For These Young Entrepreneurs, Silicon Valley Is, Like, Lame
wsj.com
wsj.com
Instead, it’s about how young Chinese entrepreneurs are underwhelmed by the lack of penetration of new technologies into daily life on the Peninsula. The whole thing reads like a submarine article artfully placed by the Shenzhen Economic Development Committee, especially given its ending quote: "China is like a startup. The U.S. is like a big corporation”.
One point within the article strikes me as especially bad. The author notes that, “Especially for those in their 20s and 30s, last week’s visit largely failed to impress. To many in the group, northern California’s low-rise buildings looked shabbier than the glitzy skyscrapers in Beijing and Shenzhen.” The clear implication here is that California’s relative backwardness is evidenced by the shabbiness of local buildings.
But that’s entirely the wrong conclusion to draw! The story here is that rich people don’t like new construction near where they live, and a lot of wealth has been created on the Peninsula in the last few decades. The NIMBY-zoning-driven damper on new office construction in the last few years has resulted in a lack of office space relative to demand, which means that it’s a seller’s market, which disincentivizes landlords from renovating buildings....and the onerous zoning makes it virtually impossible for property developers to build new ones.
Having lunch at work is not at all unusual in China, though usually at a lower budget.
> a submarine article artfully placed...
I dunno man, I haven't been to Shenzhen, but the last time I was in Shanghai was mid-2017. I felt like Silicon Valley was some remote backwater. It's not just about shining new buildings. The Shanghai subways are new and shiny, has advanced adtech, and most importantly, does not smell at all like pee (Bart riders know what I'm talking about), and it runs every 2-3 minutes. It takes 3-ish hours to go from Beijing to Shanghai by high speed rail, which is also shiny, new, and has a really nice business class. Anything you need with 2-hour shipping, not 2-day shipping. Not just the limited selection Amazon deigns to put on Prime Now (which typically does not include hardware components).
When I work on an Arduino hobby project, and I suddenly need a component my local Fry's doesn't have, I don't have to wait 2 weeks for shipping. In China, I'd be able to walk to the market and get it the same day.
Look, I still choose to live in Silicon Valley, but admittedly, in Shanghai, there were zero people pooping in the streets, and during the entire time I was there, I was ranted at or yelled at by a complete stranger exactly zero times. And number of times I have been followed by a creepy stranger in Shanghai who might do me harm: zero.
The Shanghai subways are new and shiny, has advanced adtech,
For a more intuitive comparison, the 'fair' day was clearer than Black Rock Desert on a non-windy day before Burning Man gets set up.
has advanced adtech
1) Skechers is having a sale on (some date) at (address), and there's a dude in sneakers doing breakdance moves, 2) upcoming episode teaser for a period drama.
Why South SF is not on this like white on rice, I have no idea.
That the shabby looking (to the hypothetical immigrant) houses are worth millions doesn't matter to the new comer, except that it means that in addition to living in a building they don't like, they are going to have to pay an enormous rent.
Best regards from Shenzhen.
Eh. What you are seemingly saying is that rich people prioritize living like how they grew up over developing the city for the future. I mean, I get it. Surely that is why many people moved to the bay area instead of say NYC. But I don't see how you can think that it isn't backwards.
Also, of course, there's a strong argument to be made that the California bungalow aesthetic of Silicon Valley is a big part of what made it what it is today: an entire generation of bright people saw California as a vision of life that was entirely distinct from the eastern industrial cities that came before it. Visions of surfing and orchards and intellectual freedom were attractive to the kind of liberal thinkers who invented personal computers.
We're a car culture. US cities and suburbs were designed for cars long ago. Hence the focus on the next iteration of cars: self driving. Plus, isnt the bike sharing thing turning into a disaster in China with stolen bikes?
Really, facial recognition when you walk into work is sign of our lagging technology? Sounds more like over engineering a trivial thing.
We've got rockets landing themselves, electric cars driving themselves, the re-emergence of VR with augmented reality on the way, blockchain technology (started in the US), and were still leading in AI by the way.
The big stuff on the near-horizon are sea-steading communities experimenting with governance, quantum computers, lab grown meat, exoskeletons, and more useful household robotics.
The long term R&D bets are whats paid off for us and there is no reason to assume they wont continue too. China can copy us 6 times over due to their population, but if their emphasis is always on "get it out the door now!" then they will just be waiting around looking for the next thing to copy from California.
I'm getting kinda tired of this anti-US sentiment articles.
Venmo is good for payments between people, but for everyday transactions the US needs to upgrade its infrastructure. It will, but it's far behind the rest of the world in allowing tap payment and the like.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/02/world/asia/china-beijing-...
