What American Startups Can Learn From The Cutthroat Chinese Software Industry

The cutthroat attitude may be good for businesses, but this arrangement sounds miserable for users:

>Platform-to-platform in China is war, and it is fought viciously and bitterly. If you have a Gmail account and send an email to, for example, NetEase163.com, which is the local web dominant player, it will most likely go to spam or junk folders regardless of your settings. Just to get an email to go through to your inbox, the company sending the email needs to have a special partnership.

"With monetization offsetting some of the cost, the team estimated they could bootstrap their way through the first year. “"

This is not bootstrapping. They are still taking millions in investment and it still requires a lot of connections in China to raise that kind of cash at anything approaching a good valuation. I'm guessing this guy is funded by people abroad.

My experience with Chinese startups is that they are management-driven, taking money from insiders and developing complex management structures built on cheap programming labour. So you get a team of twenty people that end up doing a worse job at product development than two or three programmers in California, while spending a lot more money in the process.