Page 96 - How China Is Winning the Tech Race

The last time we met in Beijing, it was May 2007. Chen was flying later
that week to Santa Barbara for an informal gathering organized by his
investors for the various companies in their portfolio. He also was planning to
get close to Buffett by meeting the Chinese investor and former entrepreneur
Yongping Duan, who successfully bid $620,000 for a chance to dine with the
billionaire. He’s even begun to think about what he might want to do once he’s
50. “I’d like to try to figure out a way to make my dollars work harder,
perhaps seed capital to bring more awareness to social issues,” Chen says.
Meanwhile, Chen is trying not to obsess over his dream of IPO gold. He
wants to go public so that he can have the cash to buy even more Web 2.0
brands in China and is impatiently eyeing a listing on Nasdaq or the Hong
Kong and Shanghai stock exchanges in 2008. But with his new managerial
mantra, “Fast is slow, slow is fast,” he may have the discipline to let Oak
Pacific ripen. “We want to break even on our long-term projects first and then
go IPO,” he says. He may not have the luxury of time. In five years, China’s
Internet market will go from adolescence to maturity, and leadership
positions will be taken. “That will be the end of the game,” he says.
Before we wind up the interview, I ask Chen what the most important
ingredient for success in China is. He grins slyly and then answers, quoting
Intel founder Andy Grove and his parable for success in business: “Only the
paranoid survive.”
I am counting on Chen to be among the survivors and have his shot at
tech glory if he can stay focused and not stretch too much. He may not have
the DNA to spot risks where others can, but that’s what makes him the classic
hard-charging, nonstop entrepreneur. In China today, it takes that kind of
guts to make it. It also takes creativity and imagination, and Chen scores high
there too. Being in the center of the action in the fastest-growing segment of
Web communications today doesn’t hurt either.
The next chapter profiles a Chinese entrepreneur, Fang Xingdong, who is
equally passionate about what he is doing but must serve new masters who
don’t share his vision for his young company, Bokee.com. They kicked him
upstairs until he fought back and regained his CEO title. Like Chen, he is
going after one of the wide-open areas of the Internet today in China:
blogging. He not only invented the Chinese word for blogging but set up one
of the first blogging portals in this authoritarian, communist-controlled
country.

70 SILICON DRAGON