nilspihl

You'd guess wrong :)

Haha yeah we get a lot of those here, but less so than places like Tokyo, Seoul and Hong Kong. I plead not guilty, for what it is worth, but I understand if you find that unconvincing. Perhaps I do have some rose-tinted glasses that make me partial to places that feel like frontiers, but being excited about the unknown and the future is not the same as being excited about ninjas and tentacle porn.

I moved to New York "permanently", thinking it would last, but I found myself without a job a few months later and ended up on a flight to Beijing.

I think my time in New York was negatively colored by having an office right in Times Square, but even so it was a really meaningful experience and a great place to be in. You definitely understand why it's the city that never sleeps, and it felt much more like a melting pot than California did. I enjoyed listening to and engaging with street preachers, I was grateful for all the talented musicians in the subway, and I never ran out of exciting new cuisines to try.

On the negative side, though, I did feel that New Yorkers (and by this point in my life, Americans in general) could be hard to get close to - easy to approach, but hard to connect with. I don't know who I would have turned out to be if I had stayed in New York, but I imagine that would have been a great adventure of its own.

Beijing feels similar to New York in many ways, and many expats that leave Beijing opt to move to New York. Facebook groups with hundreds of members help ex-Beijingers congregate in both New York and San Francisco, and I don't know that that's a coincidence.

Maybe, if nothing else, I want to argue that Beijing deserves to be in the international spotlight and cultural consciousness the same way that New York and San Francisco and London are.

That first point is a painful reality that can't be escaped, for sure. It can be hostile here, but again - it is a frontier.

Yeah... I did call it a frontier, and I meant that with the good and the bad. -Nils

Author here - The massive growth of big data talent is not spurred by the government, but by the fact that the Chinese market place is many times bigger than the provincial markets that Silicon Valley often ends up targeting. Within a year of launch,our client Tantan would have accounted for a very hefty percentage of ALL the traffic that Mixpanel disclosed that their clients were recording.

The data is bigger here because the market is bigger here, and the internet is more modern here. If you haven't walked a day in the shoes of a Chinese person with WeChat and Alipay, you haven't seen the future of the internet.

It's time for Silicon Valley to catch up.