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In the past Saturday (July 21st), HYSTA Distinguished Speaker Series had another excellent event: panel discussion on Web 3.0. The moderator was Qi Lu, Executive Vice President of Engineering Search and Search Marketing at Yahoo, who was wearing a t-shirt from FOO Camp. Panelists included: Jack Xu, Vice President of Engineering & Research and Technical Fellow of eBay, previously served as CTO at Netease and director of core technology at Excite; Li Gong, Chairman and CEO of Mozilla Online Limited, previously served as Managing Director of MSN Technologies; Bill Li, joined Mayfield and GSR recently, previously in charge of Google Mobile. Having such a strong panel, one could guarantee that the whole discussion was in-depth, thought-provoking and informative.

Web 2.0 is a phrase coined by O’Reilly Media in 2003 and popularized by the first Web 2.0 conference in 2004. It refers to a new generation of Internet full of social-networking sites, wikis and folksonomies. Given the successes of 2.0 from companies like YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook, it is understandable that people want to jump ahead of the game, catching the next wave, even by speculation. There is an interesting diagram worth noticing, called 2007 Web Trend, which includes Web 2.5 applications.

Fortunately, our seasoned speakers shed lights on the 3.0 myth.

• Internet was created to connect people together, which has been carried on as the fundamental base from Web 1.0, 2.0, to 3.0.
• Internet connectivity is important. Watch out for technology advances, better availability, and policy improvements. For example, 2.0’s success is partially based on broadband network.
• Web standards are important. More importantly, who will drive the adoption of standards? Obviously, open source society will play a major role.
• Web technology will further expand into everyday life, which will largely change social behaviors of human society. Apple iPhone could be a good start.
• Browsers and browser like applications will prevail with enhanced security capabilities as they control both content delivery and application delivery.
• New business models and new ecosystems will be created for 3.0, just as Google Adsense and virtual currency from online gaming and virtual worlds for 2.0.
• Web 3.0 is still in its infancy. The judgment call will be made by Internet users. As a good example, there are 400 copycats of YouTube in China. Only the ones that satisfy the end users the best will eventually survive and prosper.

Before 2000, Yongping Duan was well known in China by his company Bubugao Group that manufactures VCD/DVD players. Before that, his legend was rooted in a factory making learning/game machines for kids in China. In 2001, he migrated to US to become an independent investor. In the same year, he invested in Netease at the price of less than $1, which turned out to be fantastic. Although he kept low key in the recent years, in 2006, his winning bid of dining with Warren Buffett on eBay drew a lot of attention.

At June 30, Mr. Duan shared his investment philosophy in one of HYSTA Distinguished Speaker Series by a fireside chat with Jack Xu, VP of Engineering, eBay Inc. Their friendship was traced back when Jack was CTO of Netease.

Here are Mr. Duan’s investment theories:

• Investment means to understand what one plans to invest. Duan did very well in Netease since he has plenty of knowledge in the game industry. But, he missed Apple big time simply because he didn’t play with iPod early enough. He also didn’t do well in FreshChoice since he intended to learn how US corporates operate.
• Investment means to buy cheap. Duan believes in one of Carl Marx’s economic theories that value determines price, and price fluctuates around value. He is definitely a value investor.
• Fast is slow. Mr. Duan is so in belief of this theory that his eBay id is actually fastisslow. Here, slow means to invest and fast means to gamble. It is important to be rich once in one’s life!
• It is always hard to dig the first bucket of gold. Since Mr. Duan has no intention to win Nobel prize, he couldn’t give any tips on how to be rich fast.

Since the whole chat was carried out in Chinese, I am not sure that my understanding was 100% original. However, Duan’s words DID calm me down a little bit in this fast paced Valley where the only dream is to become rich within an extremely short period of time.

HYSTA’s Emerging Leadership Forum has organized an interesting panel discussion in June 26th, comparing Chinese and US Internet companies. Panelists included Rob Solomon, CEO of SideStep, Fritz Demopoulos, co-founder and CEO of Qunar.com, CC Zhuang, co-founder and CTO of Qunar.com, and Jason Tian, CEO of Baihe.com. The comparison happened mainly between sidestep (US) and Qunar.com (China), which are in the travel search field. Recently, SideStep has finished an acquisition, reported at techcrunch. Baihe.com is the largest Internet relationship site in China.

Here are my notes:

• It is expensive to run a company in US, but the return is also more lucrative.
• Generally speaking, labor cost is cheaper in China but not true for skillful engineers.
• Successful business models from US Internet companies form a good start point for their Chinese siblings but that’s far from enough.
• Google AdWords is a good way to lure customers to the site but it is not the only way, and it is not necessary the best way. Most time, it is not.
• Chinese companies face more challenges to keep company secrets.

The moderator was Richard Lim, who is a veteran VC. He felt pity that Google Adsense came out too late. Otherwise, one of the companies that his firm invested could be saved during bubble bust since the company had fantastic page view growth. In that sense, Google’s eco-system helped Web 2.0 boom.

Overall, it is an interesting panel discussion for these that have strong entrepreneur spirits in their bones to enjoy!