China

“China feels massively ahead of the game with their sort of mentality of tipping creators left, right and center and paying for certain things. And I love this idea of, you know, you can read 90% of a book and if you actually enjoy it and want to read the last …”

“WeChat launches this business in India and the Indian team keeps saying, we need you to do X and Y and Z. But India is so much smaller and so much less a show of attention. They can never get anyone on the phone in China to make, because the Chinese market is …”

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

“There's this whole, oh my God, China's going to have all the data, which is almost entirely horseshit.”

“And so you're not going to see Biden kind of turn around and say, we want to be friends with China and pretend none of this happened.”

“China is going to have the same GDP per capita as America, more or less, at some point in the next couple of decades.”

“The world in which all the ideas came from within 50 miles of Silicon Valley, well, that's kind of over.”

“I think there's a real parallel to that and how people talk about a lot of Chinese services now, because you can't go there, even if you go there, you can't use it, you can't use the products, you can install it, but you can't, like, nothing works if you're no…”

“Which is that China has sort of many champions that compete with each other across many fields. Whereas, you know, Google doesn't have an e-commerce delivery business, and it doesn't really have a social network. And Amazon doesn't have a social network or a s…”

“Here is China as this vast market with eight or nine hundred million people with a smartphone, and all of these enormous companies, and all these enormous services, and all this weird new consumer behavior that we're sort of trying to understand”

“And so that world in which you could just go and do business in China and not have to think about politics at all, that's kind of over.”

“E-commerce penetration is sort of five percent in most of these markets. It's not where, whereas China is sort of 25 to 30% e-commerce penetration, like Brazil and Argentina are kind of five percent”

“Enterprise software is actually relatively I wouldn't say non, I wouldn't say non-existent, but much further behind relative to what we see to the west.”

“China has a much more defined Market into itself. It's very hard to leave China. And so what that means is, yes, you have a very big market, but that's essentially your market, right? So I think every player knows from the outside, you know, rather than thinki…”

“When I talk to Chinese PM and Chinese tech workers, first of all, they don't view copying as inherently shameful, because their mentality is, you have come up with a very successful UX or product, therefore, you know, for me to learn and to catch up to you I s…”

“And I think the way to look at China might not, the framing in which I find the most helpful is to view it as this parallel world. You don't, you shouldn't view it as like the future. You shouldn't view it as like the past, but you just view it as like, Had th…”

“The sort of text structure in The rest of the world is you tend to have vertical winners. So Google won search, and there's a couple of other people trying to do search. Amazon won sort of generalized e-commerce, not market-specific e-commerce, won general e-c…”

“They've realized that internet penetration and mobile penetration has slowed down massively in the last few years, so they're kind of dealing with the fact of, oh, the market that, that's been growing for the past few years because of new users, that's coming …”

“You know, we have sort of arrived at this model where we have these vertical winners, whereas China is in a model where there's horizontal winners.”

“China is already having a crackdown on games addiction. You know, it has to be only a matter of time before China comes for this stuff as well and says, hang on, why are these people, you know, purely on sort of social harm and populism, whatever, but like Chi…”

“So like, you know, very, very detailed thing on how algorithmic content moderation should work, and how algorithmic content feeds should work, which the EU and the US have not anywhere close to having. Like, now here's a law on how the news feed should work.”

“Never before has more been done across all the different markets, including Europe, Australia, China, USA, to try and limit the power of the tech industry”

“Apple, Apple, interestingly, is on the other side of this, in that Apple, of course, has 20, 25% of its revenue in China. And of course, the vast majority of its manufacturing is in China.”

“There hasn't been a Xi in panic yet, actually, even though it's another Chinese thing that every American teenager is using. But there probably will be. I don't know what form that will take.”

“Far too often, not so much recently, but particularly, you know, until a few years ago, the argument from technology would not, technology companies would not be, no, this is the only way we can stop China from reading your emails, or the only way that we can …”

“There are probably 2000 legitimate fabless design chip companies in China today.”

“Their attempts to replicate companies like ASML and LAM and build their own equipment for manufacturing semis has also produced almost nothing.”

“And they have spent a hundred billion dollars, two hundred billion dollars over the last 10 years subsidizing the growth of their semiconductor industry.”

“And China for years has been trying to poach people out of TSMC to come build their foundries. And it just hasn't worked. Like you, it's something about the whole body of knowledge that's just too, you just can't copy and paste.”

“So in principle, any company that is based in China where sort of important decisions can be made here in China is de facto under control of the Chinese government.”

“People can come up with phrases to circumvent keyword censorship, and of course very quickly the censors catch up to it, and so it never lasts, never, never lasts for very long.”

“You can't, you know, you cannot deterministically control what it says. So you can kind of put crude keyword filters on. You can count, you can put kind of crude, crude keyword filters sort of on top, but you can't guarantee that it's not going to you talk abo…”

“One of the charts in my presentation is that like a quarter of global internet traffic is USA, Japan, South Korea combined. And then another quarter is India and a quarter is China and a quarter is everything else. So like where I was 10 years ago, it was like…”

“There's a whole narrative that for China, this is a problem deploying this to, for general purpose, consumer ads. Because China has really, really rigid ideas about what you can and can't say on the internet. And this is not going to be controllable, or that m…”

“The Hong Kong national security law, technically applies to American companies in America. So if you work for a company that happens to be covered by that law and you set foot in Hong Kong, then they can arrest you, even if the company isn't in Hong Kong.”

“10% of revenue, five percent of revenue growth. And so that's about four billion dollars, and so apparently half of that was Temu, and well, presumably quite a lot of the rest was Shein.”