Something is wrong with China’s entrepreneurs, and Kaifu Lee knows how to fix it

Kaifu Lee is a man who knows Chinese entrepreneurs well. He’s the founder of Innovation Works, arguably China’s biggest and most successful accelerator/VC, and he’s also the man behind entrepreneur-training organizations like the Young CEO Club. When he says Chinese entrepreneurs have a problem, he knows what he’s talking about.

In an interview with Sina Tech about his trip earlier this year with Chinese founders to visit a number of big names in Silicon Valley, Lee explained his view of China’s entrepreneurs:

“Our entrepreneurs have many strengths: intellectual knowledge, product design, management, competitive strategy and tactics, etc. And through fraternity organizations we’ve already expanded their social networks, leading to more mutual cooperation. But at present, pattern-recognition and worldview seems to be lacking. Lacking that is the difference between a billion-dollar company and a ten-billion-dollar company.”

There are, of course, a few great role models in China for that kind of thinking: Jack Ma, Pony Ma, Wang Xing. But Lee says that the best place to for entrepreneurs to learn that long-distance big-picture worldview is still the US. “When it comes to describing how your company will change the world in one sentence,” he says, “I think it’s best to go to the ‘holy land’ Silicon Valley to increase your knowledge.”

Because of their broad worldview and problem-solving approach, Lee says, the Americans “are still worth studying.”