Coffee Chat with James Tan: A Singaporean Entrepreneur in China

This post is a part of our coverage of Startups in Asia (Singapore), Penn Olson’s first tech conference. Our full coverage of the event can be found here, for our RSS feed, click here.

General Summary
Willis Wee spoke with James Tan, the co-Founder of 55tuan who we have written about before and managing partner at QuestVC. James discussed his own experiences going to China to do business there, and explained that while his experience there has been a fruitful one so far, that it can often be an arduous process for foreign startups to adjust to the market there.

Liveblog

#10:09: Typically we want to invest in local startups, because for foreign startups to come into China and learn the local system, local markets — it can take as long as three years, and that’s just too long.

#10:07: If your idea is something we think makes sense for Chinese market, we would be happy to help you do everything along the way. But at the same time we don’t want to make it too comfortable.

#10:06: On China besides Beijing: You can explore, but its still pretty much about Beijing for me. That’s where companies can find the necessary talent. The country can support many hubs, but there is still one major center and that’s Beijing.

#10:04: James refers to how many companies in China “copy first and innovate later.” If you look at all the big startups in China. Baidu, like Google. Tencent like MSN and ICQ. All of them started as copied but differe greatly from the originals now. It means localizing and innovating on top of the initial idea.

#10:01: I’m not going to defend [Chinese copying], but if a good idea comes from the west, it will be copied anywhere in the world. Executing well is important, because even if you copy, it may not work if it is not executed well.

#10:00: Advice to entrepreneurs: Find good partners. I think events like this help, I would love to see Penn Olson do an event like this in Beijing.

#09:59: There is a crisis of trust in Chinese companies that started back in May or June. We took a step back to look at the best time to list. We had to step back and ask, do we need capital or not.

#09:58: There are many ranking criteria. We typically go by revenue, which see us in the top three. Top three players are always consistent. There are only three sites that have a transaction value of 200 million RMB. Every day we transact more than $1 million.

#09:57: Three months after launch we had about 80 competitors.

#09:56: James explains how he went to China on a scholarship, met cofounders there. Cofounders all from Qinghua university.