IT Blog

I am an American who’s lived in Asia for a decade now. As a venture capitalist based in Singapore, I’ve learned that major tech firms in these two countries share a common goal—megagrowth—but they come at it from different directions, often with contrasting methods. These tactics can help inform how American bans might play out for TikTok and WeChat and their parent companies, ByteDance and Tencent.

How Chinese and American tech titans differ

In the U.S., many of the big online tech firms gained dominance over the past 25 years by displacing legacy dinosaurs—Netflix versus Blockbuster, Amazon versus Borders and Barnes & Noble—or inventing entire categories of technology, such as Apple and Google. In China, which was a less developed market, the largest tech companies grew without the need to displace established players. In China, the first-mover advantage was very valuable, followed by who could raise the most money—thus creating the first generation of Chinese tech…