Today we were honored to have a chance to visit Oak Pacific Interactive (OPI), the leading internet group in China based in Beijing, providing online entertainment, social networking and gaming platform services for customers. As the CEO was busy in a meeting, our interaction began first with an introduction of the company given by the CTO, who introduced OPI’s various services and operations and us. Following that was a short question and answer session before we had an interactive session with the CEO of OPI, Joe Chen.

The CTO gave some insight into China’s version of facebook, xiaonei.com, which is the leading social networking service in China and part of OPI’s umbrella of services. OPI purchased xiaonei.com and integrated it with their in-house social networking service 5Q.com to form renren.com. Out of the many copycats of facebook in China, the CTO feels that the most likely copycat to succeed is the one that copies facebook entirely, which is what xiaonei has done. The reasons for doing so is because they have no experience in product design and functionality, which makes copying a ready design more efficient that building one from scratch. Furthermore, xiaonei started by attracting users from the top universities, which means that the users are of high quality, and this makes the database more attractive.

Xiaonei focused on 3 events during the early stage start-up to attract more users and gain revenue: (1) farm games and MMO games (mass multiplayer online games), which are attractive to the Chinese population; (2) online advertising for big brands, as the revenue received is high; (3) providing value added services such as VIP user services to increase revenue.

The CEO, Joe Chen, also gives more insight into entrepreneurship and OPI’s business. He talked about having the “swimming across” culture, where life is a big lake and we must swim everyday to get to the other side. As entrepreneurs, we must adopt this culture and always keep moving in order to proceed forward and grow our companies.

Another important aspect of OPI that Mr Joe Chen shared is that the company fears being killed by competitors every day, thus it operates like the red army, being always ready and equipped to fight and win the battle.

China is a very competitive market, especially in internet search. Mr Joe Chen believes that entrepreneurs must have the willingness to change, and find out how the industry is going to change in order to maintain that competitive edge over their competitors. This means that we as entrepreneurs must build up our ability to change and also be able to anticipate change.

With regards to building a company, there are 3 important aspects which Mr Joe Chen imparted to us, namely: (1) build a great team, as this will allow the company to have a strong core to run the operations, and also be able to recruit better college graduates; (2) build a great culture as this enables the company to attract creative and hardworking workers; (3) build a long lasting company so that there would not be a need to sell the company,

To round off everything, Mr Joe Chen emphasised that having too intensive a product may be good for tech savvy folks, but it does not relate well the average user. It is essential then that the product must be easy so as to capture a large user base.

In all, in has been an engaging interactive session with both the CEO and CTO of OPI, with both providing their invaluable knowledge based on their specialties. While the CEO may have sounded discouraging in telling us not the enter the China market without any prior working experience, it is also crucial that his advice is not simply dismissed without further thought and consideration. There are many routes to take that lead to entrepreneurship, and as budding entrepreneurs, it is best that we have a clear knowledge on the various routes so as to choose one that can suit us well.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 16th, 2009 at 11:34 am and is filed under Beijing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.