14 ms·
In Silicon Valley, Chinese 'accelerators' aim to bring startups home
- Clubber 8y ago"I make a Chine Pied Piper."
- rdlecler1 8y agoSurprised they missed CometLabs, an AI focused Accelerator in SF that is part of Legend Holdings.
- coliveira 8y agoThat looks great. More countries should have this kind of initiatives, so we could have technology to spread worldwide, instead of getting concentrated into a single high-cost area of the world.
- beebmam 8y agoFWIW, decent real estate is actually more expensive in large Chinese cities than in the US.
- coliveira 8y agoBut China is bigger than the US, they have much more space for development.
- chibg10 8y agoThis isn't true? Real estate prices in Shanghai and Beijing are lower (in absolute terms) than SF and NY. Relative to local incomes they're probably more expensive though. Shanghai and Beijing are (I believe) more expensive than Chicago or Atlanta in absolute terms.
- stevenwoo 8y agoI vaguely recall reading somewhere that all real estate ownership in China is limited to 70 years for residential buildings, and that is one reason why so many Chinese invest overseas - to build capital over generations.
- rahimnathwani 8y agoLand cannot be owned privately, but the government can grant a long lease (max 70 years for residential, 50 years for commercial). But IIRC the first of those 70 leases has yet to expire, so we don't know what will happen when they do.
- digaozao 8y agoWhat happens when you sell? The person only gets 70-x years of leasing? Or it renews?
- rahimnathwani 8y agoThe lease applies to the land on which the apartment is built. The 'owner' of the apartment building cannot grant you a lease that goes beyond the period remaining on the land lease. So you get 70-x. But not sure what will happen when these leases begin to expire.
- seanmcdirmid 8y agoYou can find a 90 sqm apartment in Beijing for $800k, 1 million if it’s in a brand new building. And Shanghai is much worse than BJ. It is definitely comparable to Seattle, if not San Francisco. Given such an anemic stock market, everyone invests in real estate instead, leading to a massive bubble not seen since Japan in the 80s.
- joshuaheard 8y agoWhere I live in Seattle, one reason for the high cost is Chinese cash buyers snapping up real estate to move their assets out of the country. China's authoritarian government's policy is world domination, and I don't think we should be helping them.
- StudentStuff 8y agoIgnore our highly restrictive zoning for the majority of the city, and the booming giants we have from Boeing to Amazon crowding the region. Many of the people I grew up with have moved from Capitol Hill, Ballard & West Seattle to Marysville, Tacoma and Issaquah due to the housing crisis pricing them out of the city. Condo complexes are practically never built due to our state liability laws, and the only apartments being built are premium units, as once you deal with the zoning requirements and end up with 20% of your building's floor space getting lopped off, that is the only thing that can profitably be built.
- joshuaheard 8y agoSeattle does have many other housing problems. However, I was outbid by all-cash Chinese buyers in Bellevue and Sammamish, as well, when looking for a house.
- StudentStuff 8y agoHave you looked at the zoning code in Bellevue or Sammamish? Its likely much worse than Seattle's, I know Kent's zoning is positively wretched, mandating that more than half of any commercially zoned property be paved for parking. How can you have density when you zone it away?
- Latteland 8y agoI have heard rumors of Chinese people buying up real estate, but I have never seen it in Bellevue. i live on a street with expensive homes, only 1 out of say 30 around me is owned by a person who appears to be of Chinese descent. Where is the evidence for this?
- 8y ago
- driverdan 8y agoIt's unethical to give a piece of your company to an oppressive government like China's or anyone else involved in human rights violations.
- megous 8y agoUS is involved in human rights violations too. So where does that logic leave us?
- Clubber 8y agoYes, the US certainly cannot claim the moral high ground any longer.
- nnash 8y agoOur country was built on genocide and slave labor, there was never a moral high ground.
- AlphaSite 8y agoI mean, yes it can. Its not a zero sum game, you can be bad in one area and good in another. Just don't forget your weaknesses.
