In September 2014, Cho-Nan Tsai, a software engineering manager in Pasadena, California, got a phone call that felt like the beckoning of history. A fellow alumnus from Columbia University had an idea for a startup that could disrupt China’s wild digital marketing scene. Did Tsai want in?
“He told me there are a lot of these [venture capital firms] popping up in Beijing, and companies were getting funded very easily,” Tsai recalls.
Kai-fu Lee at Disrupt Beijing 2011. Credit: TechCrunch
Indeed, at the time, China’s internet scene was booming, and venture capitalists were scouring Beijing for the next Jack Ma. Innovation Works, a Beijing-based incubator founded by ex-Google executive Kai-fu Lee, had just raised $275 million to fund new internet projects. Another fund, 36Kr, had bagged a Series D from Ma’s Ant Group and was focused on the capital’s startups. Tsai, then in his early 30s, felt this was his chance.
“Back then, Beijing was the talk of the town,” he
Exclusive longform investigative journalism, Q&As, news and analysis, and data on Chinese business elites and corporations. We publish China scoops you won't find anywhere else.
A weekly curated reading list on China from David Barboza, Pulitzer Prize-winning former Shanghai correspondent for The New York Times.
A daily roundup of China finance, business and economics headlines.
We offer discounts for groups, institutions and students. Go to our Subscriptions page for details.
On Thursday, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo met with Wang Wentao, the Chinese Commerce Minister, in Washington. It marked the first cabinet-level meeting in Washington between the U.S. and China during the Biden administration, and it was a signal of the Commerce Department’s increasingly central role in the current U.S.-China relationship. Usually, the Commerce Department is far from the center of anything, but as Katrina Northrop reports, the department is uniquely suited to address the China challenge.
The lawyer and author talks about the attack on a train in the 1920s which created an international incident, the rise of the Communist Party and the conditions for foreign media in China today.