Page 164 - How China Is Winning the Tech Race

Maxthon’s Chinese heritage, though advantageous on some fronts, also
could be a negative. Some people might think twice before using a Chinese
browser to surf the Net. What about spyware to monitor what’s viewed
online? What about blocked searches of politically sensitive subjects by
Chinese government censors? Everyone on the small Maxthon team tells me
it’s not a big deal. Users in Mainland China allegedly can get past Chinese
firewalls by downloading a plug-in feature to Maxthon so that their clicks on
Web sites are routed to proxy servers in Canada and other overseas locations.
A reflected image of the content then is beamed into cyberspace to the user’s
screen. It sounds like science fiction, but Maxthon investor Tai tells me, “It’s
pretty standard stuff these days.”
Why Maxthon came from China and not the Redmond, Washington,
campus of Microsoft Corp. is beyond me. The creative spirit behind Maxthon
is Chen, an almost accidental entrepreneur who enjoys staying up nights
writing software code.
I meet Chen at his office in Beijing’s HaiDian district not far from the
city’s Zhongguancun Software Park. There is no listing of Maxthon in the
lobby of the sleek multi-story building. I call Chen, and he directs me down a
long hallway on the ground floor. There I find him, dressed Silicon Valley
techie style in blue jeans and a black pullover sweater that accentuate his slim
frame, standing self-assuredly in a doorway emblazoned with Maxthon’s bold
masculine logo. During a long interview with Chen, his eyes glazing over with
fatigue, I hear how he has come so far.
The son of factory workers, Chen grew up in the dusty industrial city of
Zhengzhou, the capital of China’s Henan province. He’s been to the United
States three times, the first time in January 2006 to exhibit Maxthon at a Las
Vegas electronics convention. He doesn’t have a computer science or engi-
neering degree from Stanford like a lot of the earlier Chinese tech inventors
and copiers. He wasn’t brought up in a free society that encourages the imag-
inative individualistic thinking that has inspired leading-edge innovations
from Silicon Valley over the last couple of decades. Chen was so poor when
he began developing Maxthon five years ago that he lived off donations from
fellow software programmers working with him online.
Yet from those humble roots, by spring 2006 Chen had raised $5 million
from a Who’s Who of tech investors globally. Granted, he had to turn over
15 percent of Maxthon shares to the U.S. venture firm Charles River Ventures

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