Page 160 - How China Is Winning the Tech Race

As he leaves the stage, investors crowd around Chen. He is the man of the
hour. A mechanical engineer by training who plays computer games in his
downtime, Chen finds the attention overwhelming. “This is my first public
speech. I don’t think my speech is very good,” he says.
In the corridor, beefy-looking and outgoing Peter Liu of the U.S.-Chinese
venture firm WI Harper corners Chen. “You’re mine. Let’s go to dinner,” he
tells the young software developer known in cyberspace by his code name,
BloodChen. Over a dinner that
evening with the VIPs who
attended the show, Lund whispers
“This is my first public speech. I don’t think in Liu’s ear. He explains how dur-
my speech is very good.”
ing a trip to Israel in 2004 he dis-
covered a bunch of hard-core
Jeff Chen,
techies using the Chinese browser,
founder and CEO, Maxthon
which was called MyIE2 at that
time. He tried it out and fell in love
with the ability of the rich set of
customizable features to improve surfing online. He spent three months
sending instant messages to Chen before he got on a plane from Denmark to
meet the Chinese software developer. Lund offered Chen what every budding
entrepreneur wants: a check (for $120,000) and help in building the start-up.
Everyone got pretty drunk at the dinner in Beijing, but the next morning Lund
and Chen made a handshake deal with Liu for WI Harper to invest $500,000.
Chen says of his mentor, “He can
sell anything.”
It was actually a fairly easy
sale. Chen had developed a break-
“You’re mine. Let’s go to dinner.”
through browser. Only one other
Peter Liu, browser in the market—Firefox—
chairman, WI Harper made surfing the Web so easy and
enjoyable, and Chen’s browser
predated Firebox by about a year.
Working mostly in China, Chen
had done it pretty much on his own with support from a community of
software developers for tests and debugs of the program.

134 SILICON DRAGON