In two weeks I will be at PICNIC 07 in Amsterdam. I will be in a panel on Friday, but will attend many other sessions as well. If you want to meet up with me during these three days, please drop me a note at marcvanderchijs (at) gmail (dot) com. Feel free to add me on the Picnic Network as well.

During lunch I was going through my RSS feeds when I came across a blog post by Jason Calacanis. In case you don’t know him, Jason is a US-based serial entrepreneur and A-list blogger. I have been reading his blog for the past two years or so. Today Jason had an interesting quote on his blog, that I fully agree to:

I’m amazed at how pessimistic the average person is. I’ve come to realize in my career is that the difference between people who gets things done and those who do not is this pessimism. I’ve always been attracted to the folks who say “what if we could…” or “what if you.” When I hear people talk like that I get engaged. When I hear “that’s been done already….” and “that will never work…” I want to walk away from the conversation.
(Emphasis added by me)

I recognize exactly what he says, I also hate it when people only look at the negative side of things. And it’s the main reason why most people can never successfully run a business, either their own or someone else’s. Without new ideas and products a company cannot outperform the competition. In the blogosphere pessimism seems to be even worse. If I look at the negativism in blog comments at some of the business blogs I subscribe to, I am not sure whether I should laugh or be sad. Initially I often feel sad for the people who have such a negative mindset, but when thinking it through it’s probably a good thing. Not everybody should be an entrepreneur, and hopefully they will one day join the competition.

It actually fits to the blog post I wrote earlier today about the problems I had to solve at work. If you are a pessimist you might give up, only the optimists continue and succeed. And I probably would not have been in China in the first place, had I been a pessimist.

As some of my readers know, the past two weeks have been pretty tough for me business-wise. I found out some things were going on behind my back, and some senior people in game development had to leave because of that. Honestly, for a few days my outlook on doing business in China became a lot more pessimistic. But I now I realize that it was partially just bad luck and I am getting over it. Sometimes you meet and trust the wrong people. But you need to be able to trust people to do business, without an optimistic outlook on life and people you cannot grow a company.

Pessimists would probably say: “See, I told you. The cliché is true, people in China will only try to rip you off.” But I see it different, if you do business the odds are that people will eventually try to take advantage of you, you just have to be smarter than they are. Yes, it caused me some sleepless nights, but in the end it’s actually good for the company – the rotten apples are gone and good people have already replaced them, and I will have firmer control on the daily operations.

And it’s also not just China: it happened to me before with German business partners, who seemed reliable but turned out to be crooks, and it will likely happen again. You learn from these things, and the experience makes you stronger. I might be a bit more careful as a business person, but in the end it won’t change the way I do business in China. Only optimists can be successful!

What do Chinese model workers, career women and sports celebrities have in common? They share the same gym! If you belong to one of these groups, the Worker’s Palace gym is located on Xizhang Road in Shanghai, at the top floor of one of the old buildings next to People’s Square. As the guard did not consider me a model worker I was not allowed in…

Since a couple of days I suddenly started getting phone calls from ‘personal investment planners’ or ‘private bankers’ on my direct office number. I regularly get spam calls on my mobile phone, but never on my direct office line. I wonder how they got this number, because it is neither on my business card nor on my email signature. These are normally foreigners working from a call center trying to invite you to financial seminars to help you invest your money. They are extremely annoying and the moment I figure out who they are I hang up immediately. But they have the nerve to call me back 5 minutes later!

If they call the general office number, the receptionist is normally able to stop them from getting through to me. But now that they have my direct number this is starting to give me a headache. I only used to get about 3 calls a day on my direct line, so I always pick it up. But now I had 3 calls just in the past hour!

The problem is that their numbers are not visible, like is the case with most foreign numbers. I assume they call from a call center in Hong Kong or Singapore, but maybe they are just around the corner in Shanghai rerouting the call through the internet. Anyway, if one of you financial spammers is reading this: I am not interested in any of your ‘financial solutions’, so calling me is a total waste of your time.

