Page 87 - How China Is Winning the Tech Race

Yet few Chinese entrepreneurs can compare with the swashbuckling Chen
for trial and error, success and failure. As a young boy growing up in China,
Chen dreamed of winning a Nobel Prize in physics. But when he found he was
not as smart as Einstein, he veered off into engineering and high-stakes entre-
preneurship, becoming a multimillionaire as a student at Stanford University
from an alumni networking start-up called Chinaren.com that he sold. He
went on to fail at his next three stabs at tech start-ups.
He owes his risk-taking nature in part to immersion in the innovation
culture of Silicon Valley. Like many Chinese tech entrepreneurs, he was
influenced by the Valley’s try-anything spirit and returned to his homeland to
start something big just as the market was opening up. With his short, stocky
frame and round wire-rimmed glasses, he doesn’t look like one of the Valley
boys, but he’s picked up the lingo and can talk the talk. Take the line he
borrowed from Steve Jobs and used as a sign-off on e-mails: “Stay hungry,
stay foolish.” He also worships Jack Welch and Warren Buffett. On his desk
at the office are dog-eared books dense with underlining that chronicle their
tales: Icon, Winning, and The Warren Buffett Way.

The house that Joe built

Lessons from those masters on innovation, leadership, and investment come in
handy as Chen builds Oak Pacific in the fast-moving, high-risk Internet business.
Moving quickly while the newly opened Chinese market is largely up for grabs,
Chen has cobbled together his social networking house of brands quickly, brick
by brick, with a cadre of top Chinese tech management talent. A pioneer, he
cranked up his first social networking site in China in 2003, about the same time
that MySpace’s cofounders put the first pages of MySpace on the Web.
Chen realizes that opportunities to build an empire won’t last long as
more companies such as MySpace enter China, drawn by the country’s
booming wireless, Internet, and consumer markets. That’s why he’s in such a
hurry, possibly to the point of overextension. Since 2003, Chen has raised $48
million from major venture capitalists, paid $35 million to acquire five sites
in cash and stock deals, built three others from scratch using cheap Chinese
software engineers, invested in another, and set up a joint venture with one
more site.

Oak Pacific Interactive—W eb 2.0 on Steroids 61