Friday, April 21, 2006

China and the startup world

This is an interesting one.

My company is in the process of working through the creation of a company in China as a partnership with a Chinese company and a European company. China brings, well, China, among other things (like high level government contacts, licenses to do business in China, localized knowledge, distribution, etc); the EuroCo brings cellular technology for OTA (Over The Air) type digital content delivery and we (ClickCaster) bring the content/delivery platform.

Intriguingly, what seems to make this venture so interesting to everyone involved is the fact that an American internet startup is involved. It seems to have a sort of cache that is getting people's attention (from government and industry to investors in Asia).

We're working with a very high energy women who is an executive of the Chinese company and would be at home in a fast paced American company (she speaks perfect American English with just a faint twinge of English accent periodically creeping in) and she's got honest to god vision.

Now, having working in China before in my Motorola days, this is more than a little unusual. And she honestly gets what the whole user generated media world is about. During one of our regular weekly progress calls (currently we’re co-writing the overall business plan), I brought up the potential of bringing in the US Television folks (I recently spent a week in LA with some true Hollywood types- I’ll blog about that one in the near future) and the initial response was 'well, we could do that, but why? This is about replacing the old media'.

Well, damn. She sounds like she lives in Boulder or Silicon Valley and like she's the CEO of a small user generated social networking focused software startup company we know and love! (yea.. us). Heh. Whodathunkit.

More on this as it develops. Compared to my past China business experiences, this is more than just refreshing, it's downright exciting.

1 comment:

Helen said...

Very cool!
I hope it works out well for all!

An excellent read from an ex-evangelical.

  As you know, I once was an evangelical megachurch pastor and my pastoral career stretched over many years. Eventually, I could no longer t...