The Six Entrepreneurs You Meet in China

Forget those perceptions that the Chinese rip off good ideas. Their startups are as scrappy and risk-taking as those in Silicon Valley

By Sarah Lacy

Editor's note: This is the first of a two-part Valley Girl series on entrepreneurs in China. The first three of six types of businessmen are featured below.

Before my first trip to China earlier this year, a well-known Silicon Valley venture capitalist told me I should go to Japan or Singapore instead. "Chinese people aren't entrepreneurial," he said. "They don't create things. They're just good at ripping them off."

I won't embarrass him by using his name here, but I'm glad I didn't take his advice. I've spent five weeks on two trips to China this year, meeting with entrepreneurs in Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong. These startup founders are as scrappy and willing to take risks as their peers anywhere, at times even surpassing the people who flocked to Silicon Valley in the late 1990s.

Conditions for new companies in China are hardly ideal. The modernity of the big cities is not yet widespread. Regulation is still a moving target. But there's still enough progress and wealth created by new businesses to give entrepreneurs hope.

Given China's size and geographic, demographic, and economic diversity, I can't possibly give a one-size-fits-all description of the typical Chinese entrepreneur. But for those who believe the country doesn't do entrepreneurship well, here's a rundown of the six types of entrepreneurs you'll meet in China (with apologies, of course, to Mitch Albom, author of the best-selling The Five People You Meet in Heaven).

The Opportunist. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. Sure, there are plenty of poseur-opportunists who flock to China (from the U.S. primarily, but also from Europe) but know or care little about the place. They may not even have great ideas for a company; they just want in on the action. The good news is that poseurs get weeded out fast. Most Westerners who move to China leave within the first year, I'm told. Locals put the percentage as high as 90%.

But opportunists also take the form of talented, ambitious thrill-seekers who can thrive in China. Take Richard Robinson, the New England-born co-founder of Kooky Panda, a company that taps local developer talent to create social games for cell phones. Robinson is formerly vice-president for sales and marketing at Renren.com, a dot-com-era company that went public on the Hong Kong stock exchange in 2000, only to get acquired at a lower price by a local company in 2001. Robinson also founded a mobile gaming company called MiG that was acquired by Glu Mobile (GLUU) in 2007.

Robinson—who backpacked around the world for years and wound up in China via the Trans-Siberian Railway—is now a lifer. He's got a Chinese wife and in-laws and two kids who he says are "made in China." He even wears cufflinks bearing the Chinese flag. Successful as he's been, Robinson entertains no illusions of creating the next great Web or mobile company that dominates the domestic market. "That's not the game I'm going to win," he says. Instead, Kooky Panda uses high-quality, low-cost game design talent in China to build content for much of the Western world.

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