- sametmax 8y agoWhich a lot of comments here prove they have forgot. I mean, the "we only attacked irak twice" is really something. And just because you are better on some part does not mean you should say "how come you can do such thing ?". We all do terrible things. You know how come. That's not making anything better.
- consumer451 8y agoWith all due respect, that sounds a bit like whataboutism. Or the false logic behind "I won't vote because I don't want to choose the lesser of two evils." It seems to me that once we reach adulthood we spend most days choosing the lesser the of two or more evils. While no country is perfect, the USA is still leaps and bounds ahead of China on human rights. As an example, what does the USA do that compares to this linked story? https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/former-inmates-of-chinas-muslim-re-education-camps-tell-of-brainwashing-torture/2018/05/16/32b330e8-5850-11e8-8b92-45fdd7aaef3c_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/former-inm... edit: as an immigrant to the USA, I sometimes feel like I am much more appreciative of the relative freedoms in the USA than folks born here.
- nopinsight 8y agoIt is not clear any longer that in the near future most new software technology will still originate in the US. It appears that the first author of about 50% or more of accepted long papers at ACL 2018, a top NLP conference, is a Chinese. (I didn't count comprehensively as there are > 200 papers, but I counted from a substantial sample.) http://acl2018.org/programme/papers/ http://acl2018.org/programme/papers/ Added: Yes, an NLP conference is far from a comprehensive sample of software technology. That is why my first sentence was quite tentative. Nevertheless, the data could be a harbinger for a more widespread phenomenon to come (US researchers used to dominate many, perhaps most, top AI conferences). The point is not mainland China will dominate software technology. It is that the US may no longer be dominant. Feel free to add other data to contribute to substantive discussion.
- curuinor 8y agoChinese ethnicity doesn't mean Chinese (PRC) national. There's also Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, etc...
- curuinor 8y ago(or american born chinese, or british born chinese, etc etc. almost nobody can get a chinese citizenship, plenty of smart people get american citizenships)
- seanmcdirmid 8y agoAnd plenty of Americans are Chinese (especially in tech research), if you see the latter as an ethnicity rather than a nationality.
- sidlls 8y agoIt isn't clear that your sample is representative of the population of "software technology."
- nopinsight 8y agoSome more/better data: I added up the number of university researchers who publish in top AI conferences (according to csrankings.org) between 2017 and 2018. Here are rough/approximate numbers of faculty members/university researchers who published as above in each country/continent: US 770 Canada 92 Asia (including China) 340 China 240 Europe 280 Australia + New Zealand 86 South America 12 The world excluding the US 810 So the US is still far ahead of other nations/regions, but it now has a bit below 50% of the world's university researchers who recently published in top conferences in AI. (AI is the field I'm interested in. Feel free to look into other fields.) An issue with the data is that some researchers in larger regions (Asia/Europe) may only choose to publish in their regional conferences instead. The number of researchers is not weighted by the number of papers published but this number is useful since it counts the number of people who are capable to advising graduate students to produce world-class research. Using the number of papers is complicated by the number of highly capable international graduate students who choose to study in each program (in addition to the researcher's capability). http://csrankings.org/#/fromyear/2017/toyear/2018/index?ai&vision&mlmining&nlp&ir&world http://csrankings.org/#/fromyear/2017/toyear/2018/index?ai&v...
- songgao 8y agoI can’t help but think this best aligns with US immigration system. US take in huge amount of international students, but don’t have a reliable (no, lottery-based work visa with a ~50% SLA is not reliable) and easy way for top graduates to work. Instead, policies that were made tens of years ago in fear of US jobs stolen by foreigners are still effective and the same mindset influence many Americans. This is just an effort among many to attract talent in the US, and at this point any country who doesn’t make this kind of effort is basically leaving free money on the table.
