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During the past 20 years, the author has watch China move from being a developing country into an industrial superpower
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Veteran entrepreneur and former Dolby Laboratories executive Jason Johnson and his technical co-founder, Hugo Dong, recently raised $10 million from IDG-Accel for their security apps business, BlueSprig. Theirs may sound like your typical Silicon Valley startup story, but there’s one important twist—Dong lives and works in Chengdu, China, and Johnson is in San Francisco. So how do two co-founders separated by the Pacific Ocean and a 16-hour time difference make their business work? We called Johnson to find out.
Why did you decide to look to China for collaborators?
There are only three ways to acquire talent. Steal people. That’s basically what you do in the world of development—good Python or Java or Rails developers aren’t sitting around with nothing to do. No. 2, you acquire small companies, and No. 3, you go overseas and either you hire people or, more commonly, you contract to a contract firm. We’re basically employing techniques No. 2 and No. 3—No. 3 being unique in that we’ve built our own team of developers in Sichuan province, China.
How did you meet your co-founder?
We were introduced. I was looking for a technical co-founder. He was a fairly brilliant product developer in China and was looking for a partner, so it kind of was the perfect pairing: I needed a development team, and he needed access to markets and relationships. IDG-Accel really gets the credit for marrying us and giving us the capital to build some great products.
How many other team members do you have now, and where are they located?
Right now we have about 15 people in China. Nearly everyone is in China at this point because it was easy to hire quickly and get our products developed in record time. Now I’ll backfill positions here in San Francisco, but our intention is to keep the majority of our development in China.
Why build your own team of employees rather than use contractors?
I don’t have any particular issues with contracting. I’ve hired contracting firms in the past. The challenge, particularly when you’re developing sensitive software such as security software, is that we need people who are committed to our product. With a contract firm, you never know what’s going to happen. You don’t have the ability to [create incentives for] people to stay on a product. Generally, the contract firms don’t guarantee anybody on the team. So frankly, we wanted the control that would allow us to build a team that could gel together, build a relationship, and be committed.
One nice thing about having such a committed team in Chengdu is that while a lot of burgeoning companies are in China, there’s not nearly as many as in Silicon Valley, so I don’t have to worry about my developers getting poached by other software startups in the area. It can and will happen, of course, but not nearly at the rate it happens in Silicon Valley.
What other advantages are there to having a remote, cross-cultural team?
As much as I’ve always been impressed by developers in Silicon Valley, I’m thoroughly impressed with Chinese engineers’ level of commitment and willingness to work difficult hours and perform superhuman feats. I did not expect to see the level of results I’ve seen, and I can’t possibly overstate how dedicated and hungry these young Chinese engineers are to prove themselves and build great products.
What tools do you use to stay in touch and collaborate?
I wish I could say we had some kind of special tricks and tools. The truth is, aside from the scrum methodology that many startups use—having people standing in a room for a couple of minutes reviewing a project—most teams even here in Silicon Valley are doing a lot of their collaboration using online tools. Long meetings sitting in conference rooms and reviewing project plans—people don’t do that anymore. With 37signals and some of these tools, it doesn’t really matter if the person is in the cube next to you or thousands of miles away.
