Eric Siu explores what Western entrepreneurs can learn from China's business culture, from train food delivery systems to BYD's electric vehicles. He covers rapid execution, competitor analysis, and why China's lack of residential property tax fuels real estate investment differently than the US.
In China, at each stop, you can order food ahead of it, and then someone's going to come in and deliver you your food. Have you been to Japan?
No.
Okay, so Japan, you take the Shinkansen, the trains, right? At each stop, usually you're just waiting on people getting on. In China, at each stop, you can order food ahead of it, and then someone's going to come in and deliver you your food. Imagine if you ordered food. Yeah, train order food drop-offs. They have $10,000 electric vehicles from BYD. So there's just, I feel like there's so much we can learn from how they're running things, but they learn from us, we don't learn from them. And I think when you have a competitor, like we look at our competitors, we don't look at them all the time, but we still look at them.
I look at my competitors all the time.
Yeah. So— Why do you do that?
Because they're bigger than me and I want to figure out why they're bigger, why they're struggling right now, and what I can learn from them to not struggle and how I can overtake them.
So you look at the bigger ones, do you look at any smaller ones for inspiration sometimes?
I do.
Yeah.
Because the smaller ones move faster. Like I recently was looking at this smaller agency. They've picked up some large enterprises. They do creative and what they do is they constantly email people like at companies like at X or Uber or whatever it may be and they'll send them a new creative every single week that they could just use.
Yeah. That they made custom to them.
Uh-huh.
And that's how you get people to respond to your cold emails. It's not, Can I do one for you? It's like, I just did it for you, here it is.
Yes.
Yeah.
So we take all that 'cause we believe that the larger players have really gobbled up most of enterprise market, so we try to learn from them on how they went down that path and how they got there. The smaller players grow much faster and do more creative things, so it's like, how can we do what the smaller players are doing to grow faster and the larger players are doing to go more upstream? So it's in essence the best of both worlds.
Yeah, but my point is you look at the big ones, you look at the small ones too 'cause there's something to learn from everyone, Whereas China knows we're bigger as the United States, but we're not looking at them. We should be looking at them because they are moving faster than us, in my opinion right now. And, you know, it's when you're competing with someone that works 996 like that, and all they think about is money, because they don't have— again, the only god Chinese people have, and I'm Chinese, is a money god. We don't look at anything else. So when you— that's a hell of a competitor.
Actually, the last time I researched China was a few weeks ago.
You did?
It just came to me right now. There's this girl I follow on Instagram. All right. She's a rich Chinese girl and her, her, what is it called? Her social handle is @beccaxblue. Okay. All right. Her name is Rebecca. She lives in Atherton, California. Okay. All right. And she's just very transparent. She's not like, I'm rich, you're poor, any of that.
Mm-hmm.
So I researched her to figure out how she came into money. Her parents created Camelot Systems, I believe it's called, which is, you know, cloud compute, cloud hosting company in China. And a lot of the American companies were using them to host so that they can be in China. And then from there, her parents invested in real estate and then became billionaires from that. I believe Camelot got into a few hundred million a year in revenue. But then from there, I went down the real estate rabbit hole, dude. In China, a lot of people have made a killing from real estate. It's really big from an investment viewpoint. And the government actually encourages people to buy homes and invest in real estate. And what I also saw is I don't think there's actually property tax in China.
I don't know.
So I could be wrong on this, but is there property tax in China or it's really cheap or something like that? There is no national recurring property taxes on residential homes in China.
They're trying to undo property tax. I think, I think DeSantis has said it, like, why would you keep getting paid, paying for your house after you paid for it, right?
I don't think it's gonna go in.
Well, because California, they're making the money already. Why would you want that to stop, right?
Yeah, they're not gonna want it.
But anyway, I think it's interesting. I think our key point here is it's worth studying your competitors, both bigger or smaller, um, because there's something always to, to learn. And I think, um, you know, China's studying us, so we should be studying them. And that is it for today. We'll see you tomorrow.
