Steven White on Why China is the Best Place for Entrepreneurship and Innovation

Hello and welcome to the Rich Robinson Show. I'm your host, Rich Robinson. Over the past 25 years, I've been an entrepreneur, investor, advisor, and professor here in Asia. After nearly a quarter of a century in China, I'm now based here in Bali, Indonesia, the island Of the gods, Asia is my home now. Sixty percent of the world's population also lives here, but I would contend eighty percent of the world's dynamism and opportunity is right here in the region. On the show, you'll hear candid and fun conversations with some of my friends and colleagues, people I've met along my journey, entrepreneurs, operators, experts. It will help you unlock actionable insights around the Asia region and the entrepreneurial agility that actually defines it. This first season, season one of the Rich Robinson Show, is titled At the Speed of China. Like, wait for it, at the speed of light. Things happen fast in China, and in this season one, we're gonna Take a deeper look at that. The rapid economic development over the past few decades, as well as the speed and cycles of innovation taking place all day, every day right now. Let's go. Jiao.

Professor Stephen White of Tsinghua University, ladies and gentlemen. Please, for podcast landers out there, tell me, tell us your bio. I know your story. I want to, I want to hear it in your words, please.

There's the short version, the medium version, and the way too long version.

Medium.

Let's go medium.

Medium. Working backwards, so I've been in Beijing now, this time for about 10, going on 11 years, all at Tsinghua. Before that, I was in Shanghai for about 3 years. Singapore for about 3 years, France for about 3 years. All those were business schools. I was also in Hong Kong for about 4 years. So a lot of my adult life since 1985, all except 4 or 5 years, have been in Asia. And most of them— some of that was 8 years in Japan. So kind of like, you know, traveled around a bit. Now, since I finished my degree in '97, started teaching in business schools. I've also done a lot of my research based in Asia, primarily all the things.

The full Asia buffet.

Yeah. You know, don't, don't have, I haven't lived in Indonesia yet. That could be there, maybe Thailand, but you know, I still have some time.

That's great. And for our listeners who aren't familiar, let's start top level about Tsinghua University. Some people say it's the MIT of China. I think it's actually not true. I think MIT is the Tsinghua of the US.

Yeah, increasingly there's kind of, you know, who comes first. Even in, you know, it's kind of interesting, even a number of patents, you know, Tsinghua is challenging MIT. Yeah, I think, wow, what is that? A lot of other things about in China that are getting bigger and bigger and bigger which are completely not on, you know, the radar map in the US or Europe is even Europe, you know, suddenly they're going to wake up and they're going to see suddenly the The mist will part and they'll see these massive, you know, companies, very dynamic companies and universities, and wait, where'd they come from? And I think that's going to be, you know, a lot of us are kind of trying to get the word out, but there just seems to be a lot of either hubris or arrogance or just disinterest in understanding what's going on over here. And the Chinese know a lot about what's going on outside. And you know that lopsidedness of awareness is not going to do us well. Us, you know, being you know U.S., Europe, etc. Yeah.

Yeah, hugely lopsided indeed. And tell us what your wheelhouse expertise swim lane is. What you're teaching?

Basically, kind of the intersection of strategy, entrepreneurship, and innovation. So obviously China is like the perfect place to be. You know for that, as you know. number of new firms coming along, a lot of them doing stupid things, a lot of them working hard and getting stuff done. And the innovation thing is really taking off too. Again, that's the thing that at some point, China has such an image of being a copycat. And yes, it was, just like Japan was in the '50s, '60s, just like the US was in the early 20th century, 19th century. Everyone's been a copycat.

It's more like a state of market than it is a sort of like State of, you know, what the limitations are of the—

Well, I mean, it's a smart thing to do, you know. If you're behind, go on and copy, you know. That's how you catch up. Um, now what's happening is that in some fields they've already caught up and they're already at the frontier. And, and in an increasing number of fields, I have a feeling they're going to be reaching that frontier and moving past it. And that's also going to be a blow to the U.S. ego.

Certainly.

Because Oh, we can let the Chinese do all the cheap manufacturing, all the stuff we buy at the discount stores and everything. Yeah, that's fine. But wait, you're the leading manufacturer of robots, high-speed trains, of— and so it's going to start accumulating more and more that it's going to be the leading— the leading stuff is going to be coming from China. There's still some bottlenecks. I mean, semiconductors and things like that, chips, the various types of chips. Okay, they're having a hard time in, but there's a lot of other fields that they're doing extremely well. And Ignoring the accomplishments just to kind of keep that sense of security. We're ahead. Extremely dangerous. Electric vehicles. They've already—

It's already over. Yeah.