- VeronicaJJ123 8y agoAbsolutely correct. US immigration system has deep rooted racism against Chinese and Indians. (Indians who apply for green card today will get it only after 70 years or so). India has modified its policies to focus more on bringing VC money to its shores. Walmarts takeover of Flipkart is a result of that. Our company in Bay area moved few employees to Mumbai (while still paying them bay area salary. No kidding).
- rmason 8y agoOne of the most difficult problems we have in Michigan and the Midwest in general is that a large percentage of our most talented developers leave the state upon graduating college to go to work for the Silicon Valley giants. If you talk to them a few years later they long to return to the Midwest and they want to do a startup. What if Michigan had an accelerator in Silicon Valley, one where it's native VC's and angel investors had first crack at funding these companies with the provisio that they move back home?
- cyberpunk0 8y agoI mean do you blame them? It's cold, not much to do, political turmoil in recent years. I don't see MI offering a lot
- bischofs 8y agoWas warm enough for Henry Ford, The Dodge Brothers, William Durant, Herbert Henry Dow, Louis Chevrolet etc. Maybe some thicker skin and a harder winter would benefit folks ;)
- nemonemo 8y agoAt that time, Silicon valley didn’t exist and California was barely getting mass migration. About a century later, now even the car industry seems to move toward California..
- bischofs 8y agoDoesn't seem like a good thing to me, with the cost of real estate, energy and labor in California, building sprawling manufacturing plants for cars probably won't work. Plus the margins on building cars are very low at high volumes - not something SV is used to.
- Retric 8y agoCalifornia is huge and has plenty of cheap land as long as you don't need to live next to the ocean. Ex: ~1000$ an acre. https://www.landandfarm.com/property/Freeman_Ranch-7072064/ https://www.landandfarm.com/property/Freeman_Ranch-7072064/
- Animats 8y agoChina is going to win this one, because US VCs want to "exit". Big Chinese companies are quite happy to keep ownership as the company becomes operational and profitable. They want revenue, not valuation.
- noobermin 8y agoI might be touching a sacred pearl in these parts, but in many ways, the US start-up system incentivizes the wrong things, as you say, just getting an exit. A more valuable thing for people with capital to shoot for is sustained or long-term value (revenue is one of those things I guess).
- tmd83 8y agoThat is definitely the vibe I get most of the time I read something non technical about a startup. In general a lot of startup resources (not just money but raw intelligence of really smart people) get pulled into frivolous things and when you add short term value seeking on top of that, it's not a recipe for improving humanity.
- staticautomatic 8y agoIndeed, the tech world (and to some extent, the business world more generally) is a stark reminder that there is no longer any social pressure against being a "sellout."
- seanmcdirmid 8y agoThis doesn’t match the fact that Chinese startups and recently IPOd tech companies have much much higher valuations and P/E ratios (for the latter) than in the west. If you are looking at primarily operating income, China is actually a horrible place to be. If you want to speculate however, well, that is what everyone else is doing there.
- patosai 8y agoThe reason why IPO'd companies have higher valuations in China is because the stock market is controlled by the government. So instead of just giving the SEC a number of financial documents to prove you're not fraudulent and getting a stock broker to help you sell your stock, you do all of that and more to hopefully get put on a waiting list. And once you're on the waiting list, which has maybe around 600-700 companies, there might be some 300 IPOs a year. Out of the 10,000+ that want to go public. The Chinese government really cares about how the stock market is performing (up and to the right, right?) and they try to source some of their legitimacy from these economic gains. In theory, if they let companies IPO when they wanted, supply and demand shows that the price of stock generally goes down. So all the capital that would have gone into other things in the market, like let's say undervalued tech companies, instead goes toward buying a handful of tickers which have inflated value because there's nothing else people can invest in. Now as for valuations, PE and VC firms in China get a lot of money from the Chinese government which doesn't exactly need to see a huge return on investment since they're more focused on deploying capital in industries which the government identify as important (like AI). And so firms will invest at greater multiples and with larger amounts of money.
- NicoJuicy 8y agoWhen you lived in the West, why return to China? ( Except money)