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China is Fine for Startups; Twitter and Facebook Aren’t Everything

Earlier today I came across this piece on ZDNet in which Vinnie Lauria of Golden Gate Ventures talks about his experiences as a VC in Asia. It’s an interesting piece, but I must say I take issue with his assertion that China isn’t a good market for startups because Facebook and Twitter are blocked there. Then later, in answering a question about what startups he invests in, he says:

There’s been a lot of traction around social networks but if you’re creating something similar to Facebook or Twitter, you’re crazy. You need to leverage it, but not compete with it, unless you’re in China when both are blocked [...] China has a tremendous amount of opportunity but most products are very China-focused and I will be late to the game if I decide to be a venture capitalist there. But to leverage 300 million Twitter users, a startup has to worry about users in at least twelve different countries. That means that your product has to be equally appealing to Americans, Turks, Japanese, Mexicans, and Indonesians (among others) and you’ve gotta be sure that whatever you’re doing is available in all those different languages and works across all those different cultures.