It's over. There's several hundred companies that are making— a bunch of them are going to close and lose, but the ones that are left are going to be extremely strong. And there's nothing like the dynamism in China and in the US or Europe. Even as far as I'm concerned, you know, Silicon Valley, a lot of smart people, but just kind of a lazy lifestyle choice. Whereas, um, here in China, it's just incredible. I mean, that pursuit, that focus, the energy that goes into it.

Indeed.

I mean, it's 24/7.

So speaking of time, let's go back to when you first landed in China, and that was right after the Olympics, right?

Well, the first time I came to China was 1986. I was living in Japan. living in Japan, took the boat from Kobe to Shanghai, a 48-hour ferry it was called, sleeping on kind of this big open floor. And let's say, you know, debarking onto the— somewhere along the Bund, it was obviously quite a different scene then.

Mm-hmm.

The Chinese— a lot of the Chinese had gone to Japan during that time, just like they went to the US, but Japan was a little bit closer. And I remember a lot of them were wheeling, you know, the mini refrigerators off of the boat. They buy in Japan and then, you know, bring it back because China didn't have any, or they had like 10 on display but you couldn't actually buy them. You know, those were the days. So that was— and, you know, that was when there was a nickname of China as being the sick man of Asia, whereas Japan was, you know, starting to take off. You know, single—

That was like D-Day, like the mid-'80s in Japan, right?

Contrast was huge. Yeah. And that's what's really kind of funny now is Yeah, having that— that was a period where I lived in Japan from '85 to '92, and that's just kind of funny now with, you know, being in China. Superficially, there are a lot of similarities, you know. It's kind of become the center of the universe. Everyone's on here. They were buying a bunch of stuff, you know, companies and property. Japan kind of went to sleep. It's a very wonderful, nice, quiet place. It's It's become an old European country, whereas China, of course, is just taking off. And China's buying companies in Europe.

Left and right, indeed.

It's been interesting to, you know, it's been interesting to kind of be in this thing. Of course, you know, China's gone through these, you know, huge periods of change. You know, the '80s were kind of figuring out what's going on, opening up, extremely open. People were extremely interested in what's going on, you know, excited about being about what's going on outside. You know, the '90s were kind of settling down, kind of, okay, let's how can we get— become more like, you know, some companies started forming. You had the first big private firms getting set up, you know, the Legends and the, you know, Founder and, you know, companies like that. So that was kind of neat. I was gone from '92, then came back in '95 to '96. And so that's when I first stayed at Tsinghua.

Ah.

Doing my field research for my PhD. So I was kind of there, you know, you could get a bootleg copy of Windows 95 for 20 kuai, about $3. Those were the days. The real one, it's really hard to find one, but if you did, it was like 4,000 kuai. So those were the days, the CDs, the software. That's when you talk about copying. I mean, that was right in the streets, a different world. So then I kept going back several times a year after that until moving back to China in 2007, you know, coming back for research, bringing student groups, INSEAD MBA students here for like a week of what I call touring for credit, you know. So I was lucky to be able to go through research and also actively going out, you know, visiting companies, seeing how, how things were going. And then over time, you know, you see a big, big change. The— in basically every aspect has been changed in China, whether it's technology innovation, the nature of it, the types of entrepreneurship, you know, the people, the social changes have been huge. Like one of my friends from that, you know, period, from the early '90s period, he said, you know, he was talking about— I think he put it the best way— back then we had time but no money, now we have no time. I mean, you know how hard it is to kind of catch up with people and everyone's doing so much.

I think that's also one big change that's, you know, happened over Indeed, as I get older, I realize that time is really the—that's the—that's the one non-renewable resource that's really the most valuable. Exactly. And so when you came back here, it was right after the Olympics. That's when took this new post or this this post now. Oh, right before the Olympics.

Wow. Okay.

I was down in Shanghai, so you know didn't see so much of the preparation there. Of course, Beijing, which was you saw that firsthand. And regretfully, I was watching the opening ceremony in the basement or in a. basement bar in Prague. So at least I saw it, you know, it wasn't firsthand. But yeah, so that was, that was pretty, pretty exciting. I mean, that was obviously just like the 1964 Olympics in, in Japan. It's kind of like this coming out party, you know, that parallel with Japan kind of hit me a bit, that, um, you know, kind of onto the world stage, we can pull this off. It was amazing. Yeah.

