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First Generation Entrepreneurs Build the Chinese Market Says Baidu's Wang
Note: Mr. Wang died in an accident in China on Dec. 27, 2007.
May 2007
STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS — China was still reeling from the Tiananmen crackdown and the international condemnation that followed when Shawn Wang arrived in the United States as a student in 1990.
"At that time, China wasn't hot yet," said Wang, the chief financial officer of the Chinese internet giant Baidu, during a talk to Stanford Business School students on May 14. "It was actually a dark moment."
Fast-forward a decade, and the situation has changed.
China has emerged as a global powerhouse, poised to become one of the world's biggest economies in the near future. Baidu, now one of that Asian country's major technology companies, has played a critical role in this growth and is now looking to expand beyond the Chinese market. In many ways the company exemplifies the pioneering energy coming out of China, a movement Wang described as "first generation entrepreneurship."
"In China, if you want to be successful, you really have to have the courage, you have to have the mentality to do something that's never been done before," he said. "This is really first generation entrepreneurship in China. This is becoming big. It only happened in the last few years."
China's new entrepreneurs face major challenges, as they are forced to come up with their own roadmaps to success, he said. Entrepreneurs and executives from the United States and other countries can get guidance from "corporate policies, corporate procedures, and corporate manuals that you can just follow," he said.
"We're starting from scratch," he added.
The potential for growth clearly is huge for companies such as Baidu as China's economy steadily expands, Wang said. Baidu is a major Chinese language internet search company and web platform for businesses.
"Our biggest challenge is managing our growth," he said. "We can only be our own competitor. Our ability to execute, our ability to grow our people, manage our business, and manage the scale of the operations—these are the challenges we face. And this is the challenge all Chinese companies face."
Wang joined Baidu as chief financial officer in 2004. Before then, he was a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, working with PwC's Global Capital Market Group in such cities as New York, London, Hong Kong, and Beijing.
He has helped take non-U.S. companies public and managed cross-border mergers and acquisitions. Wang has also served as an advisor to such companies as the Bank of China Hong Kong, PetroChina, China Eastern Airlines, United Microelectronics Corporation, Kookmin Bank, and British Steel.
Wang earned a Master of Science degree in accounting from American University, a Master of Arts degree in higher education administration from West Virginia University, and a bachelor's degree in engineering from Northwestern Polytechnical University in China.
Wang's talk was part of the Global Speaker Series of the School's Global Management Program.
—Ben Pimentel