"But their popularity has been accompanied by a wave of misbehavior. Because the start-ups do not use fixed docking stations, riders abandon bicycles haphazardly along streets and public squares, snarling traffic and cluttering sidewalks. Thieves have taken them by the tens of thousands, for personal use or selling them for parts. Angry and mischievous vandals hang them in trees, bury them in construction sites and throw them into lakes and rivers."
http://www.businessinsider.com/china-bike-sharing-frenzy-col...
"Bike-sharing companies – with their capital-intensive, cash-burning, ride-subsidizing business model – were among the hottest startups in China. ... But this is how quickly a frenzy can deflate... On Thursday, Chinese media reported that Mingbike, with operations in major cities, had laid off 99% of its staff, after consumers had complained that they’d been unable to get their deposits..."
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/18/bike-sharing-boom-in-china-p...
I too was shocked about how unappealing Silicon Valley was. I'm an American.
It was like "wow they don't know they are imagining solving problems that aren't a problem for the rest of the country"
Pull off to any random gas station on the peninsula? Sorry you need cash at the pump. Already in the line to the carwash? TOUGH LUCK! better get out your car, run to the attendant and get cash! Don't mind that the bank freezes your debit card at this location because its sketchy af, further inconveniencing everyone in the carwash line waiting for you. Where is the apple or google pay? Nonexistent.
I digress, that has almost nothing to do with anything. It is just the reality of whats in Silicon Valley, distinct from more cosmopolitan areas.
Silicon Valley's real inconveniences are partially California administrative problems. And as the article points out, the US is like a big corporation, lots of things in your way before change.
FinTech revolution is happening in China, not so much the US/SV.
My AM/PM here in San Diego, Calif, has debit card acceptance at each pump.
The AM/PMs
Sorry you need cash at the pump.
The scariest thing about pay-at-the-pump is that card skimmers are too common.
better get out your car, run to the attendant and get cash
Kids are genius. However, youth opinion is uninformed by experience.
Unfortunately a large number of people get to 25 or 30, figure "I'm an adult now", and then their mental model of the world gets stuck at however it was when they were that age even as the world changes around them.
On one level kids think their parents are stupid because they don't have experience with the constraints their parents live under (eg. getting a job, keeping a job, putting a roof over your heads), but on another level the parents are stupid because they've let themselves internalize those constraints beyond what's rational (eg. working so hard that you're unhappy all the time and don't have time for the kids, not looking for another job when you hate your current one). I've seen a number of instances - mostly surrounding racism, classism, overwork, violence, corruption, or misaligned incentives - where kids will say something both profound and naive and I'll think to myself "Yes, you're absolutely right, and unfortunately humanity is filled with idiots."
Very true. This happened to me. However, what you don't get enough of in our culture, is that the new "truth" the kids take as a substitute is often another come-on which is crafted to appeal to a younger generation or an updated culture.
You can see analogues for this in 19th century culture, but with the added benefit of hindsight. Various utopian and romantic movements from the 1800's and even in the early 20th century are these saccharine substitutes for truth. However, if you look at them closely and take them apart, you will find that they are based on some sort of conceit or assumption which falls apart under closer examination, or with the benefit of over a century of human and scientific progress. Marxism is a key example. Karl Marx's problem with the "accidental" is the unwarranted and demonstrably false assumption that emergent processes can't usefully regulate complex systems. Of course, Marx didn't have the benefit of a couple of centuries of continued development in biology and the benefit of computer science and game theory. Rousseau's "noble savage" is another such honeypot fiction that the 21st century Left is still plagued by in transmogrified form.
"Yes, you're absolutely right, and unfortunately humanity is filled with idiots."
Do you really think you can do a better job? Marxist intellectuals who became revolutionaries thought much the same. Their record in the 20th century speaks for itself.
I don't think that's particularly true, moreover...
> because a.) they haven't been socialized to keep their mouth shut when they see bullshit and b.) they don't have incentives to keep their mouth shut when they see bullshit.
Neither of those indicate that they have excellent bullshit detectors, nor are they plausible reasons why they would do so; instead, those are reasons why “kids generally provide third parties with more transparent insights into the output of their own bullshit detectors than adults generally do”, but the fact that adults are more circumspect in announcing that they have detected bullshit than kids are does not mean that adults aren't fat better than kids at detecting bullshit. (Being circumspect is also defensive mechanism against bullshit; a bullshitter who knows that they have triggered your B.S. detector will fine tune their approach to in response.)
In all societies, there are certain things you can't say and often some of these things are the truth, so sometimes people become so practiced at papering over such things, that they become confused about what the truth really is.
Kids just don't have as much exposure to that.
(Sometimes those there are things you have to say, which the society wishes were true, and people become so practiced at acting as if they're true, people even start to convince themselves.)
Do you have any sources?
That is my source.
Having multiple loci of major innovation can help alleviate some of the problems of Silicon Valley's monoculture.
i digress.