Yeah, so fascinating. So that's like, you You know, taking just that coming out party, and I think a lot of people were very, you know, breathless and gee whiz, and now just 14 years later, bookending it with the Winter Olympics, which are coming up in February of next year, the contrast is so stark in that China has just— I think most of my time in China in the 24 years that I've been there, you know, I always went to Tokyo or Stockholm or New York. And I'd say, oh wow, that's so great to be back in civilization, back to the future. And there's pockets, you know, the future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed. Uh, of course, you know, Philip K. Dick, right? And then I'd go back to China and I, I always loved Chinese culture and people and food and the history. And, you know, there, there's a dynamism there, but there was definitely lagging behind. And then all of a sudden I felt in many ways it, it caught up and like you, already said, it started to catapult, slingshot into the future. And what year do you recall where you kind of felt— and you're definitely in Tsinghua, in Beijing. And just for our listeners, Beijing is really the Silicon Valley, not just of China, but of Asia, and in some ways even exceeds Silicon Valley. So you're definitely very much there, right at the pulse. Canary, canary in the coal mine.

Exactly. Well, luckily there's a lot of oxygen, so it's a, it's a cool mine to be in.

It depends on the day in Beijing, on how much oxygen and how many years ago you're talking about.

But yeah. Except for the sandstorm a few weeks ago. AQI of 1,000 or something. But that's cleaned up a whole lot. You know, just the whole area is just so moving ahead. There's just so much action in terms of the absolute scale of it. You know, This is also something that's, you know, a lot of times when people want to feel good about, you know, that China is just, you know, not so— not doing as well as the hype and everything, they'll use percentages like, you know, X percentage of people have this or whatever. And percentages can be very low, but the absolute numbers are huge. 10% of 1.3 billion people is Japan. And, you know, there are a lot of things that, you know, 10%, X number, you know, what percent of So students go to university. Well, it's a very small percentage, but it's a massive number. And I think that's what— so anyway, going back to being in Beijing, where that's by far where the innovation, the R&D is being researched, especially basic research. And a lot of that is also being increasingly translated into commercial outcomes. They're still getting their act together about that. But that's been a slow, but I think pretty— the trajectory is clear between becoming even more effective, efficient and effective in transferring all the R&D that's going on. We've really pumped up the R&D activity and then getting that applied. So a lot of the innovations so far have been done primarily by firms and fairly simple in a way. not deep tech kind of innovations. But that's starting to change in a way. I kind of think of it as being like, you know, the national business model so far has been fairly simple tech, quick execution, you know, get it out there, make, you know, make money. And whether that's, you know, for cheap consumer goods or it's services or, you know, things for export markets. So that's been an, you know, the business model S-curve so far, but that reaches plateau. You know, you can't— there's a kind of limits of how, you know, if you're not leading in terms of the technology, you can't, you know, go to that next level. And I think that's where we are now, where there's emerging second S-curve that's still not— doesn't perform as well, you know. So this real technology-based innovation, the going for leading, not just for Quick and quick and dirty, cheap and cheerful. You know outputs and execution. But you know something deeper and more going for leading. It's still below. It's not performing, not contributing as much obviously as the current business model that's brought China this far. But I think that if they're able to get the act together in terms of aligning incentives right, getting the institutional infrastructure right, that's going to be the new S curve that's going to. Has the potential to bring them to being really kind of leading. And that's if they can get those incentives right and align the resources efficiently, that's going to be a whole nother chapter. It's going to make right now look like, wow, that was a quaint time. Indeed.

Yeah. With AI and robotics and all of the other automation around that. And yeah, it's going to really accelerate things. So if you, if you're going to talk to somebody like, I know you do, you talk to people All over the world, like what the speed of China means to you or how they could, number one, better understand it, or number two, even kind of like learn from it. What kind of anecdotes or stories or examples come to mind?

There's a couple of things, you know, the speed of China, part of that is related to there is no work-life balance here. So at the individual level, there is no work-life balance. It's like, work is life, life is work, and once in a while you squeeze in something else. And so a lot of the speed then is because, well, let's say, you know, we would have our nice like 8-hour day and then at 5 o'clock we're going to have our gin and tonic and then relax. Well, and then the next day at 9 o'clock we might start. Well, here in China, you know, they don't have a gin and tonic at 5 o'clock. You know, they're still you know, whether they're at the office or whether they're home or they're in the taxi or wherever, they're still working till 7, till 8. You know, they're still doing phone calls and, you know, messages related to work at 10 o'clock, at 11 o'clock. I mean, you know, I can, you know, message on WeChat, I can message, you know, my RA, my research assistant, at 11 o'clock at night on a Saturday, and I'll get a response at 11:01 or 11:05.

