Shangri-La

It's been a whirlwind 48 hours since I wrote last so I will try to describe a few of the things that have happened.


First, Friday was my last day at Kijiji. Everyone gathered to take a photo (below) as I was leaving which was very cool.


Then I went out with the GSB crew to great Cantonese dim sum and then to karaoke with a bunch of Shu's friends. I knew it would be an interesting experience but it was crazier than I imagined. The place felt sort of like a nice casino, with big marble floors and high ceilings, chandeliers, great service, and fancy private karaoke rooms. Everyone was so in to singing it was crazy. I expected that, but it was more intense and more fun than I thought. Kind of like Lost in Translation, but with bigger, nicer rooms. Our GSB group sang Sweet Home Alabama, though I mostly banged on the tambourine to drown out my voice.

I left bright and early Saturday for Kunming, Yunnan. I have decided that Yunnan is equivalent to Colorado, and Kunming is Denver. There are mountains all around, a pretty unique culture that is not like California and not like the East Coast. I am probably not explaining this analogy very well, but the point is Kunming is a pretty cool city, especially for China. Very little pollution, a really nice downtown, some great pagodas and temples and a great lake. I spent a very pleasant 6 hours there, then hopped on a plane to Shangri-La.


Shangri-La is in the very Northwest corner of Yunnan/Colorado. Despite it's technical location in Yunnan, Shangri-La is a Tibetan town. All the people I have met have classified themselves as Tibetan, they dress and eat Tibetan food, and many of the local people are monks at one of the local Tibetan Buddhist Monasteries. [A quick note on Tibet, the people that we met here say that Westerners falsely associate the Tibetan culture with the Tibet SAR that is designated by the Chinese government. There are many Tibetan villages in the provinces that border that border Tibet SAR.]


I checked in to my hostel last night the same time as two Dutch travelers, so the three of us went out to check out the town and grab dinner. The town has a really cool monastery on the top of a little hill which was great. Then we went out and had a surprisingly good dinner of dried yak meat, pickled potatoes, and barley noodle balls.


Today we rented mountain bikes to explore the area. I will not write more about my dislike for the act of biking but I survived off road biking in the Himalayas on my first day at altitude (the town is at 3200 meters, surrounding area is higher) with only one bleeding knee.


But the best part of biking was that we got to see all sorts of off the beaten path things. We met a monk who took us into one of the monastery's kitchens and had yak tea with us (absolutely gross but amazing experience). We went through all sorts of gorgeous valleys with flowers and yaks and yak sheppards and Tibetan people going around the daily work. Everyone was super friendly and yelled "Hello" or "Nihao" to us. We went to the biggest monastery outside Tibet and hiked all around it, went through its dozens of cool temple areas, and trekked up through some of the hills and villages around the monastery. Finally we ended up in a huge lake bed and chilled in the fields.


That's all I can write for now. I will upload more pictures to this post later.

Kijiji - final thoughts

This morning I went through my morning routine at Kijiji for one of the last times:

I arrive at the office, absolutely covered in sweat and dripping wet. (This has happened 17 of the 19 days – I took a taxi successfully once and unsuccessfully yesterday to escape the heat.) I drop my bag off at my desk and immediately head for the bathroom to try to clean up and dry off. I then search around in vain for a cool area, but wind up back at my desk still sweating. Then the battle begins. I can’t do anything productive until I have some coffee. But I am way too hot to have coffee. So I sit and stare at all the emails I got from the previous day in the US until I am a reasonable temperature.


Last night I took some people from work out to Bubba’s Texas Bar-B-Q to celebrate the 4th of July. Bubba’s was an amazingly authentic BBQ place. If I was in Houston, I would think it was only good, but it was probably better than any BBQ I had in New York or California. And since it was in Shanghai it made it more amazing. We had Budweiser, margaritas (not really American, but still better than green tea and whiskey), pulled pork sandwiches, beef brisket, yellow bbq sauce, red (vinegar) bbq sauce, pork ribs, hush puppies, French fries, corn bread, baked beans, and cole slaw.

And, like a typical American restaurant on the 4th of July, the service was really slow, and the place was packed with loud and obnoxious Americans (at one point, a version of the Star Spangled Banner broke out that was painful even to my tone-deaf ears). Still it was a lot of fun, good food, and I think everyone here enjoyed trying an American restaurant that served something other than just hamburgers and fried chicken.

And after dinner we promptly returned to China and went to get foot massages.

Coming to America

From the WSJ:

EBay Opens U.S. Classified Ads Site

Online auctioneer eBay Inc. has quietly opened a classifieds Web site in the U.S., its first foray stateside into an area that has been dominated by the scrappy Craigslist Inc.

On Friday, San Jose, Calif.-based eBay opened a U.S. version of Kijiji, the online-classifieds site it launched overseas in February 2005. Until now, Kijiji was available in certain countries in Europe and Asia, as well as in Canada, but not in the U.S.

