Sean Parker recently stated that small startups are ridicously over-funded where talented entrepreneurs start their own companies that don’t go anywhere resulting in a serious talent drain among bigger scalable companies. My buddy Michael Eisenberg similarily related to how that is negatively affecting the Israeli tech ecosystem by recommending non-scalable two-person startups to give up and joint bigger and more succesful companies going somewhere but having problems in attracting talented engineers.
My take on this is that both the investors and the founders of these small startups need to have an honest discussion of where things are going and act accordingly. The big problem here is that too many investors tend to follow up on an initial investment and thus keep the illusion of potential success alive even though the writing is on the wall…
I am really tired of social discovery as a way to find new interesting content. Let’s just be honest about it, most content on Facebook, Twitter and Google + is just recycled, ret-weeded and over-shared mainstream-like content with very little quality. The open Web is turning into a trash dump of recycled content consisting of executive, startup, VC, celebrity and Weblebrity gossip. It’s enough to read it once. I don’t need the same piece of shiitake in my face 15 times a day to get it. What we need is something new that can help us discover high quality content that is actually interesting. Is that so hard to come up with or is the social web turning us into mainstream conditioned “like” & re-tweet monkeys? Anyone?
I will be speaking at L2 ThinkTank’s China Clinic on Sept 9 in NYC in New York together with some great China hands: Christine Lu, CEO of Affinity China Sage Brennan, L2 Think Tank Rebecca Fannin and Sam Flemming founder of CIC to prestige brands about the exploding luxury market in China and the opportunity for luxury brands there. If you’re in town and want to meet up – let me know.
China market spotlight 2011 for Hemisphere
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Last week I gave a talk at Hemisphere, a global community of executives with operating experience leading international expansion and market development for digital companies worldwide, on the challenges for foreign Internet companies to enter and do business in China. Since I ofter get questions about this I decided to share the slides here.
This is a post I wrote for the Quora Review earlier this week.
As Quora is rapidly growing out of its Silicon Valley nest and is spreading its wings across the world, the question is: How will Quora deal with internationalization? Having experienced facebook’s internationalization efforts at first hand, I am intrigued by what approach Quora will take when the right time comes. After all Quora is a very different animal than Facebook.
Anybody who has been involved in internationalization efforts knows that it stretches far beyond than just translating a bunch of strings into a new language. It is said that, every translations is a new interpretation, but I wonder, is every question equal everywhere?
Assuming that Quora will crowd source the translation in a similar way to facebook , I dont’ think that the translation in itself is going to be much of an issue. I think the question the questions of identity and cultural sensitivity is going to be more challenging. That is, if Quora wants to stay close to it current identity.
Will Quora suffer from multiple personality disorder?
While Quora currently is perceived as an almost elitistic-like Q&A site colored by what is important in Silicon Valley , i.e. focused on technology, venture capital, startup gossip and entrepreneurism. I can’t help to wonder if that “identity” is scaleable ? And even if it is, is that something that Quora could and should strive to guide & maintain at any price? Will Quora embrace and encourage multiple identities throughout different markets even if their nature might be very different from its original identity ? How will Quora deal with turning into a site where the questions and answers will be centered around political views and religious orientations rather than technology, startups and venture capital ? How will Quora deal with two politically opposed groups lashing out against each other in a fierce Q & A battle in Iran? Monitoring and managing the active Quora community members to ensure that they uphold and follow Quora HQ policy can be tricky. One the one hand, you’d like the Quora community to set the tone and give them “editorial” freedom within reasonable limits. On the other hand, what if that goes out of hand in a direction contrary to Quora’s original vision? Is that good or bad? It begs the question: Will Quora be able to live with multiple “personalities” ?
How will Quora deal with cultural sensitivity?
Are all questions equal in every country and region? What can you ask where? Are there questions that are off limits in certain regions for political, religious or cultural reasons ? If so, how would the Quora community deal with them? What is irony in Bahrain and what is offensive in Poland? What is a sarcastic question in Italy and what constitutes a leading question in Russia? When does a question become antisemitic in Germany and racist in France? Can you ask how to make a Cheese burger in Israel, or where to find a bar in Saudi Arabia? Would it be offensive to ask where to buy contraception in Italy? Moreover, who will monitor the editors to ensure that the strike the “right” balance?
How will Quora deal with privacy and data protection in different countries?
If you’ve ever been involved in growing a company internationally, you know that it will come sooner rather than later. The privacy backlash. The data protection headaches. Every country has their own issue with privacy and data protection and Quora will have to comply with local laws and regulations in each and every market they operate in. The question is, can a question be illegal in certain countries? Likewise, can an answer be illegal in some countries? What will Quora do if it gets a request from the FBI via a foreign government to share the private data on one of its citizens for having asked “sensitive” questions? And if so, how will Quora protects its users from getting into trouble? These are just a handful of questions that comes to my mind when thinking about what challenges Quora might face with regards to internationalization.
The mother of all questions is: How will Quora approach internationalization?
Here is a fresh little video introduction to the exclusive Chinese network P1.
Here is a great interview with P1′s CEO & founder Yu Wang on building a private social network targeting the affluent market in China.
China is slated to become the world’s largest market for luxury goods by 2020 according to investment research group CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets. By 2020, the worldwide luxury market will be worth EUR 385 billion. This means that China will be represent almost 20% of the global total. Now wonder why designers all over the world are flocking to China. Affluent Chinese consumers have a great appetite for designer handbags, watches, clothing and cars.Louis Vuitton Malletier’s biggest customers were already Chinese buyers, while Greater China represented 18 percent of sales for Gucci, 14 percent for Bulgari and 11 percent for Hermes, according to CLSA. What I find really interesting is that unlike any other luxury market is that the biggest luxury consumers in China are men.
P1, the Chinese private social network catering to the affluent young Chinese have just posted their first video report: Cosmetics.
Some of my former facebook colleagues and myself were featured in a great piece by The New York Times on new companies stared by ex-facebook employees.Will be very interesting to see what can of companies the growing number of X-facebookers will create in 2011.
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