“Should I bother to come to China, people ask often, The answer generally is: No.” William Bao Bean talks to a group of Israeli startups in Tel Aviv. “When you use your gut feeling in China, you are mostly wrong. In China technology is not important, its about cash, friends or both.” Lessons from a seasoned investor, who says you can only succeed if you have an “unfair advantage”.Read More →
Getting your product into the market could be a costly adventure in the past. But Tencent´s WeChat is offering a cheap alternative for startup companies, says William Bao Bean managing director of Chinaccelerator in Technode at the Chinaccelerator Demo Day, presenting new startups.Read More →
Is China lagging in innovations? Certainly not when it comes to ecommerce, says William Bao Bean, managing director of Chinaccelerator, in TechinAsia. “If you can get ahold of Facebook’s product roadmap, it’s a giant WeChat clone,” he says.Read More →
China closed a US$2 billion deal with Russia to purchase 24 Su-35 fighters. Question, looking at the rather small amount, according to defense analyst Wendell Minnick in Defense News: will China reverse engineer the planes, like it did before.Read More →
Alibaba, and its competitor JD.com made a record sales (or gross merchandise volume, GMV, as it is called) during Single´s Day. But retail specialist Ben Cavender also looks at the little print in the contract, and wonders in CNN Money if the record sales contribute to the profits.Read More →
Far away are the days high-tech zones would offer an office and tax breaks to startups. China´s government has become much smarter in nurturing the next generation Jack Ma´s, says William Bao Bean, managing director of Chinaccelerator and an investment partner at SOS Ventures in InTheBlack.Read More →
The world outside China hardly realizes how fast e-commerce is changing the country. “Brick-and-mortar is basically dead, unless you have something special to offer,” says Shanghai-based business analyst Shaun Rein , author of The End of Copycat China in the South China Morning Post. The rest of the world will follow.Read More →
China´s traditional medicine suddenly got into the limelight as Tu Youyou was awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine. But the experts in traditional medicine had very mixed feelings, writes journalist Ian Johnson for the New York Times. Tu might have her roots in traditional medicine, but the Nobel Prize certainly did not honor that work.Read More →
Google, Ebay and Amazon are just some of the tech giants who failed in China. With a good preparation that would not have happened, claims William Bao Bean, managing director of the ChinaAccelarator. His organization prepares startups for launches in China, and Chinese firms for going global.Read More →
Eyebrows were raised when China’s food delivery service Ele.me last week announced it raised funds worth US$630 million, while in reality it was less than US$400 million. Startup expert William Bao Bean was not amazed. China´s startups are very competitive, and cheating on figures is part of that, he told VentureBeat.Read More →
The recent downturn in the financial markets is not going to have too much impact on the booming scene of startups in China, says ChinaAccelerator managing director William Bao Bean in the Business Standard. Although the second half of 2015 would have been anyway tougher.Read More →
The trend for the coming five years is China going global, says William Bao Bean, managing director of Chinaccelerator, the first and longest running startup accelerator program in China in E27. “These innovations are best targeted at other mobile-first markets in Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe and South America, and not US and Western Europe,”Read More →