Four meetings today plus a dinner, with a break in the middle (that’s how I got those last 2 posts done). Three were with entrepreneurs.

The first one was awesome: Zhang Tao, Founder and CEO of Dianping.com, essentially the Yelp of China.

Zhangtao (thanks Crystyl)

Tao is a widely known and respected entrepreneur here with backing from Sequoia China. Reviews started much earlier in China because of the lack of credible sources of information. Tao spent 10 years doing IT consulting in the U.S. then went to Wharton and returned to china with the goal of doing his own thing. He was a Zagat user and saw that their paper-based review process would be much better as an online – he mixed Zagat with the Amazon book reviews that he depended on, the idea of reputation from eBay, and the power of Wikipedia. Like Yelp, Dianping started with a restaurant focus but now covers almost everything. They’ve just started a Groupon-like model (hasn’t everyone?) that is already extremely successful.

An aside: the elevators here are small and slow…

Morning Rush Hour Line for the Elevator

Next we went way out to a software park, a government-subsidized office building for technology companies, to meet with Peter He, Founder/CEO of Qoolu, a kids club startup. This is Peter’s third company in China, but his first on the Internet and the first consumer-facing. He also spent sometime working to open China for Barracuda Networks, so we had anti-spam stories to swap. His take is that it is extraordinarily difficult for foreign companies without a huge brand (Microsoft, Proctor & Gamble) to enter China, and that it costs at least $10m and takes 3 years. That echoes what I’ve heard from almost everyone here who’s done it or tried to .

Peter was very candid about the challenges of each business he’s done, including the current one. Like many entrepreneurs here, he started Qoolu as angel investor, with a development team creating product while he was still working. These teams are extraordinarily cheap – a decent manager can be had for $2,000/month, with 5 or 6 developers for half of that each.

Peter He and I at Qoolu offices

Back into town, we went to Softbank China to meet with William Bao Bing. Despite claiming to be tired, William was like a fire hose, spouting quality insights non-stop for the entire length of our meeting. He’s doing deals in many places and shared a deep understanding of almost every Internet market. From a cultural/management perspective, he sees the main Chinese advantage as speed. The Chinese approach is much more fluid here than in the West (another recurring them), with solid high-level strategy paired with fast execution and shifting, but no planning. The only competitive advantage on the Internet here, where anything can and will be copied quickly.

Finally, we went to another out-of-the-way spot to talk with Sam Flemming, another ex-pat and entrepreneur. Sam started CIC, a word of mouth analytics and consulting company in 2004. As noted above, China was way ahead of the U.S. and Sam saw that people here were going to message boards to research products. He used the same approach to develop the initial system, then got lucky when he spoke at Ad:Tech 2005; he met a classic early adopter from Pepsi who became the company’s first client. Today they have clients including Pepsi, Nike, Intel, L’Oreal, and 90 employees. He self-funded the company initially, did a very small angel round, and have been profitable since day 1. It’s a great model to emulate.

From CIC we rushed over to meet with the wife of a friend of a friend to have awesome dumplings at Din Tai Fun. It was a great time – Mary is a firecracker – an intense, smart, beautiful California girl. She’s an animator for DreamWorks, and goes back and forth between Pasadena when she’s working on a movie and Shanghai when she’s not. It was a great change of pace – like a night out with a girlfriend. And I got the perspective of the person who deals with all the day-to-day family life issues here.