BASE April-8-2008 Meeting Notes

Hi Everyone, Thanks for coming to BASE Get together on April 10. Here is a summary of the meeting along with some resources to help all of us be better, more effective entrepreneurs!

[edit] David's Presentation

First User:DavidDehghan spoke about his experience with entrepreneurship in China. David spoke briefly regarding hiring and finding new developers. David speaks from experience, he interviewed hundreds of people in his career at Microsoft. One problem that startups often face in Beijing is that developers here that are here all want Hukou (Residency permit for Beijing), which for a startup with little resources it is impossible to get. In general, it is hard to convince Tsinghua and Beida to work for you if you can't get the Hukou. David asked himself Why not go to a different city? He tried Wuhan, and it was a much easier place to find developers, he went to 2 universities and recruited. If you are having issues with finding developers, you should go to other 2nd tier cities to recruit (College Recruiting Contacts)

At this point, there was a comment from the crowd - you can make an ad in facebook and get resume's. You can target for specific universities and for China.

Another website to post your jobs in 51jobs.com, here you can get folks with a little more experience than fresh out of college. For designers, a potential lead (yet to be explored) is the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing.

Health Insurance is another problem faced by start uppers, and David spoke from experience about his experience with health insurance. There are many health insurance brokers, which are more approachable than insurance companies. Individual insurance brokers are paid a fee by the insurance companies. There is a broker who can make a plan for all of us at BASE (minimum 5 people). Approximate cost provides major hospitals in China for approx 7000RMB and 14000RMB international policy, though prices can vary by plan. David's final tip: find out about what hospitals in your policy have direct billing, you don't want to have to pay thousands of RMB and then get reimbursed. It will be a huge waist of your time to chase the insurance companies for reimbursement. If you are interested in pooling together to find an insurance company sent email to David [at] SoftwareInnovationLab.com

[edit] Demos

1. Apollo & David presented International Person: Its about Travel, learning, and social. Does hostel booking, English learning (online practice, mobile learning, offline courses), and has user generated content. Uses ASP and ajax technologies. (apollohu1980 @ gmail.com)

1. Hunter Lin - Gooer, or www.gooer.com. Remote desktop service allows you to work on office PC from home. Alternative to VPN for company. Revenue model is a subscription service based on number of computers. Distinguishing features are that it does not need software install on client, supports cellphones and you can remote into a machine witout a static IP. Company is currently comprised of 2 founders. (lht @ gooer.com)

1. Yundong, Darius and Xixi Wei (hotel liason) made a facebook application that allows you to book hotels during the Olympics. 500 hotels are currently in the program. Yundong will give an invite for the Facebook application when it's ready. The applicaiton's name will be: Beijing Olympic Games. (yundong.sun @ gmail.com)

[edit] Next Meeting Potential Topics

1. Ruby on Rails
2. How to advertise your Chinese website to Chinese, advertising, etc, including what works and what doesn't.

[edit] Companies Represented

Jennifer Pan of China Sense, a business education training company,and affiliated with University of Maryland Business school talked about an upcoming competition for business plans. Stay tuned for details.

Companies represented:

1. Native systems, a mobile city guide for Beijing
2. Hao Kan Bu, a Chinese photo blog website that has recently seen 200% growth! (alex.dong @ gmail.com)
3. China Web 2.0 Review - Tangos Chan representing both his website and China Growth Capital.
4. MoVo - multi language blog and social networking software.
5. DAAV
6. CIKUU - Enterprise search
7. Fangzi100 - real estate website for China.