Mm-hmm.

So You know, you can kind of work almost continually. So instead of waiting till, you know, 9 o'clock tomorrow morning to continue doing whatever I'm doing, making the progress, well, it's already— it's continuing that evening. So I don't know if you've ever worked with people in, you know, like in the US or Europe and other time zones where, you know, the project can be worked on around the clock. I'll be working on it daytime my time and then hand over and then in New York you're going to be working on it your time while I'm sleeping. And so the project is getting worked on around the clock, not by the same people of course. In China it's kind of like that in the sense that—

Yeah, everybody's jet-lagged all the time but they're not flying.

It's midnight to 5, 6 AM where it might be quiet. So I think that's one element of it that When you— and so you can get more done, more time is spent on stuff. And then there's the other thing about the speed of China is this thing of a nice slow approach to stuff. It's either you do or do not do, there is no try, and it's like the Yoda quote. So, and do in China means you do and then you just put all the resources in, you go for it, you try to get it done like now, today, you know. Right. So things— there's not— there's very little like calm, okay, you know, let's plot out this timeline and, you know, schedule it. No, it's all kind of— you just do it as quickly as possible. And now that has one— it increases the speed, but also the downside currently of the speed of China for me is that sometimes it's fast but it's not. And so there's a lot of wasted resources because You know, you shoot first and then aim kind of thing. The speed is prioritized over planning with the assumption that, well, don't bother planning too much detail because, well, things will change anyway. So just start doing something and then quickly adjust and fix it, you know, if you need to, or in real time. And so you can imagine, you know, German engineers coming here, just go crazy.

Losing their minds. Yes.

Anyone who has kind of that kind of, you know, very structured, time-wise structured kind of mindset. But that— so that's, that's also part something that, you know, you can, you can get ahead if you just put in a lot more time, resource, you know, energy, do stuff quickly. Now, and I think that the thing that they're going to have to become better at is working smart. In other words, being more efficient with time and resources. And that's, you know, maybe that'll come about. That's more still, still a question mark for me. Because in the past, I, you know, part of the old business model, you know, the old S-curve was be fast, be first, be fast, you know, just have resources. You know, if you have some money, if you have some generic management organizational skills, you could do really well. You could start, you could build a big company. So that was kind of the— Part of the old business model, the old S-curve. But increasingly, they're going to have to be more and more, and that was effective. Now they're going to have to be effective but more efficient and smarter. Because if you want to be the leader, you can't fast. You have to actually know stuff. You have to have deep knowledge, deep understanding. And you know, with you can't just throw any amount of resources to it. I think the Chinese governments realize this: that they've got to be more efficient in the use of resources. And they can't have this kind of, you know, national-level cross-subsidization and moving, you know, imaginary money around. At some point, the music's going to stop, and a lot of people won't— I think they're going to be able to avoid any kind of crash. So I think they have some way of doing that. The system is so malleable. But in absolute terms, they're realizing they have to be more efficient with resources. That came out clearly in the Last party meeting.

5-year plan. Yeah. Yeah. I think there's one special forces guy that I listen to sometimes, his podcast, and he talks about going slow to go fast. Sometimes it is better to be more deliberate to be able to execute well. But I think perhaps, you know, and it's still something I'm exploring as I write this book, At the Speed of China. Yeah, of course, there's some things that just can't be emulated, right? If you have a gigantic centrally planned government and they say, hey, everybody's— we're going to be doing this 5-year plan around electric vehicles and we're going to ask municipalities to buy electric buses and we're going to ask this province to have this target around battery factories and we're going to subsidize consumers to buy electric vehicles so then they can get a license plate in Beijing because license plates are tough to get. That's Like there's not much to be learned necessarily from that. Or high-speed rail. Hey, we're going to take by eminent domain all of these thousands of kilometers of land and build this high-speed rail and put billions of dollars into it. Like, you know, it's kind of, it's difficult to take actionable lessons from there, but, you know, perhaps at the sort of local level, when you have your local officials really aligned with your objectives and are really taking action to be like, you know what? going to develop this one section of the city and this is going to be specifically for AI. And I need to meet with investors and entrepreneurs and, you know, people, larger companies that, that can help us to achieve that objective. Then I think that's something actionable. Right. And, and the JoJo Leo, the 996 work culture. I mean, I don't think people really want to necessarily emulate that. Maybe in some more developing markets, perhaps to be able to play catch up. And I think there's pushback in China. And, you know, and you're right that If you just throw a ton of people over a ton of time, then things are going to happen. But I think there are actual approaches around launches and execution. And I think also when you're innovating these loops of experimentation, if you're able to tighten the timeframe around those, then you are able to get innovative breakthroughs in business models or technology that then gives you potentially a moat for the future, right? So there really is an incentive to run as fast as you can, but there's, yeah, there's a lot of inefficiencies and a lot of tears around that.

