Sandhill Road VCs Face Great Wall Hurdles:
In this week’s Red Herring issue, Jeremy Xue, the managing director of Beijing- based Tsinghua Science Park Venture Capital, an affiliate of China’s prestigious university knows that the domestic venture capitalists and even the foreign VCs are risk adverse and sums it by saying that when it comes to supporting entrepreneurs, “there is a lot of talk but no action.”
Xue goes on to indentify specific reasons why most Silicon Valley VCs are still misguided and often misinformed in their attempted China due diligence:
Kanbujian. VCs simply don’t see the deals because they are difficult to find.
Kanbuqi. VCs don’t take the deals seriously because they are often too small.
Kanbudong. Foreign VCs fail to understand the deals because they (the deals) are too Chinese.
As is often the typical American or rather Silicon Valley approach, the VC jets into the Middle Kingdom mid-week and expects to be flooded with deals before the end of the week. Additionally, the investors dismiss small tech deals because they cannot justify the extraordinary attorney fees.
The final excuse for not investing in Chinese tech companies is simply fear. Sandhill Road, home to the largest concentration of VCs don’t understand the language, culture and ultimately the level or role played by government influence.
In the Red Herring article, WI Harper’s David Zhang has this advice for Western-based venture capitalists who want to invest in China: “If you want to make money in China, you cannot take the short-term, fly-by commando approach and try to manage remotely. If you do, you will get burned and lose your money.”

Related entries:

Silicon Valley Bank Bridges Sandhill Road and Shanghai… – Aug 03, 2005
U.S. VCs Scaling China’s Great Investment Wall… – Jul 29, 2005

Related Research Reports:

WSJ: Google Print is good for writers:
Cory Doctorow:
Today’s Wall Street Journal has a great editorial on why Google Print is a good deal for struggling writers (and, by implication, why the Authors’ Guild lawsuit against Google is so foolish):

Many a frustrated author can tell you that being published is just the start of the dream of making it as a writer: If your publisher doesn’t back your book, or it doesn’t quickly connect with the reading public, it’ll soon fall out of print and very few people will ever hear of you or your ideas again. That’s exactly the frustration that’s driven many writers to the Web, where anyone can publish and be guaranteed a world-wide audience for his or her thoughts.

But it’s not the Web itself that makes that guarantee — it’s the search engines that tame the Web’s terabytes upon terabytes of information by making it all searchable. Google Print could bring those same advantages to all the book world’s frustrated and forgotten authors, putting their ideas before a limitless audience that could then buy their books. That seems like something any author or publisher would want — and Google is willing to do the work for them.

Of course, Google isn’t “just” a search engine — it has ambitions far beyond that. Publishers and authors should keep their eyes on Google Print, and if Google steps beyond what “fair use” allows it to do, the law will be on their side. But for now, authors and publishers have far more to gain than they have to fear. Here’s a core value for them to adopt: Don’t be short-sighted.

Link

(Thanks, Carl!)

This sucks, I love that store! I’m sorta into fountain pens, so I used to go there often. There was another paper store next to Central Market on Lamar that was really cool too. Best of luck to Kelly Fielding, the owner.

Fare Thee Well, Paper & Ink:

One of our favorite stationery and producers of all personalized-paper-related products and services stores is closing its doors. You may remember reading an earlier post about our good friends at Paper & Ink. Well, starting Monday, Oct 3rd, all inventory, fixtures, furniture and displays will be majorly discounted. All personalized stationery and holiday card orders are 25% off. Their last day open will be Oct. 28th – a new tenant is moving in on the following Monday! (We can not speak the new tenant’s name here; not out of hatred, just cuz’a like legality issues and such. But look for more about that space later in this space

For more information, check out the owner’s note to her customers.

Paper & Ink
706 Congress Ave.
Closing Its Doors Sale

How much would you lose if you bought stocks from spam?:
Cory Doctorow:

SpamStockTracker tracks how much money you’d lose if you actually followed the pump-and-dump “stock tips” you get in your spam:

Link

(via O’Reilly Radar)

Wow this is cool!

Glowing multicolored bathtubs and sinks — tchotchkes for your bathroom:
Cory Doctorow:

Hard to say what I like so much about these glowing bathtubs and sinks, illuminated from within by colored lights. I think it’s that they are basically full-sized bathroom fixtures designed with the same novelty aesthetic as a point-of-sale gewgaw like a flashlight-compass that’s also a Pez dispenser. It takes a lot of guts to manufacture a tchotchke that weighs hundreds of pounds, takes up half a bathroom, and glows popsicle green.

Link

(via Popgadget)