“It’s the Silicon Valley experience in Shanghai”

A lot of people around the world are now taking notice of Chinese web giants like Alibaba and Tencent. But China’s startups are generally overlooked and have little chance of breaking out onto the world stage. China’s most active startup accelerator, dubbed Chinaccelerator, is trying to change that. “It’s a bridge, internationally,” says Chinaccelerator managing director William Bao Bean. “It’s the Silicon Valley experience in Shanghai.”

Shanghai is China’s “most outward-facing city,” he adds, which makes it a good fit for the program. But Chinaccelerator, which started in 2009, was initially based in Dalian, up in China’s northeast, not too far from the North Korean border. It headed south to warmer and more cosmopolitan climes earlier this year; the program’s fifth batch of startups, which graduated in May, was its first out of Shanghai. Now it’s midway through the sixth batch as the participating teams build up to the demo day towards the end of November.

“Demo day is not the finish line,” says Bean. He believes that it’s “tough for startups to connect with brands,” even though for many it would be very beneficial to have such strategic partnerships. So Bean and the Chinaccelerator team place an emphasis on helping startups connect with major companies, even long after the startup teams have flown the coop.

Startups have short-term goals, but brands have long-term goals. So we set up projects that are short-term where brands can see success quickly – or failure.

That’s all part of ensuring that the startup graduates grow quickly once they’re out the door. “Our focus is around traction,” adds Bean. He runs an ‘Innovation Day’, which is actually open to anyone, to connect Chinaccelerator’s incubated teams to important brands like McDonalds, Sony, Coach, and Chinese dairy firm Mengniu [1].

“Startup language and corporate language are very different. We do the translation,” he adds.

There’s no charge for the assistance to Chinaccelerator’s graduates. The program, which is run by SOS Ventures, invests in every startup, taking a flat six percent equity in return for US$16,000, so it has an interest in seeing the young businesses gain traction, make partnerships, attract users, and eventually churn out a profit. If they survive.

Where are the incubators?

Bean is new to Chinaccelerator, taking over the top spot this week from co-founder Cyril Ebersweiler. It coincides with Bean (pictured below) joining SOS Ventures as an investment partner for Asia. He departed SingTel Innov8 for this new role.

SOS Ventures runs five other accelerators besides Chinaccelerator, including Shenzhen-based HAXLR8R, which focuses on hardware startups. While Chinaccelerator specializes in web startups, they both share the idea of connecting Chinese startups to the world, and both also host a number of overseas teams that set up base in China.

The new MD points to Orderwithme as the most high-profile and successful of Chinaccelerator’s graduates. It makes use of China’s manufacturing firepower to offer wholesale group buying for small businesses. After the team’s stint at Chinaccelerator in late 2011, the startup crew quickly – in literally just two weeks – went on to win Techcrunch Disrupt in Beijing. Investors have so far ploughed in US$9 million into Orderwithme, and it eventually relocated to Las Vegas to be closer to its customers.