TLDR:
“China is like a startup. The U.S. is like a big corporation... China runs very fast, tweaking along the way. The U.S. runs at a steady pace, doing a lot of research and development. It’s hard to tell who will win in the end.”
There's something really interesting about connecting with your customers and understanding how they use your products as opposed to assuming they are the same as your North American customers. The ones who succeed tend to do a good job on localization, not just translation but local product market fit research. (McDonalds, Starbucks, and Evernote are great examples.)
It seems awfully distasteful for an organization like the WSJ to make a dismissive play on the Great Leap Forward.
Between the face recognition, and the "social credit score" shit going on in China, I really hope their vision for the future does not catch on.
And where in China it may be the government, in the US it is EvilCorp or some other entity not bound by the constitution.
My face is recognized, tagged, and stored in Facebook servers, shared with intelligence agencies, and cross-referenced with all other photo's. And I don't even have a Facebook account (leading some employers to distrust me -- "what do I have to hide?" -- and lower their "social credit score" of me).
In contrast, I am relatively safe against China's spying apparatus.
As it is private property, it is free to set its own rules, even if those rules impede on my free speech. If Facebook was a government, it could not make those rules as per first amendment.
You can still sue of course.
Look, I feel AI-powered surveillance is scary, and think China is going too far (perhaps showing us a glimpse of the future) in this. But where it is state-run surveillance in China, it is capitalist-run surveillance in the West. That Europe needs to step up and protect its inhabitants is a sign of what happens if you give companies free reign in handling (private) data: A big privacy mess.
Not having "free speech" on Facebook isn't because the constitution doesn't apply to companies, it's because Facebook is like someone's house - private property - first amendment doesn't apply in my grandma's house as well.
They still have to oblige to your right of privacy etc, as I said, in Europe, you could sue (FB can't even use the photo tagging feature in EU because it'd be against the laws).
The constitution is just a basic law, it applies to corporations as well, it just doesn't speak about them much.
BTW, I don't really think you guys in the US should believe that your government will or will not do something because of something like the constitution - remember NSA? Remember Kim Dotcom?
You’re wrong. Most Constitutional rights are granted to all persons, and corporations are legal persons (and were well before the Constitution), and, furthermore, are generally vehicles for action by natural persons such that depriving them of rights is seen to effectively curtail the rights of natural persons; for both reasons, corporations are generally held to have Constitutional rights.
e-commerce is larger in China not so much because it is better, but because retail commerce is so underdeveloped. I'm not convinced it is per se better either. (cheaper, yes, but that's a COL issue)
Mobile-payments solve a problem the US doesn't have; China never had the well-developed credit card system the US had. Having used both extensively, mobile contactless payments are only marginally better for a consumer than using a physical credit card - and mobile QR code based ones are worse.
Cheap dockless bikes for rent are something I consider China to be solidly winning; that's blocked in the US by government regulation. US has plenty of meal-delivery options; lacking support at "any hour" is due to structural differences (lower density, higher COL)
My take: China's retail is fine, and from some perspectives the most developed in the world. Credit cards in particular but arguably bank cards in general are a broken system that needs to die.
No, it's that in a society that already has an effective solution that is tied together by network effects (credit cards), there is little incentive for a marginally superior system (contactless payments via mobile phone) to take off.
> Credit cards in particular but arguably bank cards in general are a broken system that needs to die
What are you comparing them to? Mobile-phone contactless payments linked to my credit account? I don't see the newer tech as that superior -- and I think the market generally agrees by having such little adoption.
> China's retail is fine, and from some perspectives the most developed in the world
I probably expressed this a bit wrong. At the time of the e-commerce boom in China, China's retail was far less developed than the US. This means there was more relative value for a customer to use e-commerce.
Another driver (that may be larger even) is a reduced car culture in China which means the cost of shopping at stores is higher.
(Regardless, from my comparison of being in Shanghai vs. the SF Bay Area, I would put the SF Bay Area's physical retail as superior. e.g. I recall being unable to buy a very basic computer adapter at a physical store in China. And I don't see online availability/shipping speeds as strictly greater in China either).
Yes, the downsides are well enumerated and discussed ad nauseum, and there are other interesting locations to run a startup, but dismissing it out right is rather silly.
It’s a great place to be young and wealthy, with minimal affect and empathy.
Is it though? The article makes a point that SV doesn't have the glitz and glamor, so if you're truly young and wealthy wouldn't you be better off somewhere else?
I don't know if there is any correlation to age and relative wealth with regards to success as an entrepreneur, but I do know that actually being an entrepreneur is a lot of hard work, regardless if you were raised with a silver spoon or not. There is a lot of hustle, and a lot of grind. Maybe if you're rich you can immediately just use your own money to pay others to do the hustling and grinding, but at that point aren't you really just an investor?