What American Startups Can Learn From the Cutthroat Chinese Software Industry | Hacker News Reader

What American Startups Can Learn From the Cutthroat Chinese Software Industry

fastcolabs.com

45 pointsmankins7 comments

> Kobo says American startups like to develop products without the "impure" influence of monetization, "but [in China] the development of a good product isn’t even thought of in the beginning," he says. "Chinese web companies have a totally nonchalant attitude towards creating the actual products. They are just a lot more focused on ways to make money from the outset.”

...because they know that, due to their country's non-existent respect for intellectual property, they can just rip off the product itself from something created in America.

...whereas in America, capitalist cowboys wear white hats and respect others' intellectual property or even the common folk's human rights.

Similar to how America used to disrespect foreign intellectual property back in the day: http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/khan.copyright

'The U.S. was long a net importer of literary and artistic works, especially from England, which implied that recognition of foreign copyrights would have led to a net deficit in international royalty payments. The Copyright Act recognized this when it specified that "nothing in this act shall be construed to extend to prohibit the importation or vending, reprinting or publishing within the United States, of any map, chart, book or books ... by any person not a citizen of the United States." Thus, the statutes explicitly authorized Americans to take free advantage of the cultural output of other countries. As a result, it was alleged that American publishers "indiscriminately reprinted books by foreign authors without even the pretence of acknowledgement."'

It's a tendency that nations (and startups) break the rules as much as possible in the early stages or when behind, and as soon as they're ahead seek to prevent others from getting similarly ahead by lobbying for stricter regulations and intellectual property rights.

(1) The current state of the world is more relevant to China then what we did in the past.

(2) In this case, Chinese entrepreneurs are constantly ripping off from each other, making the situation intolerable even if we ignore theft of global IP. Enforcing IP rights in China at this point would be good China, not just for foreign IP right owners.

The real question here is how important the bottom line is. I think this is more like Cold War thinking - Let the west put up all the costs for research and development, if works - we will borrow it. Using this method, your competitor wastes time and money developing something and you come in and take what works. Is it efficient? Yes.

However, by following the non-risky approach means you are always second and never first (to capture largest market share). The internet: .com for US vs .co.uk, .co.cn. The telephone: +1 for US, 011+86 for China.

The Chinese approach is similar to the approach taught in an entrepreneurship class I'm taking at the University of Michigan right now (ENGR 520). They teach a variety of tools and models, but most of them revolve around how to identify the high-value-capture activities in an industry segment, evaluate the barriers to entry and founder capability sets, come up with a strategy to get into the industry, and calculate whether or not the business is worth starting. For the purposes of the class, they encourage us to assume the business implementation (technology) will work, since the point is to figure out whether or not the business is worth doing in the first place.

"...If you’re not building a business, then what are you doing?”

Innovating, maybe?

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