Shenzhen

“It's said that, you know, a lot of these robots, whether they're humanoid or industrial robots, the raw kind of hardware itself can be like at least 50% cheaper than produced elsewhere.”

“So in 2004, when I went to Shenzhen there were three copies of LinkedIn. There were such exact copies in Chinese. I could fill out a profile. And I don't speak any Chinese.”

“I think, actually, the East Bay, where we are near the Bay Area, has great potential for this. Like, there's some alternate universe Where this looks like what Shenzhen looks like, and I don't think there's anything fundamentally that should stop us from getti…”

“And because it was a free to attend event, we got 700 people to come every month.”

“It's the most modern city in the world. It's leading the world with leading the world with innovation in the fields of like robotics and AI. So I think if people want to have like a glance about the future, how the future is going to look like, they should vis…”

“You could design a circuit board in the morning and some kid would run over to your office by nighttime.”

“If you've ever been to Shenzhen, which I went to even before I joined in recent Horowitz and saw the manufacturing capabilities of advanced, advanced manufacturing, robotics manufacturing you know, and then now we see the defense like shipbuilding manufacturin…”

“They're the two great founts of entrepreneurial dynamism in the world. It is Shenzhen and Silicon Valley that are inventing the future and not so much Europe and Japan. Any longer.”

“I find Shenzhen probably the most boring city in China. It's a lot of these big office parks. A lot of it is meant for driving. The city layout is actually kind of weird. It's like there's several big hubs that are connected by highways that are pretty distant…”

“A lot of these investments have been in place for 10 years, some for 15 years and there's no easy thing, not export controls That will derail this tech engine very easily.”

“In the factories in Shenzhen, there are the rural people, and they're not allowed to just move. Like, they can temporarily relocate for work, and then the state sort of requires them to go back, and in a sense, they are forced to repatriate what they earned as…”

“The PC industry grew up in Shenzhen. And they have these factories where like you show up and if you commit to building, you know, a 100,000 laptops, they will build you a building and they will keep all your IP in the building. They will not cross employees o…”

“A lot of the locals heavily dispute that Financial Times graph that was going around about the number of startups. They said it just mismeasured the whole thing. And so, no, I don't sense that there's any lack of enthusiasm from entrepreneurs in towns like She…”

“10 years ago, if you ask where is China's startup hub, it would have been Shenzhen, which I mentioned was like the hub of the headquarter of Tencent, DJI, SenseTime. Now it's actually up there in Hangzhou.”

“Right now, all the components for robotic arms, everything that you might, that might go into an autonomous factory is all coming from Shenzhen.”

“那我们福田区今年的统计呢就是去年的统计那就是就登基的人口都有一万多就是光福田区就有将近一万多的这样的就是外籍人士到福田有半年以上的居住的时间”

“So when I went to Vietnam, I only knew one person and that person is now an investor in my company. But I met him in Shenzhen actually at like a private dinner party for like crypto bros.”

“Getting those boxes for our packaging from China from Shenzhen was a whole other story... We're trying to get somebody to send us like a hundred boxes because we were just starting off. Nobody bakes a hundred boxes in China. Like nobody would even talk to us, …”

“The iPhone is made in Shenzhen, but actually, the vast majority of the value inside it doesn't come from China.”

“What it lets Xiaomi do is do these flash sales where they say, Look, we've got a 100,000 of the Hongmi, or we've got a 100,000 of the Me Too. We're going to sell those now. You have to sign up for the right to get a ticket to have a chance to buy the phone, wh…”

“There's not infrastructure and subcontractors and other vendors to make consumer electronics outside of the Shenzhen, Guangdong province. There's just not in, you can't go to another country.”

“One of the world's first special economic zones was created in Shannon, which was very close to, you know, maybe 10, 15 miles from where I was born. Deng Xiaoping visited it and found this quite inspiring, and so decided to set up special economic zones in Chi…”

“Today, you can just go to Shenzhen and say, we'll have a number three and number 15, please, and then it gets put together for you. And so the question is more about the vision and the route to market than the, kind of, the underlying core technology.”