By Jochen Schanbacher
Jun. 27 – Not many foreigners are brave enough to start a company in China, especially an internet business. Willing to try are the people of Yunio (云诺), who have created a cloud storage service much like Dropbox, but with an advantage the competition doesn’t have: access to the Chinese market. I recently had the pleasure of meeting Yunio’s Founder Chris Mathews and Operations Director Joey Gu in their office here in Shanghai.
“If you were to put the creation of an internet startup into a video game, setting up in Silicon Valley would be like playing on ‘normal’ mode while creating a company in China is like playing on ‘difficult’ mode,” according to Chris, who has experience doing both. “Every aspect of a tech startup is tougher in China than in the United States – from the regulatory environment to the inherent limitations of the Chinese internet backbone – and you are doing it all on your own.”
The creation of Yunio started with an idea that was first developed into a prototype in the comfort of Chris’ own apartment in Shanghai back in 2010 alongside cofounder Rick Olson. With the prototype, Chris and Rick went looking for (and found) a Chinese angel investor who supplied them with the angel investment. They are now set to launch version 2.0 in the next few months. Great for all cloud-savvy “laowai” out there is that this new edition will include an English version. To come to this point, the company had to solve some normal startup problems as well as some China-specific ones.
Chris himself is an American with an ethnic Chinese background who came to China to be rooted and because he knew this was where he wanted to be. Early on in his time here, Chris decided to conduct an MBA at Fudan University to connect with local like-minded individuals. He’s also taken the time to learn and appreciate the local culture, and his first point of advice was that learning Chinese is essential if you want to do business here.
“Would you ever go to America and do a startup without speaking English? Probably not. The same applies to China; you just HAVE to learn Chinese,” Chris says.
With over 450 million netizens and a forecasted e-commerce market of US$311 billion by 2015, the Chinese online environment has great potential for startups. The hurdles to enter and succeed in this market, however, are equally tough to overcome.
Continue reading this article on China Briefing News.
