Timing of Kai-Fu Lee's Chinese VC Fund Is Fascinating
Even as some investors are pulling back from foreign countries -- as Battery Ventures said it would do in India -- the forces that drive globalization are relentless. VCs in China, India, Japan and Israel all raised more money last year than they did the year before, according to data from Thomson Reuters (via the MoneyTree report), and in China the jump was big: $4.2 billion in 2008 compared to $2.5 billion in 2007. For the first time, China last year had more Internet users than the U.S. -- 2/3 of them under the age of 29 -- and it is expected to be the world's second largest economy by 2025 (although India will have surpassed China by then in population). At the same time, China is in a very different place than the U.S. in its development of technology and startups, several VCs have told me, even though U.S. companies and investors don't always get that.