Last week I received an email from the Beijing Olympic Ticketing Center, informing me about the results for the tickets that I had ordered. It was a bit disappointing, most of the events that I booked tickets for where sold out and I mainly got tickets for some athletics and some swimming events. I was also among the happy few that got a ticket for the closing ceremony (but not for the opening ceremony).

My wife also just got a few tickets, and not even a ticket for the opening or closing ceremony. Several of her family members did not succeed to get any tickets at all! It seems most of the events are completely sold out now already, I had not expected this actually. Maybe many people hope to sell their tickets at a higher price during the Olympics? You are allowed to sell your ticket to someone else (but only once I think), so I expect heavy trading during the games itself. Maybe I will sell my closing ceremony ticket (only 14% of the applicants got a ticket, so there will be quite some demand), because I don’t think it’s a lot of fun to go there on my own. Or maybe I just give it away, I’ll see next year.

If you live in China and did not order tickets online yet, you will have a second chance in October. On a first-come first-serve basis the remaining 600,000 tickets will be sold off, but these are probably only for less popular events. I hope the servers of the Olympics site are prepared for the heavy traffic that might suddenly hit it.

On Shanghaiist I came across a 6-month old YouTube video of a recorded conversation between the control tower at JFK in New York and an Air China pilot. The Air China pilot seems to have no knowledge of the English language, and the few words he says are incomprehensible to me. Quite scary considering that English is the standard language of air traffic control. I don’t want to imagine that this is something that occurs daily, and what fatal consequences this potentially may have…

As regular readers probably noticed, I did not update my weblog for a couple of days. The reason is that I was traveling with several Dutch colleagues around China (as you may have seen from my Twitter feed), and there was hardly a free minute to write a blog post. But now I am back in Shanghai again, and can spend a bit more time on writing.

The trip we had was busy (a bit too busy actually), but quite successful. I traveled with Peter Driessen (CEO, Spill Group), Willem van Wijmen (CFO, Spill Group) and Martijn Hamann (Partner at Van den Ende & Deitmers, a Dutch VC fund that invested in Spill Group), meeting with companies and potential partners in Shanghai, Beijing and Chengdu. For Willem and Martijn this was their first trip to China, and I think they got a good impression of what is happening here.

As usual with people new to China they probably did not expect how modern and advanced the country is. The foreign media keep on describing China as a backward country with only low cost and low quality products, but that is not what China is anymore. In many aspects it has become more advanced than Europe or the US, but people have to come here to see it for themselves. The mass media won’t tell you, they prefer to keep focusing on scandals with inferior or dangerous products. But that’s why it’s good that there are weblogs, so people do not have to rely solely on one-sided newspapers and TV reports.

For me one of the aims of this trip was to show my guests the modern, advanced China. Not only in Shanghai and Beijing things are developing very fast, but also in China’s Western regions. Chengdu’s development for example, never ceases to amaze me. Each time I visit this place, the city and especially its development zone have developed further. The design of some of the structures there is more futuristic than any building you will see in the Netherlands, and this is only the beginning! KLM even has a direct flight from Amsterdam to Chengdu, even though most people have never heard of this 12-million people metropolis. If I would be 10 years younger I would probably pack my bags and move to Chengdu, because that is where things are happening now.

During our one-week trip we met about 20 companies, which is quite a lot for such a short time. I am now trying to digest all our discussions, and doing the follow-up for some of them. We also had a few hours of free time, and Martijn and Willem went to see the Great Wall for example (Peter and I opted to stay in the hotel and had some strategic discussions instead). In Chengdu we visited the Wenshu monastery and had the local spicy huo guo (hot pot) for dinner. In Shanghai we did not have time to do any sightseeing, but we had dinner on the Bund and in Xintiandi once. All in all the trip should have been one or two days longer, but due to our busy work schedules this was not possible this time.

I had planned to post some pictures of the trip, but because my almost new Sony camera broke down the first day, this was not possible. The others will send me some of their pictures and movies, and I will upload those later to my Flickr account.