

What American Startups Can Learn From The Cutthroat Chinese Software Industry - hello_newman
http://www.fastcolabs.com/3005191/what-american-startups-can-learn-cutthroat-chinese-software-industry

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jamesjporter
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.

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trevelyan
"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.