Kijiji, available in 220 cities in all 50 states, looks barebones compared with the main eBay site. While that site is covered with images and links, Kijiji features mostly text, calling out sections like "for sale," "community," and "jobs." For now, anyone can post an ad for free, said eBay spokesman Hani Durzy, though the company plans to explore ways to make money, for instance by charging for display ads or premium services for sellers.

The U.S. site puts eBay in closer competition with Craigslist, the Web-classifieds site that was founded in 1995 by a San Francisco resident named Craig Newmark and has since expanded internationally.

EBay in 2004 bought close to a 25% stake in Craigslist from a former Craigslist employee and has closely watched that company in recent years to learn from its success, Mr. Durzy said. EBay has been "very happy with the financial and strategic returns" from the investment but sees room for more Web-classifieds players in the U.S., he said.

"We look at Kijiji as being competitive with Craigslist as well as the other classified platforms in the U.S.," Mr. Durzy said.

EBay owns other international classifieds sites, including Marktplaats.nl in the Netherlands, Loquo in Spain and Gumtree in England, Australia and New Zealand, and Mr. Durzy said eBay plans to look into expanding those sites into the U.S. as well.

Online classifieds in China

Got back last night from a great trip to Xi’an. I’ll post more details about the trip after I get the photos uploaded. In the meantime, here are some thoughts on the online classifieds business here in China.

I would describe our business here as “Craigslist with Chinese Characteristics”*. The general idea is that we provide a website where people can post things that they want to buy or things that they can offer to sell in various categories. Much like newspaper classifieds, the big categories in online classifieds (both in China and the US) are apartment rentals, job listings, and secondhand goods. People can contact the poster by phone or email if they are interested in their ad, and transactions get negotiated and take place offline and usually in person.

The market here in China is different from the US for a few reasons though.

First, the idea of newspaper classifieds is fairly new in China. People were not allowed to exchange private property until ~20 years ago here. As such, newspaper classifieds are <20 years old. While in the US, Craigslist’s challenge is just to migrate the offline classifieds business to an online forum, in China Kijiji must often educate users about the classifieds model generally and then convince them to use it online. As a result, in the US, the offline classifieds business has declined 5-15% since 2000. In China, offline classifieds are up by 100-300% (with a lot of variability by region).

Second, online classifieds is a typical network effects business. This is the concept where a service becomes exponentially more valuable as the number of users increase. So, in our case, the more people use our site, the more useful it is to each of them, because it is more likely that someone will be able to provide the good or service that they are looking for.

Third, in the US, Craigslist acts basically like a non-profit. Craig has explicitly stated that he has no intention of running his business to maximize revenues, and their decisions reflect that. Most estimates put their revenue at only around $40MM. They do not have advertising and they only charge for job listings in select cities. In China, we and our competitors are trying to make a profit. While the market is still too new to charge for job listings, people can selectively pay for premium features (like having extra photos in their posting, for example). The site also sells banner ads and uses Google Adwords.

Finally, China is far more culturally heterogeneous than the US. Many people describe China as Europe, except if there was one central government that ruled over it for most of the past 2000 years. Each province here has its own language, culture, economic situation, and other characteristics – much like the different countries in Europe. This makes expansion into new cities much harder than the US. In the US, the difference between denver.craigslist.com and atlanta.craigslist.com is almost zero. Here, lanzhou.kijiji.cn and shanghai.kijiji.cn must be extremely different.

So all this makes the online classifieds market here in China much more challenging but at the same time much more exciting than in the US.

*The Chinese political philosophy is described by the government as “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics”. It could also be described as single-party capitalism.

Kijiji

Great news! It turns out that Dolae is actually a male cat. So that’s nice.

I haven’t written much about work so I think it is time.

When I arrived in Beijing 3 weeks ago, I was very skeptical about whether I would like working here. China was so overwhelming, and I was not sure how I was going to enjoy – let alone contribute – in 4 weeks at Kijiji. I was also probably more excited about working in India than in China. But I realized this week that this sentiment has reversed. Work here has been much, much better than expected.

First and foremost the people here have been great. Our CEO, Jian Shuo, is really impressive. He is in his very early 30s, worked for Microsoft for about 6 years before becoming Kijiji’s first employee, and basically built the business from scratch. He is also one of the biggest bloggers in China and his English blog is definitely worth reading.

Second, everyone else here has been extremely nice and welcoming, even though I cannot communicate in their language at all and need help doing the most basic things. We are a small office of about 20 people, and everyone is really friendly. I can’t always get across 100% of what I mean to say, and I definitely don’t understand 100% of what is said, but everything is working out well and we are having a lot of fun. People have taken me out to countless different lunches, dinner places, home to their apartments, to Hangzhou. It has been amazing.

Third, I think both the online classifieds business and my project here at Kijiji are both very interesting. I will write about both in more detail in separate posts.

Finally, I haven’t worked for a “real company” since an internship after my freshman year of college over 9 years ago. It has been pretty cool doing actual work, instead of consulting or investing, even if is only a summer hiatus. It’s also been fun working for a start-up – lots of exciting things happen, you can make real changes in the business really quickly, and most importantly I wear flip-flops every day.

Another photo from Hangzhou: