silicon Valley, for its willingness to copy and its fierce competitiveness.
While you might be somewhat repelled by the aggressive, gladiator-style entrepreneurship in China, the results compared to the USA speak for themselves:
- Rides on shared bikes 300:1
- Mobile payments 50:1
- Food delivery 10:1
- E-commerce purchases 2:1
Let’s also not forget that Uber lost against Didi, eBay lost against Taobao, and Meituan is more successful than its role model Groupon ever was.
According to Marc Andreessen, the winning companies 20 years from now will be enormously large, maybe 10 or 100 times the size of today’s Google or Facebook. I’m pretty sure that a lot of them, if not the majority, will come from China.
It’s foolish for us Westerners not to watch China more closely. I know that Charlie Munger does. And that’s what I’ll be doing as well.
(I learned this lesson from AI Superpowers by Kai-Fu Lee.)
