5 Lessons from China's Internet Companies

-U.S. startups are following suit. Clubhouse recommends audio rooms, often full of complete strangers. ItsMe, through its avatar interface, matches you with new people around the world. And Honk lets you discover people to chat with based on your interests.

-Our online social graphs are no longer dependent on our offline connections.

-For years, people have touted the rise of social commerce in the West but we haven’t seen any players break through...The exception to this may be in vertical opportunities within social commerce. Within food, for instance, Snackpass describes itself as “food meets friends” and lets you gift your friends food. It’s creative and unlike anything els... See more

-AI may be the solution to serendipity. AI-driven feeds untether the social graph from our offline connections: instead of hanging out online with the people you went to college with, you can forge new friendships and uncover new content creators. Bytedance’s suite of AI products—including TikTok outside of China—are the most successful AI-powered ... See more

One through-line that cuts through all of the above is business model innovation. U.S. consumer internet has long been reliant on digital advertising. Partly because it matured on mobile—at a time when mobile advertising was less proven and mature—the Chinese consumer internet pioneered more creative and diversified revenue streams. Take Facebook a... See more

Digital advertising isn’t going anywhere; massive businesses have been build on its back. Google revenue grew faster last quarter than it has in a decade.

-Xiaohongshu—which means “Little Red Book”—is like Instagram if Instagram had introduced Instagram Shop years earlier and made it its premier feature. Xiaohongshu has always been more commerce-centric than Instagram, focused on discovery-driven and serendipitous shopping—the digital equivalent of browsing the mall. It’s the counterpart to more sear... See more

-Bilibili is built around shared interests and purposefully builds friction into community. In order to join a community, users have to pass a 100-question exam. A representative question to join the Harry Potter community, for instance, is: “How many horcruxes does Voldemort have?” (Any self-respecting person should know the answer is seven.)

-Despite China’s crackdown—another proofpoint of how challenging it’s become to do business in the country—the West can learn from Chinese tutoring marketplaces. Edtech in the U.S. and Europe remains solitary—some form of Zoom school and individual assignments. It’s telling that America’s most valuable education startups are MOOCs (massive open onl... See more