Talking about one part of that is, you know, in so many things, products, services, you know, we talk about the really taking to heart the minimal viable product.

Yeah.

Like, if I may, I remember coming to China and I see a roll of toilet paper and it has no tube in the middle. And you're just like, wow. Somebody is like, yeah, why? We don't have toilet rolls here. It's like, let's— how can I make a roll of toilet paper even cheaper and more compelling for somebody? And it's like, wow. Like Jack Ma even said, I have a platform because don't try to out-innovate or outcompete a Chinese entrepreneur. Right.

But also one strength to try anything, not having too many cognitive barriers to, well, let's try this. So that much more willing to do something weird, innovation stuff in these fields. And I think that's where, on the one hand, part of China is very precedent. If you talk about the characters, there's only a very specific right way Of writing characters with little, you know, angles and stuff. Some other things can be very precedent-based, but we talk about a lot of these, you know, products, services. They're able to innovate because they're willing to kind of try anything. There's less barriers, cognitive barriers to coming up with new things. So sometimes it's weird combinations, but that's part of being innovative is coming up with the weird combinations. 'Cause once in a while they, they hit.

Yeah.

And I think that's, that's also kind of interesting. That's going to do them very well. They'll learn from other stuff, but they are willing to kind of like try something completely different. And I think that's where a lot of the consumer services have been very successful, you know. But now in the beginning it doesn't work very well, but then, you know, you start doing it, and then I think this is where the Chinese speed— rather than waiting until you design the perfect thing and then, you know, adapt in real time. So never buy the first product or first service of anything, because it's usually pretty bad.

Yes. I mean, it's interesting.

No, it's interesting because I saw an interview with Elon Musk and he said, yeah, you know, prototyping is fun. The, you know, production of a car is really, you know, difficult and being cash flow positive is excruciating. But he said, you know, until we get the production line really working, Like the Tesla is going to be inconsistent and it's just, that's, that's part of the process. And, you know, I know that you work with so many startups and you even have to tell startups who are extremely nimble and fast and aggressive and very visionary. Like you have to launch when you're still a little bit embarrassed about your product. Because if you waited until you're not embarrassed and you waited too long. So if you have to tell that to the, you know, the people that are taking the arrows that are the pioneers right in the beginning, then of course in larger organizations, it's something that is actually crippling if you can't do that, those experimentation loops. And I think part of the speed comes with the comfort of just saying, you know what, we'll figure it out. And we're going to just launch it faster before it's ready. And then we're going to kind of in a jazz-like way, make it happen as we lay the railroad tracks down in front of, in front of the train.

Yeah. And of course, the trick is that that is okay if we're talking about some kind of mobile phone app that you're playing games on. It's like healthcare, you don't want to be Certainly. Yeah. I think in certain fields that, I think that that model is great, works well, but then it is not applicable to, again, some of these deeper tech, you know, things. You have to start with something better. And so that this new S-curve will have different requirements than, and I think this is one of them where, you know, you're going to take, have to take some time to do the R&D because it's deeper, more complex. Maybe it's more of a system. Maybe the technology itself is deeper. And so, you know, you're not going to have revenues for years. To get any kind of funding, you need revenues. So that means that you already have something out there.

That double S-curve is fascinating. I think maybe I'd love to be able to— I'm going to hire a graphic artist to be able to take all these different charts and make it consistent looking, but I'd love to be able to attribute a chart to you, kind of Putting like arrow, like we're here now, and it you know it can it can it can work. But I think yeah for the the future it's not just about getting a whole bunch of users or trying to launch quickly. It's going to be a slower burn.

You know there there's this talk about the big challenge with the Chinese government at the high level is trying to make sure does that they're able to do is to escape the middle income trap. So they've done a job of going from poor to middle income as a country and then the people, of course, in it. But then, you know, but, and they've been able to do that through this first S-curve very well. But if they want to break out of that and then be able to create, you know, dramatically more wealth and create value, capture value, then they're going to have to get on the second S-curve to innovate out, to avoid being trapped in the middle. A lot of countries kind of trapped in— Mexico is kind of an example. It's okay, but it's kind of stuck in that middle-income trap. Not poor, but not as a country. A lot of examples of that. And so that's— Chinese government definitely want— the whole China dream is to go beyond where they are now and dramatically, not just little bits. And that's where that second S-curve comes in. Country— the new companies are going to have to be To reorient toward new companies are going to have to come along that have a different approach to this. Different investors are going to have to come along who have firm investment horizons, not just oh they're generating revenues now. I'm going to make money and it's going to list in six months. You know, but but again, you know, they're already all a lot of the new EV companies, for example, mentioned that before. You know, the Nios, the Xiaopengs, the Xpeng, Xpeng Auto. You know, they were founded, you know, and within 2 or 3 years they were at mass production of automobiles, where it took Tesla 9 years or something before they finally—

Yeah.

So I think that's a great example, and kind of in the same industry, you know, comparing the speed of, you know, China's speed, even in some kind of a heavy manufacturing industry, heavy manufacturing, there's a lot of R&D that's gone, they're putting in that, you know, They were able to get to mass production.

Yeah. Terrific examples. Yeah. And I think the Gigafactory, 168 days outside of Shanghai, I think there is a good lesson there about how a local government can support and incentivize companies to come in. And I think there are takeaways there. And I think there's definitely some of that, the government support of some of these players. But yeah, a lot of these guys who started these companies, they're all former internet entrepreneur, Elon Musk. So that's the interesting insight. They all have their own Elon Musk-esque superpowers. There's so many of these entrepreneurs that are forged by fire and that are insanely intelligent and insanely competitive and insanely skilled and networked, kind of forged by fire inside this crucible of the China arena of competition.

And that is also something that a lot of these serial entrepreneurs, they might have been in the internet and they kind of have this idea attitude, this kind of that a company can grow fast, you know, this exponential schedule of growth and as opposed to arithmetic, you know, they kind of— so they're looking for ways to— the DNA. And so even in these, you know, going from You know, online platforms for different stuff, going to making an electric vehicle, which is a physical, big, complex product. They still have that same idea about expectations of what, you know, how a company can grow. None of this little stuff, but, you know, take off. And then putting the resources into it and kind of driving it— pun intended.

Driving it, driving it indeed. Yeah, and accelerating into the future. But yeah, I think, and the other, I mean, that spark of an idea. Okay. I'll stop. That's it enough. That's 3, that's 3 puns. And I, yeah, it's, it's really, it's really interesting to see, you know, a lot of it, these guys who are running these companies, they know that things are also changing in real time. So they have to be learning machines and be super reactive. And I think those sort of learning loops, right? I mean, that's what an startup is, right? It's a learning machine and an entrepreneur learns faster. And I think if somebody comes from within the car industry, they're just calibrated at a different cadence and they're unable to sort of react and move quickly. And these guys are used to software startups which move so quickly. So once they get into the hardware space, they can, I think, put that together with their software experience, but also their ability to know how to scale a company because they've all scaled companies from, you know, and the number of users as well too. I mean, you look at just the lessons of like Meituan and Pinduoduo and ByteDance and how those guys have scaled so quickly and just learned from previous companies' mistakes. Their cycles are just, you know, they're just running at different cycles as a company as well too. So, hey, it's on the hour.

Mr.

White, Professor White, thank you so much. Any final thoughts? I'm sorry. I'm, I think I'm talking over you.

Very interesting. You know, it kind of gets me thinking and putting some thoughts together, but I appreciate the chance and looking forward to the next chat.

Wonderful. Yeah. I hope to meet up in person and also, yeah, if you come across any anecdotes or people around At the Speed of China, I'd appreciate any connections around that. And of course, please let me know how I can ever be helpful in the future. Love and good vibes to you and yours and all the best. All right, great, great. Enjoy. Thanks so much.

I'll do my best here in the dry north. Enjoy Beijing Spring.

See you. Bye-bye.

That's a wrap. Thanks for listening to this episode of The Rich Robinson Show, Season 1, At the Speed of China. Visit therichrobinson.com. .com/show to smash that subscribe button. Please also go to iTunes or whatever platform of choice, rate and comment. And until next time, thank you very much. Zaijian. Cheers, y'all.