Let a thousand startups bloom!

In China, you’ve lots of young people who refuse to be “unified” by force, so to speak. As in be mixed, matched and merged into that “Great Big ‘Society’ Out There”. Full of darkness or at least excess copycat stuff. Young folks have a lot of dreams, but if it doesn’t make capitalist pocketbooks fat, it’s not going to happen.

Or at least there’s an angel for Chinese startups. We leave it to Gang Lu of Mobinode, who himself has a startup (Kuukie.com), and has a post out on ChinAccelerator. This is fabulous. Check it out…

On the one hand, it’s about money. Startups do not need big amount of money to get started, but unfortunately here in China, it’s so hard to find angel investors who believe what the founders believe and are willing to give them money to share the risk together; on the other hand, money does not mean everything. There are loads of cash in China I would say, and there are many people out there waiting for projects. However, the issue is that many startups do not know how to reach them. More importantly most of the local investors are great in traditional business but know little about web industry. They only believe Guanxi will work and how-to-make-money is the only metric they trust, which basically shut down the door to many young men with dreams. Young entrepreneurs need angel money and also need mentors and help.

If you’re not too familiar what the “guanxi” thing is: China’s a very LinkedIn kind of nation where connections matter like — H.E. double hockey sticks, let’s just put it this way. Without the right ties, your startup idea will forever be stranded on the runway, only to be flattened by an Airbus A380-ish “fellow startup” who has the right government-and-capital ties and is out there to make you irrelevant.

Mobinode’s article on its partnership with ChinAccelerator is one uplifting read. Check it out here.